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What should a product VP’s 90-day checklist look like when they start at a new company? A seasoned product expert walks through seven vital tasks to ensure the success of new product VPs.
A VP of product establishes the broader context for building great products and making them successful. They use a combination of processes, trust-building, hiring, mentoring and cross-functional leadership to help their individual product managers succeed. Since I spend most of my time wrangling product issues at the C-level, here are some thoughts on creating conditions that can unleash great product work.
For context, let’s imagine that you’re a newly arrived vice president (or director) of products. You’re taking over a product team of five, matched with a development organization of 50. Product roles are poorly defined, priorities are muddy, overall development productivity is uninspiring and there are plenty of complaints about how product management isn’t doing its job.
As a new VP of product, having a 90-day checklist can make the difference between quickly getting control of the situation or finding yourself bogged down by existing inefficiencies and problems.
Official Product VP’s 90-day Checklist
You’ve just been hired as the new product VP and you need to hit the ground running. The following tactics and strategies are the top items on your 90-day checklist.
1. Create and share a minimalist, current-quarter priority list
As quickly as possible, you need a simple, force-ranked answer to “What are our top three priorities this quarter?” This should be obvious but rarely is. Even if it’s only partly correct, the list provides a way to push consensus among the executive team—which will be critical to everything that follows. It’s important to get the executive staff’s agreement that this list is “right enough”, and they will back your product priorities.
Share this high-level list with functional partners like development, sales and marketing to uncover any festering disagreements. The list is less than a roadmap, and it doesn’t address feature-level choices, but it helps you sort out “you don’t agree with my priorities” from “you think my team is failing.”
2. Become the heat shield for escalations
A seasoned VP won’t be surprised that their team gets five-plus escalations every day from sales, support, customers and prospects. Each of these makes sense in a vacuum, but individual team members are spending a lot of time defending the current plan from trainloads of seemingly good suggestions. As product VP, you know that sales and marketing live in an “and” universe, but development lives in an “exclusive or” universe. You also know that your team of product professionals straddle both worlds.
Since you already have buy-in to your explicit priorities as established in step one, your team can respond more clearly to other requests. And while lots of escalations will ricochet back to you, you can stand firm on most of the account-specific requests that consume so much development time. You become the congenial promoter of “exclusive or” thinking at the executive level, freeing up your team to make more nuanced decisions.
3. Create some job boundaries
As a new VP of product, you’re certain to discover that every department feels short-changed for product management attention, and the combined set of demands is impossible to meet.
You’re likely hear requests like the following;
- “The scrum product owner book says that product management must be at every standup and available to development teams 24/7. Every story needs to be exhaustive, and we need four sprints worth of groomed backlog.” — Development
- “Product management must be on every new customer call and in every technical partnering meeting. Everyone at the company works in sales.” — Sales
- “We need dual-track discovery teams of product + UX + technical architecture in the field at all times.” — Innovation/ Lean strategy
- “Your team has to staff six industry events next quarter, create four segment-specific product pitches and do weekly webinars.” — Marketing
- “Incoming bugs need to be ranked and sized within a week.” — Support
Individual product managers don’t have enough organizational leverage to fight back against this job-scope creep. They also inadvertently raise expectations by temporarily filling gaps, only to inherit those gaps permanently.
As the new VP of product, you need to set general guidelines for your team which makes this less personal. Here is what that might sound like:
“I expect that you’ll each spend 60 percent of your time with development, 30 percent with customers, prospects and market discovery and 10 percent with organizational communications/planning. Trade shows only if you’re speaking. No unqualified sales calls and only train-the-trainer and technical closer meetings. Let’s talk through where that’s challenging, and what I can take off your collective plates.”
4. Build trust, promote goodwill and sell the value of product management
As a new vice president of product, you will probably be frustrated but not surprised that almost no one in the company understands what product management does or how they add value. Combined with the unbounded job expectations from above, your team is often viewed as failing. So, you combat this by starting a slow-but-steady roadshow for your peers and their departments.
You combine this with basic education (“Here’s how my team helps us build the right products and make money”), active listening, (“I’m sure things aren’t perfect. Let’s talk through your issues and pick one to address first”) and endless reiteration of priorities (“Here are our No. 1 and No. 2 deliverables for the quarter. Let me know if there’s anything you would put above No. 1.”)
As you work on this process, you’re building trust, clarifying that your team is neither rejecting enhancement requests out of spite nor willfully avoiding meetings just to sit around. This will help your team reach their goals because as product managers, they have tons of responsibility but no authority. They rely on cross-organizational trust to get anything done.
5. Get product development re-energized
You may hear some developer complain about wasted work or erratic priorities. As Daniel Pink, bestselling author of books about business, work, creativity, and behavior, suggests, we get the most out of teams through motivation, not force. Knowing this, you work to get development excited about problems and emotionally connected to users. You’ll help them see that what they work on really matters to paying customers. You’ll do this by organizing product/vision sessions specifically for development:
“Real users have these problems. Product and development collectively refine problem statements and collectively find solutions. We want the smartest people in the room to figure it out.”
Adding this to your product VP’s 90-day checklist can go a long way toward improving cooperation and excitement.
6. Update the Hiring and Training/Mentoring Plan.
As the new VP of product, you notice that you have repeatedly inherited untrained, unmentored product teams with the wrong skill sets and in the wrong geographies. You rip up the current hiring plan and job descriptions which emphasize subject-matter expertise over product management experience. You reprioritize actual product experience to the top of the candidate filter and require that all new product hires be co-located with their development teams.
You then start a weekly mentoring/coaching cycle with your current staff, emphasizing organizational collaboration and strategic market understanding. Not all your team will be well-suited for product management, but you mentor as many as you can. It’s possible that you may also need to help find better-fitting roles in the company for others.
7. Organize market discovery teams for your product
After a month or two, morale is up and escalations are down. Your product teams are starting to find their groove. Now it’s time to start identifying what the broader market really wants from the product line. You might partner with development to form a part-time market validation team with your best product professional, a UX veteran and a software architect to validate new product concepts with real B2B users. You might push for instrumentation and A/B testing of consumer SaaS improvements or oversee a few other lean experiments. Executive-level air cover for these teams is critical since it’s easy to value the current quarter deliverables above all else and keep postponing real market learning for just another quarter or two.
As you read this product VP’s 90-day checklist you can see just how much there is to do. Remember though, you’ll benefit from playing the long game, finding motivation in small wins and attitude improvements along the road to great products. And revenue. And cross-functional trust.
It’s worth noting that great product professionals can work out some of these issues for themselves (and their teams). But we want them to focus on their specific products and services. It’s very hard to drive organizational change while also building winning products.
Also, some directors and VPs are player-coaches, managing a small part of the product portfolio while overseeing a team. If you have more than three direct reports, though, you should be focused on this kind of organizational enablement and process improvement — which your staff can’t do for you. Delegate the product-specific work.
Product management leaders must create an environment where their teams can be successful. That includes a lot of organizational design, behavior modification and relentless focus on the few most important projects. If you follow this product management checklist for VPs, however, your first 90 days are sure to be a success.
