Take Back Control From Product Management
Are you a manager? Do you need to ask others before you can tell people in your department what to build? Then you’re probably a CTO, the only manager in the company who needs to ask others if they can tell employees in their department what to work on.
This is not directed towards product management. I have met excellent product managers I admire. I have friends in product management ;-) This is directed towards you!
You are entrusted with potentially millions of dollars in salaries as an investment. You need to be in control of what is being built. You’re responsible for what is being built. You’re responsible those millions are used for the best of the company.
Sure, product is very important-they drive the core revenue (probably, or does marketing? Or sales? Or no one knows in your company who is the tip of the spear? Everyone thinks they are? You might have a bigger problem). But not every feature is. Migrating to a new database version, migrating from a monolith to microservices, getting off the cloud, making tech work in the future, code being maintainable, rearchitect your core, integrating HubSpot for marketing, upload email addresses to a mail provider, ingestion data into BigQuery and technical R&D and innovation - all these things are important too. And product is not without bias for what to build. Guess what their bonus is tied to? Exactly.
I know, it is convenient, not making decisions, not taking responsibility. Just do what others tell you to do. Delegate marketing to product, delegate sales to product, just direct everyone who needs development resources to product. Product is your Accountability Sink.
Why do you expect accountability from every developer? And you delegate accountability to product management? Without a role model, people will not get it. It’s not what you say but what you do. If you don’t take the most important decisions yourself, how can you expect developers to make important decisions?
The downsides: The CEO doesn’t agree with accountability and still wants and expects you to deliver everything everyone wants. If marketing doesn’t get their things, they go to the CEO and she comes to you. If sales don’t get their things, they go to the CEO and she comes to you. If customer support doesn’t get their things, they go to the CEO she comes to you. And you do lots of handwaving and mention product (take responsibility!).
The downsides: Database migrations don’t happen until you get into a crisis, development comes to a halt, everyone scrambles around. Guess who everyone thinks is responsible for the crisis? Yes, not product management.
The downsides: Security is lacking, because product management is not interested in security. But if there is a critical bug, or a hack or a security incident, guess at what door they come knocking. Yes, not product managements door.
The downsides: Internal tools are bad. The company is drowning in cost when every engineer can see how to optimize workflows with tools and coding and increase margins. Guess who is not interested in margins?
So get control back into your hands.
Ask CEO about how much she thinks—after you explain what needs to be done and what other departments want. Ask about a development budget. She knows about budgeting-it’s the main way to control a company. How money is split. You can do the same for development
- 60% product development
- 10% marketing
- 10% sales support
- 15% scalability & maintenance
- 5% technical R&D
Let the CEO decide about the percentages and how to spend development time. Not you guessed who.
If this increases your burden and work, get a project manager. I had excellent project managers in the past as CTO who did manage all the things (integrations, internal tooling, new customers, …). Create a project management office (PMO) if needed.
Whatever you do, get back into control. You’re responsible.
