The Product Manager's Survival Guide

by Steven Haines

As you navigate the organization, meet people, and learn what people do, refer to this set of common definitions as your guide: The role of a business function in an organization is that people associated with that function produce an agreed-upon outcome. The role of a person in a function is to use specific knowledge, skills, and experience to produce the desired outcome for that organization. A responsibility represents the work steps or tasks that are undertaken by people in a given role. An outcome is the actual goal that must be fulfilled or accomplished. Within this context, your action plan will include: 1. Putting together the organization chart that best represents the organization’s design. 2. Fine-tuning the chart by ensuring that you have the right names, job titles, roles, and responsibilities for each person in the chart. By doing this, you must meet with key players in each function. By so doing, you’ll learn what people do, how they do what they do, and with whom they work. 3. Creating a Functional Support Plan. The Functional Support Plan is essentially a cross-functional contract that you can use to negotiate with people who work in other functions. It serves to clarify roles, responsibilities, and outcomes of all relevant players who work on a product team. I’ll talk more about this in Chapter 5.