Episode 254: Pushing Back on Unsustainable Workloads
Join Melissa Perri in this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast as she tackles the complex issue of managing an overwhelming workload as a product manager. A senior product manager shares their struggle of handling five engineering teams, a task typically assigned to multiple product managers. Melissa offers practical advice on how to communicate with leadership, prioritize effectively, and implement systems to manage scope.
If you've ever faced the challenge of balancing broad strategic oversight with detailed management, this episode is a must-listen. Melissa's insights will help you understand how to align your team's work with company goals while maintaining quality and focus.
You’ll hear us talk about:
03:36 - The Classic Project Management Trade-Off
Melissa discusses the well-known project management saying about scope, quality, and speed, explaining how product managers must often choose between these competing priorities.
04:44 - Proposing Solutions to Manage Workload
Melissa provides a framework for presenting options to leadership, including hiring additional product managers and weighing the opportunity costs of current workloads.
07:40 - Building Internal Systems for Workload Management
Melissa advises on creating internal systems to distribute work, allowing development leads to step into prioritization roles, thus enabling a more balanced workload distribution.
Tune in to gain actionable strategies and ensure your product management approach aligns with your organization's strategic goals.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:00:28] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:00:37] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. It is time for our dear Melissa episode. This is the episode where you get to ask me any of your burning product management questions. If you go to dear melissa.com, you can submit them there and I'll answer them every single week.
[00:00:53] This week's question, it's all about what do we do when we're assigned Way too much as a product manager. So let's dive in.
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[00:01:43] Dear Melissa, I'm a very senior IC product manager, though my title is director. Right now I'm assigned to five engineering teams, that's 37 engineers total all doing infrastructure and platform work.
[00:01:57] For comparison, other groups this size have four to five product managers. It's just too much. I feel like I'm a mile wide and half an inch deep. I'm juggling multiple big initiatives while also trying to answer all the questions that come my way, but the scope is too wide. I'm missing details and honestly I've been making mistakes.
[00:02:15] My worry is that leadership will see those mistakes as a reflection on me, instead of realizing they're the result of having too broad a scope. I need to figure out how to communicate that something has to change. I can be broad and strategic, or I can go deep, but I can't sustainably do both. I don't want this to come across as if I can't handle working hard, I can, but my hard work is getting diluted.
[00:02:38] I think everyone would benefit if I could focus more clearly. Thanks for your help. Alright, so this is a really interesting one. I think it's funny because we got a question a couple weeks ago that was about having too many product managers for too few developers. Now we have the complete opposite situation here.
[00:02:55] You have a very wide mandate in front of you and a lot of teams. So this is not sustainable. You're correct. I have not seen this work really well. And it's time to make a change. So to make a change and to get people invested in it, we have to push back. So the only way that you are gonna get them to change their mind and see that this is actually impossible, it's for them to understand that they can't get everything they want. So there's like a nice old project management saying that says you can have scope, you can have quality, and you can have things fast, right? Which is time, but you can pick two, but not all three at the same time. And it sounds to me like quality is the thing that is slipping here.
[00:03:36] You've got really broad scope, everybody wants everything as fast as possible. But you're saying it, you're making mistakes. You can't really handle this much. So you have to explain that to them. And people do understand that little project management saying about the scope, quality time, they just don't wanna accept it. But let's be realistic and let's break it down for them. So how do we get ahead of this and show them what you can do. And what you can't do.
[00:03:58] I create a prioritization system out of them. Instead of just taking all of the initiatives and all the mandates that everybody's giving you, how do you create that strategy and that scope and the prioritization?
[00:04:09] Put it back into their hands about what the dimensions are that you prioritize, not what the work is. You're not gonna ask them to prioritize the work for you. You're gonna ask them to prioritize dimensions about what's important. So if we're thinking about our big initiatives, it's probably going to be related back to goals and what we're trying to get out of these things. So what are the outcomes that we have here? Once you get that information and that alignment from the stakeholders, then you wanna show them what is inside your scope and what's gonna fall below the line. By showing that to them, you're gonna say, Hey, based on the capacity that we currently have, I can handle this.
[00:04:44] All of this other stuff cannot happen. It will not happen or will be deprioritized into, future quarters. They're gonna ask, how do we get that other stuff in scope? You say that the only way that we can actually handle it is to bring on more product managers who can handle this work. Then you're gonna work out the pros and cons.
[00:05:03] If we had one more product manager working with me, we could take on this much. If we had two, we can take on this much. And you wanna show them the opportunity cost of those things as well. By bringing on a product manager, it's not going to be cost neutral, right? We're adding more cost to these projects.
