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Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. It is time for our Dear Melissa episode. This is the episode where you get to ask me any of your burning product management questions. If you go to Dear Melissa.com, you can submit them there and I'll answer them every single week. This week's question is all about what do we do when we're assigned way too much as a product manager, so let's dive in. I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Product Weekend in New York City on November 14, an incredible event Powered by Localize in the last edition of May, I had the chance to meet a few people from the Localize team and some of their clients and it completely changed how I think about localization. It's not just about translation. It can be a real growth driver. In fact, some companies attribute up to half of their revenue growth to localization. Localize helps teams do this at scale with over 3000 companies using their AI powered localization platform to speed up translation, ensure quality and deliver better experiences worldwide. Head over to Localize.com to learn more and check out their localization revenue report to understand more about how localization can help scale your business. Dear Melissa, I'm a very Senior IC Product Manager, though my title is Director. Right now I'm assigned to five engineering teams. That's 37 engineers total, all doing infrastructure and platform work. For comparison, other groups this size have four to five product managers. It's just too much. I feel like I'm a mile wide and half an inch deep. I'm juggling multiple big initiatives while also trying to answer all the questions that come my way. But the scope is too wide. I'm missing details, and honestly, I've been making mistakes. My worry is that leadership will see those mistakes as a reflection on me instead of realizing they're the result of having too broad a scope. I need to figure out how to communicate that something has to change. I can be broad and strategic or I can go deep, but I can't sustainably do both. I Don't want this to come across as if I can't handle working hard. I can, but my hard work is getting diluted. I think everyone would benefit if I could focus more clearly. Thanks for your help. All right, so this is a really interesting one. I think it's funny because we got a question a couple weeks ago that was about having too many product managers for too few developers. Now we have the complete opposite situation here. You have a very wide mandate in front of you and a lot of teams. So this is not sustainable. You're correct. I have not seen this work really well. And it's time to make a change. So to make a change and to get people invested in it, we have to push back. So the only way that you're going to get them to change their mind and see that this is actually impossible is for them to understand that they can't get everything they want. So there's like a nice old project management saying that says you can have scope, you can have quality, and you can have things fast, right, which is time. But you can pick two, but not all three at the same time. And it sounds to me like quality is the thing that is slipping here. You've got really broad scope. Everybody wants everything as fast as possible, but you're saying it, you're making mistakes. You can't really handle this much. So you have to explain that to them. And people do understand that little project management saying about the scope, quality, time. They just don't want to accept it. But let's be realistic and let's break it down for them. So how do we get ahead of this and show them what you can do and what you can't do, I create a prioritization system out of them. Instead of just taking all of the initiatives and all the mandates that everybody's giving you, how do you create that strategy and that scope in the prioritization, put it back into their hands about what the dimensions are that you prioritize, not what the work is. You're not going to ask them to prioritize the work for you. You're going to ask them to prioritize dimensions about what's important. So if we're thinking about our big initiatives, it's probably going to be related back to goals and what we're trying to get out of these things. So what are the outcomes that we have here? Once you get that information, that alignment from the stakeholders, then you want to show them what is inside your scope and what's going to fall below the line by Showing that to them, you're going to say, hey, based on the capacity that we currently have, I can handle this. All of this other stuff cannot happen. It will not happen or will be deprioritized into future quarters. They're going to ask, how do we get that other stuff in scope? You say that the only way that we can actually handle it is to bring on more product managers who can handle this work. Then you're going to work out the pros and cons. If we had one more product manager working with me, we could take on this much. If we had two, we can take on this much. And you want to show them the opportunity cost of those things as well. By bringing on a product manager, it's not going to be cost neutral, right? We're adding more cost to these projects. But what's the opportunity cost? Is it that the infrastructure is unscalable to actually meet the demands of the customer? That's an opportunity cost, right? Where does it break? Is it that we can't fix bugs? Is it that we can't re platform things? You want to show them where things fall below the line, what's the time until that breaks? And then what's the opportunity cost of it versus bringing on another product