Welcome to another edition of Learning Leaps, where I’ll be sharing lessons learned from my first 16 months as a product manager at Pluralsight. While transitioning into a Product Manager role, one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn was about facilitating effective collaboration while creating learning experiences. That’s why for this weeks Learning Leaps, I’ll be taking a deeper look to identify what collaboration looks like and provide some tips to help get you started!
Moving from IC to Product Manager
After spending the past 8 years designing and delivering learning experiences, I was no stranger to collaboration on the job. In all of my previous roles, I was always an individual contributor on a cross-functional team. I had enjoyed this type of role and had done well with my approach to collaboration.
Soon after transitioning into my PM role at Pluralsight, I had a huge wakeup call that my existing approach to collaboration needed to change and FAST!
Product Management is collaboration. As a Product Manager, you are driving the product you’re responsible for. This means that you’re frequently coordinating and collaborating with all of the stakeholders who touch your product. So rather than being an individual contributor on a cross-functional team, you’re the one driving the initiatives and overall decision making related to your product line.
This type of collaboration is a skill that is learned and perfected by many Product Managers over time. So I decided to put together a few tricks that I’ve learned over the past year that I hope will help others while they’re collaborating on learning experiences.
Tips for effective collaboration when creating learning experiences and products
Identify and build trust with your stakeholders
A week before joining the team at Pluralsight, I fell down the stairs and broke my ankle. This put a huge damper on the onboarding plan I had created for myself. Since I am the absolute epitome of an introvert, I knew I was going to have to make an extra effort to meet everyone who I would be working with.
Over my first month on the job, I ended up having 30+ virtual 1:1 sessions. I did them in order of priority; starting with my immediate team including developers and UX designer. I put together questions that would help me learn more about their experiences inside of the company and in their roles. By taking the time to learn more about my team and stakeholders, I was able to gain empathy about the challenges they had to overcome on a daily basis. This gave me insight on things I could do to help make their lives easier in our work together.
After the official meet and greets were done, I made sure to put reoccurring meetings with stakeholders on the calendar so I’d never have to think twice about who to talk to and when. To this day, I’m still discovering people that would be great to connect with or touch the products and initiatives i’m working on.
Define the outcomes you’re looking to drive
Once you have a better idea of who you’ll be working with, you’ll want to identify the outcomes you’re looking to drive in your work together. Whenever I kick off a new project or initiative, I’ll usually schedule a meeting for everyone to come together and chat about the outcomes we’re hoping for and why. This alignment meeting makes sure that everyone starts out with the same context and helps us to be more effective in our work together.
Define roles for everyone on the team
When working on a cross functional team, it’s important to remember that everyone brings unique strengths and perspectives to the table. It is through your work together you’re able to deliver better outcomes than one person would be able to individually. Collaboration works best if everyone has an idea of what is being expected of them. Whoever the project leader is (in my case since I was the PM, it was me), will want to make sure everyones roles are clear from the very beginning so there is no confusion as you deliver on your mission.
Communicate early and often
Once you have your stakeholder group figured out, you’ll want to figure out the best way to work together. Since Pluralsight has multiple offices around the world, much of our work is done asynchronously. Depending upon the size of the project I’m working on, i’ll often spin up a slack channel for everyone to communicate and share insights with one another.
I’ll try to limit scheduled meetings for major project milestones like brainstorming, sharing user research synthesis, or discussing priorities for a coming year or quarter. As a Product Manager, I’m usually deep in the weeds of the problems I’m involved with, while others on the team may jump in and out as their schedule allows. Because of this, i’ll also try to over-communicate as much as possible to ensure others can follow along with things as they’re unfolding.
Show your work!
Prior to joining Pluralsight, I had always worked inside companies that were smaller in size. For context, when I joined The Predictive Index, the company had around 30 employees and when I left it had reached 100. Pluralsight on the other hand, is around 1400+ people currently. It goes without being said, collaborating inside of a 100 person company is drastically different than collaborating inside of a 1400 person company.
At a smaller size company, collaboration meant coordinating with maybe 8-10 stakeholders. During a recent project I was working on I had over 30+ stakeholders I had to coordinate with.
While chatting with my teammate Patrick, he noted how important showing your work was inside of larger organizations. He compared it to showing your work during math class. I vividly remember my math teacher trying to drill into my head the need to document my work as I progressed through problems (as a child I hated this activity).
I use a similar approach today for my projects inside of Pluralsight. I use project documents to highlight the outcomes were looking to drive, hypothesis we have, links to designs, experiment ideas, and decisions about future product strategy. This approach allows others to follow along with decisions and how they were made. As much as I despise forcing myself to slow down and document my work in this way, I’ve found that it’s made me more strategic about what i’m communicating and why. It’s also made it easier for me to get buy-in, influence, and manage others.
Seek context with intention
One of the core values that Pluralsight encourages amongst all of it’s employees is to seek context with intention. I’m a huge believer that as children we were driven by our curiosity and as we entered adulthood it was beaten out of us little by little. Thats why this value is my absolute favorite and I utilize it all of the time when working with others.
When working teams, it is not uncommon for everyone to have different viewpoints because of the vantage point they have in their role. I’ll frequently question why someone has a particular opinion, ask why they did something a certain way, what their thought process were and why. By asking questions, i’m able to learn more about the constraints and possibilities of a project.
Do you have any tips for others on how to collaborate more effectively? Post them in the comments below!
The next Learning Leaps will resume in 2020, where we’ll be dialing in on how to use data to make informed training decisions.
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