9.4 Running Meetings
The work you do as a product manager is all about communication, and your work with roadmaps is no exception to this. You will have many conversations with stakeholders as you build your roadmap and will need to artfully manage those relationships, run effective meetings, and handle the feedback you receive. In this checkpoint, you will spend some time developing the communication and collaboration skills essential to your success as a PM.
By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:
- Describe how to include stakeholders in the process of building roadmaps
- Practice answering the tough questions stakeholders may ask
- Communicate effectively with various stakeholders about meeting agendas
Who are your stakeholders?
Many people care about the progress that you make on your products, including your bosses, coworkers, and—most important of all—your users. The best way to improve your product is to include all of the people who have a stake in your work, known as stakeholders, throughout the process. How will they be involved? That depends on who they are.
Your bosses and above
The people above you on the organizational chart depend on you to help accomplish their goals and fulfill your company's strategy. They are usually the ones who set company goals and strategies in the first place, and they'll want to know what you're doing to ensure your work fits in those goals.
The best way to keep them happy is to meet with them regularly and communicate changes frequently. Keep them aware of what's happening and explain the rationale for the decisions you make. In most companies, you will have reoccurring 1-on-1 meetings, or there will be another process in place for the product team to share their work with management or company executives.
Others around your company
You'll be contacted frequently by people around your company. They will want you to answer questions about problems they're experiencing, problems customers are experiencing, and updates on upcoming changes to the product.
You should befriend a few people around the company that you can depend on to provide feedback on new features and designs. These allies can also help you get in touch with users of your product, keep you updated on what's happening on their teams, and help you advocate for your decisions and needs when they share your interests.
Your (best) customers
Involving users in the roadmap process is the best way to ensure that you are meeting the needs of the people who will actually use what you create. Depending on the size of your company, you may be able to get the assistance of coworkers on sale or support teams to do that. Large companies may even have a group of select customers who are involved in giving feedback or testing new features. At smaller companies, you may have to recruit these users yourself.
Your users have their own responsibilities and jobs, so getting their time may be difficult. Incentives (such as gift certificates, product discounts, or other freebies) can go a long way toward making a user's time investment worthwhile. Keep in mind that your users could share anything you tell them with the public or even competitors, so take care what you tell them.
Your relationship with users is also heavily influenced by the kind of company you work in. At B2C companies, your individual users are likely to respond to requests for feedback if you give them a peek about what's coming next and provide proper incentives (like gift cards).
At B2B companies, clients (businesses) pay a lot of money for your product; they will often push hard for you and your company to develop specific capabilities to fit their needs. Your sales team may want you to travel with them to visit big customers so you can better understand the customer's requirements and discuss options for serving them (and maybe even help the sales team close the deal!).
Managing stakeholders
Many of the methods and tactics you learned about in the lessons on conducting user research can also help you manage stakeholder relationships. Here are some guidelines to consider that may help you communicate more effectively.
Be sociable
Before you dig into any work needs, take a genuine interest in the people you're engaging with. Ask how they're doing. For example, inquire about the sick child they mentioned when they canceled a meeting or ask how they enjoyed their vacation time. Treat them as people, not just work functions. Reveal a little something about yourself, too. A little humanity goes a long way toward building trust and rapport with your coworkers.
Use your interview techniques
Asking Five whys, setting goals, or preparing questions in advance are all interview techniques that could also help you make the most of your limited time engaging with stakeholders. Meetings are short, and the time flies by. If you could only get your stakeholders' answer on one question, what question do you want their answer to? How will that answer help you make better decisions? Come prepared, and be transparent about the value of their feedback.
Take advantage of company rituals
Most companies have regular times and places where you can share and receive feedback. For example, if you need more information on how parents use your company's mobile app, you could ask that question in your support team's Slack channel. Similarly, if you need help chatting with users who have kids, you could drop in on the support team's weekly meeting and ask them in person. (Depending on your company's culture, this may need to be coordinated in advance.)
Be honest
Your ability to build relationships and manage stakeholder relationships depends deeply on your ability to get your stakeholders' trust. This is especially the case when stakeholders come to you asking for product improvements that you're not planning to do or that you can't do. When these situations happen, it is far better to be honest and politely refuse—or say, "I can't at the moment"—than it is to agree to prioritize something that you can't actually prioritize. You'll be respected for your honesty. Placating others and then failing to deliver on your promises is a sure way to get a bad reputation and lose your ability to impact.
The video below provides more information about how to manage stakeholders. It also gives advice on how to categorize your stakeholders, which will help you better understand how to engage with them.
Stakeholder meetings
Meetings will be a frequent part of your work life at any company you end up working for. Many people consider work meetings to be a necessary evil, and internet jokes on the uselessness of meetings abound. But meetings don't have to be ineffective. Preparation on the part of the participants, and especially the person running the meeting, can ensure that meetings are useful. In your role as PM, you will have to run many of these meetings yourself, so invest some time now to think about how you can make your meetings better than most.
The main reason to run a meeting is to make and communicate decisions. A meeting is an opportunity to help collaborators understand the problems you're facing and to share the rationale for why you're choosing one option over another. Meetings also give others a chance to ask questions or challenge the choices you've made.
