#ProductDiaries is a documented series of my experience as a product manager — what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and what I’m changing.
What I did:
I’m a buyside customer growth product manager. I set up a recurring meeting with the other product manager & designer pair that works toward customer growth even though they’re on a different team; the partnership between our two pairs being referred to as a superpod for the buyer’s experience.
Why I did it:
Though we use emails and Slack channels to keep tabs on each others’ work, hoping the other is in the loop lets stuff fall through the cracks and fails to utilize all the potential of the group. This kickoff meeting was established to ideate on the best systems and processes to collaborate effectively on driving the same goal since we can often drift into working in silos.
What I could do better:
We want multiple people aligned on a greater buyer’s experience to prevent us from ‘shipping the org chart,’ as one designer put it. We identified that there is complexity caused by how the product vs engineering vs strategy team lines are drawn and intend to work with these groups to use a customer experience first model to draw team lines over our current feature ownership first model.
The meeting ended with no clearly defined process for how we intend to collaborate despite that being the goal of the meeting. Although we do have org wide constraints on how to move forward, I’d rather we implement some kind of process then iterate on it to address the complexity than miss the opportunity to collaborate well in the meantime. I plan to propose an ‘MVP’, minimum viable process, next week to start so we can start driving wins without being blocked by the larger company still sorting out post-layoff changes.
