Season 03 - Newsletter 01 --> 5 Things I did as Product Manager to tame a monster initiative
Friends -
As I wrote out the final newsletter of 2022, my goal for 2023 was not dropping the first newsletter in the third week of July. But life, work has a way of getting in the ways of our best laid plans. For the past 19 months, culminating in a conversion event on memorial day ‘23, I led the digital team on what was by far the most complex project of my career (at least so far), helping provide a north star, leadership, feedback and cheers to more than 64 work streams. The following newsletter lays out the tools I leveraged to not just survive but thrive and make this a very successful project. It goes without saying that these tools were enablers of the success and the true credit lies with the tens to hundreds of individuals who made this project’s success their personal ambition.
As always I appreciate you sharing this newsletter if you think it could help a peer of yours improve their product skillset or a friend enter the world of product management.
Q: What are some of the tools and techniques you recommend using to get successful outcomes for very complex and large projects?
As we approach almost the two months post project launch milestone, I’ve finally had some time to reflect on some of the techniques I employed mostly deliberately to help guide this team of very talented individuals and 64 work streams to very positive outcomes. The following five techniques and frameworks are a few of the tools we leverage, but they proved critical to our success.
Anchoring on a currency - With the sheer number of individuals, the long length of the project, and the hundreds of decisions that would need to be made, it was very important to anchor conversations from the start and throughout on a single currency. For us that currency was customer obsession and centricity. This currency helped us frame every discussion, every tradeoff and every decision whether macro or micro. Regardless of the challenge we discussed in terms of how the customer experience would be affected and for how many folks. This single threadedness (if it’s not a word I claim it) allowed all participants however removed from the core group or from whatever discipline, to rally but more importantly a common language and set of outcomes.
Pirates not Navy - As the analogy goes startups are pirates and as they mature they need to become a disciplined navy to succeed. While that may be true to medium or even large just out-of-the-startup stage companies, for establish very large companies the more apt analogy is that these companies are an armed force, that is they are comprised of a navy, an air force, an army, marines and i guess they are lucky a space force(?). But complex, special and distinct term projects require a pirate’s mentality. They require that its participants have the ability to move fast unencumbered by bureaucracy or politics and with be equipped with a fair amount of audacity and boldness. Lastly pirates rally around their own flag regardless of what company tribe they came from, which is vital in forging ahead as a unified team.
Shreyas Doshi’s Radical Delegation Framework - As the size of the initiatives you are involved with, grow, so does the need to delegate some key responsibilities. I leveraged all four quadrants of this framework. Whether I focus on the work myself or delegated was based on which skills I had at the time, how important (see strategic) the work was and the strength of my core team around me. I relied heavily on delegating to the most suitable person as well as a fair share of delegate and forget. As Shreyas noted, leveraging this framework should be done with thoughtful consideration especially in orgs where optics are important or prevalent.
Radical Delegation Framework by Shreyas Doshi Shreyas Doshi’s LNO Effectiveness Framework - The original purpose of the framework by Doshi was to help product managers understand how much time to dedicate to individual tasks. Tasks are divided into 3 categories, Leverage, Neutral and Overhead. Each category having an effort level, 10X for L tasks, 1X for N tasks and less than 1X for O tasks. For this complex project however, I leveraged this framework as a way to prioritize meetings and prep or content time. For example a meeting with The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was a Leverage task while a status meeting was an Overhead tasks. I leveraged Outlooks meeting categories function to visual color our meetings so i can see at a glance how intense the week was going to be.
LNO Framework by Shreyas Doshi Shishir Mehrotra’s Rituals - When the core team thought through our rituals and their cadence we wanted to make sure that the combination would help chaos, constant planning and replanning and unclear decision paths. With quarterly planning well established, we decided to focus on weekly rituals and put into play 3 types of meetings. Decision-making meetings were setup with a small set of leaders (with optional attendees that could grow depending on the subject matter) and decisions once made were recorded. Group information rituals were used to both get status from work streams as well as broadcast new information or instructions. Lastly our second most popular type of rituals were Tag-ups, recurring meetings that were fixed in time and where the agenda rolled over from one week to the next. We used these tag-up meeting extensively especially in the early part of the initiative to work through the customer experience.
I hope you find these recommendations useful. As every organization is a different environment and not two are alike, be deliberate and thoughtful about how you apply these frameworks to your initiatives. One thing is for sure, being thoughtful about the management of your initiative will surely help the team achieve positive product and customer outcomes.
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