If you only want to share information, a meeting may not be necessary. There are usually other, more effective ways to communicate, such as through email or company chat systems. That said, some people may not like the information you communicate and will want to discuss it in person. By avoiding a meeting and simply dictating the decision, you may miss an opportunity to get others' buy-in and make a decision together. With time, you will learn which decisions deserve a meeting and which don't.
Image source: someeecards.com
The invite
When you send out a meeting invite, first make sure that your invite has a clear explanation of what's going to happen. That means you should briefly explain the purpose of the meeting and include an agenda for what will be discussed. This also gives you a chance to ensure that you're setting the meeting length for enough time to discuss everything that needs discussing. If you have presentation materials, share those in the invitation. This will give participants a chance to prepare and read through the information beforehand, prepare questions, and come to the meeting knowing what to expect. If your presentation materials are not yet ready when you send out the invite, share them as soon as they're ready.
Nemawashi
For especially complicated discussions or to set conversations in your favor, it's a good idea to spend time with a few of the participants prior to the meeting. In Japanese, this is nemawashi, or the meeting before the meeting. This is a setting where many fundamental decisions are made. Some product managers may be more comfortable working 1-on-1 with stakeholders until they reach some decisions, instead of struggling to appear decisive in meetings involving many people. When conflicts are expected, you may want to go into a meeting with a few allies who are already armed with your data and rationale and can help you fight for what you think is right once the debates begin.
Who to invite
Most of the time, the invite list for your meeting is straightforward—including just the key stakeholders who need to be involved. If you're unsure who to invite, ask your product management peers, your boss, or the heads of the teams of people you need to invite. For example, if you are sharing specs for a future feature and would like a representative of the design team to be present to review it, talk to the head of the UX design team to find the right person to invite.
One-on-one meetings
You may want to set up a few individual, 1-on-1 meetings on an ongoing basis. It is customary to set a weekly meeting with your direct manager. And you should set the agenda of what to discuss with your manager every week. Similarly, you may have regular 1-on-1 meetings with the people on your team you manage directly. Your tech lead and design lead are also key collaborators you would want to meet with on a regular basis. You occasionally may want to meet with other stakeholders, such as company executives. You'll need to fight to get onto their schedules, though, because it's up to you to get their time, not the other way around.
Running a meeting
Running team and cross-functional meetings will be a big part of any PM role. Get comfortable leading meetings with some of the tips below.
Agenda
At the start of a meeting, you should review the agenda. Cover the goals you want to achieve and make sure everyone understands any context necessary to have the discussion at hand. If the goal of the meeting is to leave with a decision, make that explicit so that everyone is aligned. If your goal is to collect feedback to inform a decision you (and others) will make later on, state that. Clear expectations are the biggest differentiator between a useful meeting and a useless one. Finally, if there were any action items that were completed between the last meeting and this one, review those and update everyone on what has been done.
Notes
Start taking notes as soon as the meeting begins—or better yet, delegate note-taking to someone else. Notes are essential for a few reasons. You need a record of what was discussed and decided in the meeting in case you need to review (or remind others) what and why decisions were made. Notes are also good for others who were not in attendance, allowing them to be updated about what happened at the meeting. If it's a recurring meeting, a good practice is to have a single shared document where you add that week's meeting notes. That document becomes a running guide to the choices and decisions you've made in the past.
Sticking to the agenda
Stick to your agenda as best as possible. It can help to time box a discussion when you begin a new topic—say, take at most 10 minutes to discuss and decide the issue. If discussions go long, make a call to keep going or take them offline. If you're making progress on a decision, it's safe to keep going. If the discussion isn't useful, it's better to make a decision to scuttle the discussion and take action outside the meeting to resolve the issue.
It's possible that someone may try to hijack your meeting for their own purpose. Again, you'll have to make a call about whether to keep going on your agenda or follow this interruption. Do you have all the information you need to have this discussion? Is this an urgent issue that you need to discuss right now? If so, go ahead and take the interruption. If not, propose that you cover it in a separate meeting so you can prepare and get the right attendees to discuss it.
Ending the meeting
At the end of a meeting, recap any actions required as action items. These are the items you and others need to take action on—your to-do list. Each action item should have an owner, a goal to be accomplished, and a deadline for when it should be completed. Finally, send meeting notes—a summary of what happened at the meeting, a list of action items and owners, and the full notes (or a link to them). You should distribute these to all attendees and to anyone who might be interested. If you have a team chat app, like Slack, that's a good place to post the summary and link to full notes. If you are using a Google Calendar, a document with meeting notes can be linked in the invite itself, making it easily available to all attendees.
Practice ✍️
You start work at Salesforce on their enterprise products team. Using Google Calendar (or a similar app), create detailed meeting invites for the scenarios listed below. In each, include the meeting name and the body (text) of the invitation:
- A biweekly, recurring meeting with the product team to cover the week's agenda
- A one-time meeting with a few people from the sales team to discuss their problems with a key enterprise customer
- A meeting with the marketing team to discuss the upcoming launch of a new feature (make one up)
Take screenshots of your calendar invites and paste them in your notebook/notion page or a shareable doc, . Consider your current level of comfort leading meetings and building relationships with stakeholders. These softer skills are essential to your ability to get hired as a PM, so invest in improving them now. How can you strengthen these skills?