Trends
09 Oct 2017
I received some feedback recently. It wasn’t from my manager and it wasn’t neatly packaged, direct feedback about what to improve and how. The coworkers who delivered it might not have even realized what they were doing.
This year, I’ve been acting as the Product Manager of the Developers team. Being trusted to make these decisions has forced me to evolve and adapt, with the Product team patiently helping when I stumble. One of the responsibilities of PMs at Clever is to document your team’s roadmap: what projects are going to happen in the next 3 months, and roughly when those projects are going to happen. As school season picked up, the Developers roadmap became less organized. The team had velocity, and we were steadily making progress on projects, but I wasn’t communicating our future plans.
A few different people asked me when projects were going to be rolled out, and it occurred to me that if I had clearly documented the roadmap, those conversations wouldn’t be necessary. A trend was developing here. I compared our roadmap to that of other teams; ours was clearly lacking. I asked other stakeholders if they felt like they knew the Developers team roadmap, and the answer confirmed what I feared: they felt less knowledgeable about our team’s plans than that of other, adjacent, teams.
So at my next 1 on 1 with Josh, our Core Director of Product, I asked him to pair with me on the roadmap. We talked through each project. He helped me clarify open questions I had been avoiding and pushed me to think about balancing the roadmap at a high level. We both left the meeting feeling much better about the Developers team roadmap, even though little had changed about the actual plan. Recently, planning questions have been a lot less frequent.
Direct feedback is often the best way to understand how to improve. If you’re like me, you crave it. But recognizing trends is another channel to find opportunities to refine your work. Paying attention to and acting on this information can save you from being surprised later on. Next time you hear the same question from more than one person, you may want to take a step back and ask if this is a trend you can reverse.