Many product managers are adept at prioritization for the product team and product managers ruthlessly prioritize their own time. When it comes to your product management time, often prioritizing isn't the right tactic. Sometimes you need to stop ruthless prioritization of your time and shift tasks to others on the team.
How does an individual contributor get things done through others? For example, you need to lead workshop with a key customer at the same time as you need to present at an internal executive strategy session. Both events need a good bit of preparation and potentially overlap. Here are a few ways get help and be ready for both events:
Break projects down into small chunks
Keep track of the things that depend on help from others
Explain the benefits of working on your projects
Publicly recognize contributors
Each of these need a little thought and relationship building to get results.
Break Projects Down into Small Chunks
There are probably a few items on your priority list that can be broken down into smaller tasks. Some of these smaller tasks can be handled by experts must faster than doing them your self. Coming back to the example dilemma of a customer workshop and an internal strategy session on the same day, you can break each project down in a way that expert co-workers can handle easily. For example the customer workshop can be broken down into:
Prepare an agenda that the customer will value: target the sales engineer for this
Update the external roadmap: request help from the product managers on the team
Review the latest technical marketing material: contact your product marketing leader about presenting the latest thought leadership material
Find a mini-project manager to coordinate the workshop: target the account team about leading the workshop
The internal strategy session can also be broken down:
Contact your manager about the desired outcome of the session: this will help you get support for from others
Get updated financial reports and provide opportunity for the finance team to get involved
Prepare a preliminary agenda with topics for your coworkers to handle
Schedule a preparation meeting to review the preliminary agenda with the experts
The main idea on both projects is to enable others to contribute.
Keep Track of Agreements
As you get coworkers involved, set up a way to track dependencies on others. A simple list by person is an easy way to remember which person is doing something for you. When you speak with the person, you can check the list for progress. Each time you talk to others about the project, you update the list to match any new agreements.
For example, when you update the account team about the roadmap preparation, you can ask about the workshop agenda. Or you can send an updated agenda for the internal strategy session to the product team to gather more information on the preparation.
Explain the Benefits of Working Together
While the benefits of working together seem obvious to you, the others on your team might not realize the benefits of the joint project. There are many ways to let colleagues know about their contribution value.
For example on the customer workshop you can do this:
Have the account team discuss the account strategy in relation to the workshop so the rest of the team can see how a successful workshop helps with the strategy
Tell the technical marketing team about the opportunity to improve their material with customer feedback
Remind the product management team about engineering wanting more customer contact
On the internal strategy session you can do this to make the benefits visible:
Get information from the financial team on product investments and sales
Learn more about hot product topics and what product changes are being considered
Ongoing communication about the value of these projects keeps the interest up on the team while doing the work.
Recognize the Contributions of Others
Recognizing the work of the team is important before and after the project is finished. A few ways to weave in recognition on the examples are:
Tell the account team and product team about the useful new product marketing material
Compliment the account team in organizing the customer workshop
Update your manager about the new version of the roadmap that can be used for customer feedback and for the internal strategy session
Update the product team about the valuable financial reports prepared for the internal strategy session
Finally be sure to recognize the contributions at the customer workshop and the internal strategy session.
Conclusion
Breaking key projects down into pieces, tracking agreements, talking about the benefits of working together and recognizing contributions from others becomes a new habit in handling product manager challenges. Using prioritization along with getting work done through others leads to better results for you and your product.