Day 15 as a PM: 3 ways to cultivate great work relationships early on
How do you cultivate great work relationships early in your PM role?
About us: Andrew (AM) and Chandrika (CM) met during their MBA program at MIT Sloan and connected over their passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management. AM currently works as a Product Manager at Moveworks and CM works as a Product Manager at DocuSign.
In our last post, we touched on the importance of understanding various internal stakeholders involved in making your product successful. In this post, we share what worked well for us in our early days to start cultivating great relationships with these stakeholders. We understand the recent shift to remote work has changed the way we engage with these individuals and have adapted our suggestions for this new way of connecting with coworkers.
Being deliberate about the outcomes of our initial “coffee chats” ☕
You often hear the advice to set up coffee chats with as many coworkers as possible in your first few weeks. While speaking to folks across various teams would be helpful, it was 10X more effective when we spent a few minutes preparing for these chats. Before going into these chats, we asked ourselves - what is it that we are trying to get out of each conversation? What would a successful conversation look like? what has our coworker’s journey in tech/product/the organization looked like?
In the current environment, it can feel even more challenging and overwhelming as these chats have to be virtual. Our hope is these pointers will help you prepare for chats, whether virtual or not.
Scheduling chats at least a week after we started - The first few days in your role will feel busy with all admin related formalities, including reading the onboarding material and taking any required training. More importantly, we needed to develop the product-specific vocabulary (acronyms and project code names galore! - Warty Warthog? Breezy Badger? and Karmic Koala??) so that we could formulate our mental model about the product ecosystem and be better prepared for future conversations. While getting set up in the first week or two, start scheduling chats in parallel for the next week.
Spending time understanding our coworkers’ background - what team they work on, who they report to, how long they have been at the company, what have they done before they started here, and their role within the Product ecosystem.
Having a rough agenda/list of questions - Based on our preliminary research, we picked questions that were in their area of expertise, which also surfaced historical context to why Product decisions were made.
Spacing out these chats - Instead of trying to cram these chats one after another, we scheduled them to have free slots before and after. We used the few mins before to crystallize talking points for the meeting. And while everyone understood if they had to rush to another meeting, the conversations felt more fluid if we had time to go a few mins over if needed. As much as we could, we followed our schedule and did not move the meeting around.
PS: For every coffee chat you schedule with your coworkers in your immediate team, ask them for suggestions on 2 more people you should be speaking to as someone new at the company or in your role. You could ask - “Who are the people you work closely with, and you’d recommend I speak with as I ramp up?” or “Who do you think I should be speaking to, to learn more about X?”
Trying to understand our coworkers’ “pain points” and how we can help 🙋🙋♂️
Early on, we understood the importance of identifying the areas we could add value in. Because we were new to not only the organization, but also the role, it was difficult for us to start adding value in the traditional sense of a PM - in helping define the product strategy, defining requirements and writing specs for specific features/projects, etc. Instead, we attempted to understand our coworkers’ biggest struggles.
Here’s what worked for us and could be helpful for you in your interactions with:
Senior leadership: Focus on strategy and try to ask questions about what their vision for the organization overall and your product is. Try to pick up on the “how” they are planning to get there and find areas you can start influencing soon.
Manager: Try and learn more about the various product areas that your manager is responsible for. Extend your help in any of the areas, even if they are outside of your “assigned” area of focus. Request to be added to meetings that your manager is participating in, that they believe will be helpful context setting for you.
Peers: Understand the existing practices (like sprint planning, retrospectives, standups), the frequency at which these occur and what your peers like or dislike about the way these are run today. Do not try to bring about a lot of changes all at once. Try to introduce changes one at a time, assess the impact of a change you have introduced and depending on the outcome either iterate or build on that.
PS: If you are replacing someone, ask your day-to-day coworkers (Engineering Lead, Design Manager, Business stakeholders etc.) what they liked most about working with your predecessor and try to understand what they didn’t like as much. You could ask - “How did X do this?” and follow up with “What did you like most about that approach and what did you think could have been better?”
Getting to know our coworkers beyond work 🤸♀️🏈🍳👟🎿
For us, this was important. Not just because it helped us become more successful as PMs, but also because it made work more fun. We knew we were going to be spending a significant amount of time working with these people. Getting to know them at a personal level (to the extent they are comfortable) went a long way in making this time spent working more enjoyable for us.
Identify fun chats forums: Whether your company uses Slack, Teams, or email Listservs, try to find and join some of the fun groups such as the “Runners Club” or “Escape Room” teams.
Join the casual virtual meetups: Because you cannot simply meet people snacking in the cafe or passing by in the hallway, try to identify the virtual meetups that are setup by HR or other teams/individuals. For example, daily morning virtual coffee chats that allow colleagues to catch up.
Be authentic (cliche but relevant): Develop your own style of engaging with your coworkers because there is no one-size-fits-all approach. And don’t force yourself to fit into an approach that works for others but just doesn’t feel right to you.
PS: As a PM, you want to establish yourself as an approachable leader early on. This would come in handy when a team member is dealing with a challenge and they feel comfortable coming up to you and sharing their challenge. Knowing the situation sooner rather than later will help you. To establish that rapport, we have both used our own ways - AM enjoys scheduling recurring 1-1s to talk about work (and more) and CM has been getting together with groups of coworkers on shared interests like viewing a masterclass together, or doing a yoga class together.
If you found this valuable and want to support us, consider buying us a coffee!