Product Managers Who Build Together, Win Together - follow up story

How to Align Without Losing Speed

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 coordinating with product managers:

Product Managers Who Build Together, Win Together

What Prompted This Article?

I recently took on a new product initiative to increase sales through channel partners. What is the biggest holdup in sales to channel partners?

My team's products don’t have consistent marketing materials. Channel partners want to mix and match products to meet their customers’ needs.

The request to combine products into a solution from the channel partners is high priority to increase sales.

This means I need to coordinate across 8 products in 3 product teams. Like product managers everywhere, we don’t have free time to redo our material and align with other product managers.

Before writing this article, I researched how product managers with similar products coordinate their work. I found an idea from platform product managers - self-serve material that product managers can voluntarily use when time permits.

For my situation, I decided to:

• create a customer experience checklist

• set a model of pricing and packaging

• pre-fill key marketing material

• set up a dashboard to track voluntary progress

Will my co-workers align with this proposal?

What Happened After This Article?