Monitoring Without Interfering

Tracking progress on your product unobtrusively

Your emails about the status of a development project are going unanswered. 

There is no new status on your requirements.

The program status shows green. 

The demo is in several weeks.  If the program is green and you trust the team, why worry about the status of your requirements?

You can save time in the long run by staying close to your development team.  It is important for product managers to understand how their requirements are going to work when delivered.  Likewise, it is important to avoid:

• Project management - because your project manager is doing this

• Interrupting the development process - because this isn't efficient

You do want to add value and head off issues before delivery.  How can you find out the status without micromanaging the team?

The steps to take are:

1. Understand why you need development status

2. Make tracking one of your leadership superpowers

3. Celebrate what you learn in tracking

Let's dig into each step to make development tracking an unobtrusive and natural part of your product leadership practices!

Why Care About Development Status?

You have a great program manager and development leaders on your product team.  You're getting detailed information at product team meetings about development status.  You have access to burn-down charts and engineering dashboards showing everything is going as planned.  Why would you do more monitoring?

The missing piece is the customer's perspective.  As the product manager, you are the only one who can imagine how the whole product comes together.  Your domain knowledge, customer conversations, and ability to see the product from the customer's perspective are crucial to visualizing how the components of your product come together.

Some ways product managers put together their own vision of the development progress are:

• Reading the design documents from the customer's perspective

• Asking questions about the customer impact of a change

• Discussing architecture changes with engineering leaders

• Reading the comments from developers in bug reports and in your user stories

• Attending every demo and taking screenshots to share with Marketing and Services

• Celebrating the small steps in the development process

Let your customer's perspective be your guide in monitoring development status.

Tracking Habits for Product Managers

Now that you are straight about your unique role in visualizing the complete product change, what can you do about it?  You have many demands on your time from stakeholders, sales, and customers.  You can save time in the long run by staying close to development unobtrusively.