I once worked on a Marketing team where I constantly resolved disagreements with Sales. Each week, I helped decide which sales channels would get promotional discounts. I negotiated against one team that mostly wanted one thing: discounts. The work was one-dimensional.
I’ve since changed careers to product management. It requires collaborating across multiple teams to build software products. The work is high-dimensional.
Previously, I’ve written about the product management process as an individual contributor, but this post reflects my experience when products get more complex and start pushing up against an organization's constraints..
I find it helps to view each team as a tree within the broader forest of product management. Teams need to cooperate on what to build (product vision), what to measure, and how to build.
Product Vision
Ask ten employees for their objectives and you'll likely get ten different answers. Aligning vision can be challenging.
Companies are always trying to improve cross-division alignment. In the 1930s, Proctor and Gamble (P&G) invented brand management, where each product team (soap, foods, etc.) had their own team to build and market the brands.
The issue with this structure was there were redundant roles across each product line. In response, companies adopted a matrix structure where functional groups (Sales, Finance, R&D, etc.) supported multiple products at once.
However, teams still clashed because functional teams optimize on how they’re measured. Finance has cost targets. Salespeople have sales targets. Manufacturing has quality targets.
Product teams focus on the bigger picture. Where is the market going? What are customers struggling with? Then, they build the business case, the story, and work with functional teams to get feedback and buy-in.