Monitoring without Interfering - follow up story

Tracking progress on development

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for premium subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about getting meaningful status of in-progress engineering projects:

Monitoring Without Interfering

What Prompted this Article?

My boss IM’d me to request that I join a call with our deals desk. The deals desk team was escalating that sales and finance hadn’t been trained in handling complex deals with my product.

This escalation came two weeks after a product release that was focused on sales tools and financial calculators for the deals desk.

Another product manager, Matt, had been working with delivery on the tools for this release. Throughout development, delivery had told Matt there were no issues with the requirements. The delivery team told Matt there was no need for a demo of the new tools. Delivery released the new tools as planned.

What could Matt have done differently before release?

This article was about finding meaningful development status before release.

What Happened After this Article?

By looking in the rearview mirror, it was easy to see the traps that Matt fell into: