When Multiple Product Managers Own the Same Problem - Follow Up Story

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about multiple product managers on the same initiative:

“Do you two even talk to each other?”

This question came from a sales leader after “Stephen” and I asked about the same customer problem.

How embarrassing!

It doesn’t matter if it was my mistake or Stephen’s mistake. Ultimately, our actions reflected poorly on our organization.

When I work with another product manager, I always feel uncomfortable about having an “operating model talk”. I’ve worked with Stephen for years and I didn’t want to say “let’s coordinate more.”

I wrote this article to help product managers find another way to be effective when working with another product manager.

Instead of having “the talk”, here is what product managers can do:

recognize the situation:

• shared execution ➡️ reduce duplication

• incident coordination ➡️ protect trust and be clear

plan joint work:

• Exploring: agree on the driver for a topic

• Learning: focus offline and come back

• Sharing: single living document

• Decision ownership: by type, not by task

• Communicating: coordinate before external communications

Writing this for the newsletter seemed simple. I wasn’t sure how I would put this into practice with Stephen.