PM Best Practices

Excerpt I wrote for onboarding new Associate Product Managers at LogDNA | April 1, 2020

Running Meetings

  1. Come with an agenda and an outcome you want for this meeting

  2. Show up on time and end meetings on time

  3. Keep an eye on the clock and keep everyone in the meeting on pace

  4. Take notes for all meetings either on a doc or on the Jira ticket

  5. Create Action Items as a group before the meeting ends and assign an owner for each item

  6. Create follow up meeting if more time is needed

Creating Meeting Invites

  1. Provide the agenda in the meeting description and what you need out of this meeting

  2. Invite all relevant stakeholders

  3. Mark members as optional if they are truly optional

  4. Add a Zoom link

  5. Add a room (one for MV and one for TO if there are TO folks)

  6. Give members invited a heads up on Slack about the meeting and why you're including them if you've never spoke to them before

  7. Be cognizant of team members in different timezones and be respectful of their working hours

Kicking Off Projects

  1. Invite the relevant stakeholders, usually tech leads, eng manager, designer, and the frontend and backend person working on this project

  2. Come with a completed (and revised) PRD, walk the team through this.

    • Who we are building this for (use cases and pain points)

    • Why we’re building it (impact)

    • What it means to be successful (metrics of success)

  3. Come with the associated Jira ticket created to track the work

    • Keep the overall feature assigned to the PM, the person who’s pushing it along

    • If it’s a small piece of work, assign to FE or BE, still provide a PRD and run the PRD by the person assigned to work on it

  4. Come with 90% completed designs

    • Designer will go over the prototype if there is design work during kickoff

  5. Identify specific BE and FE leads in this meeting so they are explicit resources for the rest of the team to ask questions

  6. The purpose of this meeting is not to get consensus on whether this feature / project should be prioritized, so don’t use the time in this meeting to do that. It is on you as the PM to prioritize the right features, so come prepared to kickoff the work required to build this feature vs debating priority. Solicit feedback and questions on the PRD itself, not on why this is the right priority.

Overall Preparedness

  • Being on time is really the least you could do, whether you're the person who is running the meeting or you're attending.

  • Come to meetings being the most prepared person in the room, this will help you with pushback.

  • When a conversation is going off the rails, ask to take it offline and bring the meeting back to the agenda items.

  • Your job is to get what you need out of the meeting by building consensus, making a decision, and doing what you need to move things along. This will look different for different projects and with different people. It's not about being right, it's about moving this piece of work forward.

Managing Stakeholder

A large part of your job is to ensure all stakeholders are aligned by prioritizing the right projects, pushing back on other ones, aligning teams around deadlines, and communicating delays (expectation management). Document decisions has been made post meetings or decisions made through ad hoc conversations in a public place like open Slack channels or Jira and @ the relevant stakeholders (this can be BD team, sales team, support team, marketing team, etc). Err on the side of over communicating!

 

This excerpt lives in LogDNAs internal docs