manager? Also give them options, right? So one product manager, we could do X, Y and z. A junior PM, I can handle this. Two senior PMs, we can handle that. Also think about, do you want to manage those PMs? Are you asking to be the leader here or are you saying, hey, I want a leader, right? Like, I still want to be an icpm, I don't want to be a people manager. I think we should bring on a director to oversee these things. I can still work on these really hard problems, but we're going to need some other people to do this stuff over here. Propose the changes that you want to see there and make it easy for them to say yes. I always like to put out a couple different options when I'm working with executives to show them what is going to help them reach their goals. What's a good option, what's a bad option? And then when you show them that too, you're always going to want to make the things that you think will work the best, sound the best to meet their goals. So definitely massage that story in there. Now, if they look at this and they go, absolutely not, you should be able to handle this stuff. Now you have to think about what can you do within your area? First you have to think about, do you Want that job. That just sounds awful. And there are consequences to overloading people, right? It's that they will burn out and they will quit their jobs and they want to do the work. So now if you can't solve it through adding more people, can you solve it? Let's say you want to stay through process or through elevating people on the team that you actually have. So is it a process problem? Is it that we don't have a good prioritization framework, it takes you too much time to sift through all the work? Or is it a thing where you are getting sucked into, let's say, data analysis or something around it where you could suck? Solve that with somebody who's not a product manager or better systems or better processes or platforms. If so, bring that up. Right? If it's that, it's still a people problem and it's way too much work to handle, how do you help your team level up to a point too where they might be able to take on some of this work? Can you go to your development leads and say, hey, I'm swimming here, I think you're swimming too. Let's create a system within ourselves where I can help put some of this work onto you and you can help prioritize, create a system for yourselves, create a framework for yourselves and then help your development leads actually prioritize a bunch of that work. Scope out that work themselves as well, Enable them to do that. Right? How do you create the systems around that to allow them to step into it? I've worked with so many great development leads who really like doing that work too. So sift through yours and see are they going to be able to step up to this? Who might I be able to call on which ones can actually handle that task and then scope the work out so that they get the things they can actually help with. That's a great way too, to help bring your whole team together and work around it in a great system. But at the end of the day, if your company doesn't want to bring on more people to help with this work, you have to decide, is it something that I want to take on and fix it through either processes or programs, or bringing my development team into this, or is this something that I want to walk away from? And if it is something that I want to fix, do I have the right people on our team to actually fix this? Maybe you also propose, if it's not product managers you bring on, it's maybe different development leads or restructuring of the teams, or restructuring the work or different processes there to help make it work. So I would take a couple steps back, reevaluate what the root cause problem is. Is it that it sounds like too that they're just dumping a lot of work on you. So what strategic bucket can you make there? How can you get ahead of it? How can you align the stakeholders? And then how can you diagnose what the root cause is? Is it a people problem, a process problem, a system problem? And then is it a problem that you actually want to solve? I'd also turn to your leadership. I know you're a director here. Who's your leader? Right. Who's your product management leader? Turn to them with these different options and, and ask them for help as well. Ask your peers what they've been doing in these types of situations. See if you can form a relationship that way and get some answers there too. And if you're just floating by yourself and you don't have that, buy in from your leadership or from your product management leadership, that's where I would say try the approach of breaking it down for them, giving them options on what could help, showing them that they can't get everything that they want. And then see if you want to solve it yourself, then otherwise you have a choice there. It sounds like it's really interesting work and that you love doing this work and you're capable of it, but the system is not set up for you to thrive. So now we have to think about the systems and we have to show how this system prevents them from getting their goal. That's the only way you are going to change management's mind. So how do you show them that by changing the system in any one of those ways, they can get to their goal faster and they're not going to lose out on opportunity cost. I hope that helps. And definitely write back and let me know if you try that and if it works for you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Product Thinking podcast Again. If you have questions for me, go to dearMelissa.com and I will answer them here every single week. We'll see you next time.