When Multiple Product Managers Own the Same Problem - Follow Up Story
Why it creates confusion and how to fix it before trust breaks
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 multiple product managers on the same initiative:
What Prompted This Article?
“Do you two even talk to each other?”
This question came from a sales leader after “Stephen” and I asked about the same customer problem.
How embarrassing!
It doesn’t matter if it was my mistake or Stephen’s mistake. Ultimately, our actions reflected poorly on our organization.
When I work with another product manager, I always feel uncomfortable about having an “operating model talk”. I’ve worked with Stephen for years and I didn’t want to say “let’s coordinate more.”
I wrote this article to help product managers find another way to be effective when working with another product manager.
Instead of having “the talk”, here is what product managers can do:
recognize the situation:
shared execution ➡️ reduce duplication
incident coordination ➡️ protect trust and be clear
plan joint work:
Exploring: agree on the driver for a topic
Learning: focus offline and come back
Sharing: single living document
Decision ownership: by type, not by task
Communicating: coordinate before external communications
Writing this for the newsletter seemed simple. I wasn’t sure how I would put this into practice with Stephen.