[00:05:20] But what's the opportunity cost? Is it that the infrastructure is unscalable to actually meet the demands of the customer? That's an opportunity cost, right? Where does it break? Is it that we can't fix bugs? Is it that we can't replatform things? You wanna show them? Where things fall below the line, what's the time until that breaks and then what's the opportunity cost of it versus bringing on another product manager.
[00:05:43] Also, give them options, right? So one product manager, we could do X, Y, and Z. A junior pm I can handle this. Two senior PMs, we can handle that. Also, think about do you wanna manage those PMs? Are you asking to be the leader here or are you saying, hey. I want a leader, right? Like I still wanna be an ICPM.
[00:06:00] I don't wanna be a people manager. I think we should bring on a director to oversee these things. I can still work on these really hard problems, but we're gonna need some other people to do this stuff over here. Propose the changes that you wanna see there and make it easy for them to say yes. I always like to put out a couple different options when I'm working with executives to show them, what is going to help them reach their goals? What's a good option? What's a bad option? And then when you show them that too, you're always gonna wanna make the things that you think will work the best, sound the best to meet their goals. So definitely massage that story in there.
[00:06:33] Now, if they look at this and they go, absolutely not, you should be able to handle this stuff. Now you have to think about what can you do within your area, first you have to think about do you want that job? That just sounds awful. And there are consequences to overloading people, right? It's that they will burn out and they will quit their jobs and they wanna do the work. So now, if you can't solve it through adding more people, can you solve it, let's say you wanna stay through process or through elevating people in the team that you actually have?
[00:07:01] So is it a process problem? Is it that we don't have a good prioritization framework, it takes you too much time to sift through all the work? Or is it a thing where you are getting sucked into, let's say data analysis or something around it where you could solve that with somebody who's not a product manager or better systems or better processes or platforms. If so, bring that up, right? If it's that it's still a people problem and it's way too much work to handle, how do you help your team level up to a 0.2 where they might be able to take on some of this work? Can you go to your development leads and say, Hey, I'm swimming here. I think you're swimming too.
[00:07:40] Let's create a system within ourselves where I can help put some of this work onto you and you can help prioritize. Create a system for yourselves, create a framework for yourselves, and then help your development leads. Actually prioritize a bunch of that work, scope out that work themselves as well.
[00:07:55] Enable them to do that, right? How do you create the systems around that to allow them to step into it? I've worked with so many great development leads who really like doing that work too. So sift through yours and see are they going to be able to step up to this? Who might I be able to call on? Which ones can actually handle that task?
[00:08:12] And then scope the work out so that they get the things they can actually help with. That's a great way too to help bring your whole team together and work around it in a great system. But at the end of the day, if your company doesn't want to bring on more people to help with this work. You have to decide, is it something that I wanna take on and fix it through either processes or programs or bringing my development team into this?
[00:08:37] Or is it something that I wanna walk away from? And if it is something that I wanna fix, do I have the right people on our team to actually fix this? Maybe you also propose if it's not product managers you bring on, it's maybe different development leads or restructuring of the teams, or restructuring the work or different processes there to help make it work.
[00:08:54] So I would take a couple steps back, reevaluate what the root cause problem is. Is it that it sounds like too, that they're just dumping a lot of work on you. So what strategic bucket can you make there? How can you get ahead of it? How can you align the stakeholders? And then how can you diagnose with the root causes?
[00:09:12] Is it a people problem, a process problem, a system problem? And then is it a problem that you actually wanna solve? I'd also turn to your leadership. I know you are a director here, who's your leader? Who's your product management leader? Turn to them with these different options and ask them for help as well.
[00:09:32] Ask your peers what they've been doing in these types of situations. See if you can form a relationship that way and get some answers there too. And if you're just floating by yourself and you don't have that buy-in from your leadership or from your product management leadership, that's where I would say.
[00:09:47] Try the approach of breaking it down for them, giving them options on what could help, showing them that they can't get everything that they want. And then see if you wanna solve it yourself. And then otherwise you have a choice there. It sounds like it's really interesting work and that you love doing this work and you're capable of it, but the system is not set up for you to thrive.
[00:10:04] So now we have to think about the systems and we have to show how this system prevents 'em from getting their goal. That's the only way you are going to change management's mind. So how do you show them that by changing the system in any one of those ways, they can get to their goal faster and they're not gonna lose out on opportunity cost.
[00:10:25] I hope that helps and definitely write back and let me know if you try that and if it works for you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Again, if you have questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and I will answer them here every single week.
[00:10:38] We'll see you next time.