Beyond the Roadmap - Follow Up Story
How Builder PMs scale the projects that don't have a home
What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.
This week’s backstory is about getting cross-functional teams involved in your initiatives:
What Prompted This Article?
I ended a frustrating week in product management. It felt like each thing I did resulted in a huge debate.
A partner changed the terms of service - two product managers claimed that I didn’t understand the change and they weren’t going to help resolve it
A product manager assigned to help me - he questioned actions from a year ago and deep dived into old decisions
Major feature releases not ready - product managers debating about support of OpenSource after shipping
These are familiar situations for product managers. But it felt like everything was stuck in debate.
I did some research. Did I just have a bad week, or did other product managers feel decisions were being made over and over again?
My research turned up:
product managers stretched by AI-driven speed
the product management playbook is changing
AI isn’t simplifying work
overcoming “AI brain fry”
Now I have signs that I’m not the only product manager doing AI speed without accomplishment.
After thinking about this problem, I decided the endless debates were caused by a lack of “gravity” to pull the initiative forward.
I realized that I need to build momentum by pulling people into the work.
I wasn’t sure if I could step out of the debates to take these steps…
