Industry Insight

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With product management taking the forefront of many strategic initiatives in the workplace, the softer skilled traditional project and program management methodologies are often put on the back burner to make way for technical conversation. While this effectively drives the product strategy and lifecycle, many teams struggle with producing executable product delivery timelines and roadmaps. The struggle is not in the product management discipline but in how these meetings are conducted. Whenever "technical" becomes the focus of any forum, the team can clarify requirements, solution design and find ways to connect cross-functional development efforts to overcome barriers in their project. And for the record, these are all great things! However, the challenge to this approach is that you are interdependent and driving technical projects on the same platform. Coordination is a must for preventing failures! The technical conversation is necessary, but the plan to execute those technical decisions against a timeline is lost before the meeting concludes. If you find yourself participating in discussions where 58 mins are spent on technical, and two minutes on strategy, you likely need another meeting to put a plan in place.

To alleviate this, experiment with ways to better facilitate and interject to control the dialog. Become a sharp timekeeper! As a good rule of thumb, a free-flowing conversation is time-consuming. Be agenda-driven and outcome-driven, and drive the discussion to these points! Many, especially managers and leaders, will be silent during the call and book another call with you shortly after to discuss what was missed in the last call. This is a good signal that better facilitation needs to be done. Taking the initiative will save meeting time on your calendar and align the team to be more focused on the topics and on time.