One of the biggest transitions to adjust to when you become a manager is how to ensure that you get the results you want, without doing the work yourself.
You know what good looks like and you can deliver it - that’s why you’ve been promoted. But now you need to:
- Communicate to others what good looks like
- Check they are delivering work at the quality you expect
- Support them where necessary
Each of these steps is both new and challenging.
Your product operating model is the way you make sure that you build the right things in the right way: high quality, fast, and reducing risks up front.
This is critical because building products is difficult, and it’s easy to waste time building things that users don’t want, or can’t use if you’re not careful. In practice, a product operating model is a rhythm of meetings, documents and other processes that help teams reduce risk early.
This article will talk you through how to set up a product operating model that helps your squads increase team velocity and create value in a consistent, repeatable way by setting clear expectations and inspecting work at appropriate intervals.
The role of managers
“Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”
- Julie Zhuo, ex VP Design Facebook
As a manager your job is to ensure that the team as a whole delivers the best results possible.
Everything that you do should service this need. Running staff meetings, 1:1s, hiring new team members and coaching existing ones, giving context and setting strategy are all things you do to maximise the value created by your team.
You are also accountable for the performance of your team. If your team is not performing, by definition you are not performing. There are no excuses here. You cannot blame other people or external factors.
The machine analogy
You can think of your team as a machine which you operate. If you build and run your machine well, it will deliver great results, in a consistent manner. Build and run it poorly, and it will deliver poor or unpredictable results.
At a high level, your machine takes instructions in the form of objectives, and then through doing some work, it outputs results. Hopefully the results meet the objectives. You probably don’t know absolutely everything that happens inside the machine - lots of people are doing lots of different things. That’s normal.
But how the machine works is your responsibility, and in your control. And you can only control the results through the workings of the machine.
Think of it as if you built a printer. If the colours and alignment are all off in the documents it prints, you don’t get mad at the documents. This is pointless. You might get mad at the printer, but this is also unlikely to have much effect. No, you need to open up the printer and fix it.
So is your role as a manager. While you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on inside your team, you need enough visibility to know that it’s working correctly, and you’re going to get the results you want. And if you’re not getting the results you want, you need to know enough to open up the machine and get it working smoothly again.
Running the machine
Running your machine effectively requires three things:
- Clear definition of success (i.e. your objective)
- Indicators of whether you’re on track for success (i.e your operating model)
- Effective interventions to get things back on track
Without a clear definition of success, you have no measure of whether teams are performing or not.
Without indicators, you don’t spot problems your teams are facing - and there are always problems.
Without effective interventions then you’re not doing anything to help your teams out, and they are on their own.
Why catching problems early is key
You want early and frequent signals about whether the work is progressing well, and has a high probability of giving you the results you want, because:
- Investment in the work increases over time
- Time to act decreases over time
The sooner you catch and correct work that is not on track, the easier it is to correct - less work needs redoing, and it’s therefore less emotional to correct it. At the same time you have more time to get this work back on track before it is due (almost all work has some expectation of when it is due).
This is especially true in product management, where it might take weeks to go from an objective through discovery and delivery to the point you get some results. If you just wait to see what results the team produces and then take action then you’ll easily waste weeks of time, probably equating to £10ks - £100ks of cost!
What might this look like in practice? Well for a typical product development cycle, you might set up your Product Reviews and documentation like this:
Each of the meetings here is an opportunity to review work your team is doing, and could signal that you need to give the team more support.
But rather than jump to a solution that probably isn’t a good fit for your organisation, let’s talk through the principles and steps to creating a product operating model, so you can build and run your own.
A note on terms
Overall, whilst we use terms like “inspecting” work, “supporting” teams and “intervening” this isn’t meant to imply that people can’t do their jobs and will fail without you. It’s to emphasise that accountability ultimately rests with you, and that you have to have the right information to know where to act.
What that action looks like will vary from team-to-team and situation-to-situation, but for the best manager-report relationships it will be an enjoyable, collaborative process. The manager will help their reports do their best work by inspiring them, coaching them, providing honest feedback, more context and unblocking them wherever necessary.
We’re also not implying that the manager is necessarily better at the task in hand than the direct report. Individual contributors and managers have different roles, different contexts and different skills to bring to bear, and that everyone benefits from having someone to bounce ideas off and get honest feedback from.
