There are a lot of tips available for product managers. What about founders and CEOs who are managing PMs. Here is a thread for them -
1. Think of your PM as the CEO of the product and you as a board member. Allow them to operate independently and poke your nose only when absolutely required. Better to agree on items upfront where they need to take your input (similar to AVMs in SSHA).
2. Have a working agreement with your PMs on reports, metrics, communication, prioritisation framework etc. Don’t surprise them every time with a new modus operandi.
3. Allow your PMs to be straight-shooters. They shouldn’t need to sugar coat their message to you. This pretty much depends on how you react when they bring bad news. If you bark at them every time they bring you unpleasant news, they will just stop bringing them to you.
4. Don’t make your PM as your messenger. If you want to give some bad news to your customers, your boss or other leaders in your company, you do it yourself.
5. Don’t force your PMs to give optimistic rosy pictures to your customers and sales team. Your PMs are always paranoid. They constantly think about what can go wrong and don’t want to hide issues. If a GM stops the PMs from giving visibility, they have to go against the GM’s wishes.
6. Remember that the main job of your PM is to be customer advocate. They do injustice to their customers if they are not strongly arguing for their customers. Understand and coach their adjacent teams to not take this personally.
7. PMs are not your assistants. Don’t expect them to take notes in your meetings and send them back to you. Don’t always expect them to keep you in the loop. Don’t waste their time asking to find a suitable time that works for everyone and send calendar invites. Don’t ask them to spoon feed you.
8. Don’t expect your PM to butter up people and get things done. Don’t make them feel that other team members are doing a favour to them when those members are just doing their job.
9. Allow your PMs to use sticks if carrots don’t work. They have full responsibility without any authority and sometimes they need to escalate, complain, make noise. So be it.
10. PMs are here to get things done, whatever it takes. Sometimes, they need to bulldoze some lethargic blockers on their way. Its’ a sad reality but sometimes they need to behave like a**holes. Allow that as long as it’s exception and not the norm.
11. Take feedback on PMs from other teams with a pinch of salt. Only bad product managers try to please everyone.
12. PMs are not here to baby-sit Engineers. They need not worry about Engineers working on maintenance and bug fixes instead of new development. They are not going to use hot tech just to please Engineers. They don’t care about the career progression of the Engineers. That’s the job of Engineering Managers.
13. Engineers don’t get to prioritise. It’s the job of PMs.
14. Your PMs are not magicians. They can’t add your last minute features without affecting deadlines. They can’t deliver a project earlier than what Engineering Manager has quoted. They can’t debug issues themselves. They do sleep sometimes.
15. Don’t bring your org politics to your PMs. PMs don’t care about team boundaries. They go to any team within any org to get things done. They don’t mind bypassing managers and work with the individual contributors.