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Product Manager
How do you manage your boss's boss expectations?
I'm a PM at a 200-300 person company and need some tips on managing dfferent members of my team.
How do you guys manage other teams expectations without losing your mind or getting overwhelmed? I'm trying to explain to my one team that we need simple info to give our business leaders so we can get a yay/nay on a project but these guys are hesitant to give a "rough" estimate because there are many unknowns.
In my opinion, I say lets get the yay and then figure it out once we know we'll get some resources to investigate.
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NiceHoomansSoftware Engineering Manager
If you were talking to me and I had concerns about a project management wanted to do, I'd be thinking about a couple things:
- When people come to me with impossible, urgent requests because of "market demands", the expectation is that I need to rally my teammates and get it done…even if it means overtime. Do I even like you enough to put my team through that? If not, maybe I'm going to push back and delay things so we can get the LAST urgent task done.
- Are the people in charge asking the right questions? I don't want to waste valuable resources on projects no one consulted with me about. If thats the conversation we want to have, send me a calendar invite. I don't want to find out about things when its mission critical. Would be nice to be able to anticipate issues and resource accordingly.
- And lastly, what are our shared goals? Just because it's important to them doesn't mean it should be important to either of us. I know this is more of a leadership/strategy thing, but depending on your company's structure, you might have to let things die on a vine because we just can't do it all. The risk isn't worth the effort.
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