Staff work

from Washington DC // june 27 2024

The modern software org is collaboration across, down, and up - all the directions.

In this lattice, the PM finds themselves strung up. Very few (any?) PMs get to make all the decisions, all the time. Their tools of the trade are logic and occasionally cajoling - the bully pulpit in practice. Thus why PMs laugh about the "CEO of your product" moniker because it's a job that is sorely lacking in official power. A PM job is a hard job to get, a hard one to keep, and a place where your primary tool is influence. You gotta talk for your living.

The great PM actively cultivates a positive, living agenda, and communicates it all over, all the time. PMs provide leadership and also are led.

The method is what I think of as staff work, in the classic sense.

If you simply show up and throw up with your ideas ("mine!"), then your ideas won’t be taken seriously and YOU won’t be taken seriously. Because you aren't part of the team, and it shows.

The great PM does active, painstaking staff work to synthesize ideas across teams. They cultivate relationships as a way to stress test ideas. And in doing so, not only improve them, but also fireproof them.

What does this look like?

For example if your company is working on presentations for your user conference, you can't just drop your deck into the folder and be done. This time as an opportunity - a forcing function - to mesh your ideas together with other people at the company and to get to better decisions, better answers, better insights, better alignment.

• Are we positioning this product correctly? What do you think?

• Do we have the right pricing? Too high? Too low? Packaged with these extra modules, or should they included? Why? Why not?

• Does our the sequencing of our roadmap make sense with what you know about the market and our customers? How do you think our customers will react? What is missing?

Inside of each of these questions are 2-3 equally viable directions ... (of which you have a strong preference obviously…) But as a PM you need to do the staff work to get the TEAM to an answer, not just declare the answer yourself.

How do you do it? You map out and drive:

• Who is involved? 

• Who has something to say?

• Who is critical to get feedback from, versus nice to have?

• If there are core conflicts how will the team make the decision?

• Who breaks ties?

• What data or frameworks or background can you anticipate and collate, that your extended team will need in order to make the decision in the time frame required to make the decision?

• How will you help get the team get through the discussion in the time allotted?

And then show your deck to e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e you can, but especially sales, dev and leadership. Take notes. Capture words that matter. Gather up alternative views, hear them out. Steelman where you need to.

Practice your explanations and sharpen them up. It's a statement of follower-ship and humility to get input and feedback from your team, openly, in good faith.

Not with the intent that "everyone gets a lollipop" (that is, everyone gets their way... because that can never happen). But rather that everyone gets input, everyone gets a hearing, and good ideas bubble to the top because you, the PM, are not the only one with good ideas.

You are part of a team and teams work together. Good staff work makes for good ideas makes for good leaders makes for great products.