Office of the Flywheel

1. Trust your product managers.

Identifying process tools such as monthly review meetings, email updates, and ways to get input from stakeholders should be intuitive to your product managers. Taking the time to surround yourself with quality product managers will pay off in spades. Once in place, the regularity and depth of detail appropriate for you and your organization should be something they can quickly assess and create reports and documentation to suite. These reports and documents will serve as a good measure of how things are going.

2. Product managers should manage the process

This also means that stakeholders and executive staff do not disrupt the process by going directly to the developers and requesting changes. I’ve actually experienced this and the results were disastrous. If you are looking to disrupt the process, upset other management, confuse and demoralize the individual contributors, and ultimately kill the project (and possibly the company), I highly recommend it.

3. Integrating should feel intuitive

If you are an executive you shouldn’t need to worry about learning the new process. If you have a good product / project leader, it should go something like this:

- Receive information for review

- Meet with stakeholders to discuss, approve, reject, or place on hold

- Get updates regarding status, issues, etc., for things relevant or important to you

- Be alerted when things are ready

In other words, everything that is happening under the covers with respect to process is in the domain of your PM and his/her staff. The number one thing you can do is hire a good staff and trust them to do their job.