Outliers in this story refer to the ‘over-performed’ and ‘under-performed’ product managers in your team. You might think that they are quite different. It’s true, but there are several foundational leadership principles you can generalize.
Prerequisites: Before managing outliers, you need to ask if you have these foundational structure in place. If not, stop and work on it as it will help you to manage both of the types of outliers in the organization.
- Have right mindset as a product leader. Be positive, forward looking and building confidence about your support in helping your team to grow their career. At the same time, consider your own bandwidth — you need to leverage your team right and don’t make a common mistake to spend too much time with the under-performers.
- Have a Competency Model in place and make it a common knowledge. Your company should have a rubric to evaluate PM performance. If you don’t, the Reforge Competency model is a good starting point.
- Have a proactive feedback mechanism in place. Not past-looking, once-a-quarter type of performance review. You need something to actively engage, provide near-real-time feedback and listen to employees about where they want to go next.
Symptoms & Consequences: Failure to manage outliers in your team have several common symptoms and consequences:
- Symptom #1: Short of high and consistent quality work: The under-performers don’t deliver the result as you expect, being it a PRD preparation, communication in critical meetings, or a product strategy write-up. The over-performers may start to produce surprises that have never occurred before or they don’t seem to go above and beyond like they used to.
- Symptom #2: No pushback but no change. When you give feedback or suggest new things, you don’t see any questions or pushback, but you don’t see anything changes either. This might be more true to under-performers.
- Symptom #3: Sense of team demotivation. For under-performers, others might think about them as an example for a new low bar of quality. For over-performers, they might feel the current projects or scope of work no longer exciting and tend to look down on other teammates’ efforts.
- Consequence: There is only one common consequence when you failed to manage outliers - churn. The under-performers might not leave your team, but other teammates will if you don’t fix the situation. The over-performers might find better opportunities elsewhere.
How to manage?
- Identify the root cause and classify the type of problem: Motivation or Capability. The motivation problem can have multiple angle: the product managers have changed their career aspiration (become a more B2C product managers instead of B2B) or they want to grow into different scope (become more external facing, PMM type of work instead of PM) or hate some parts of the job that you need them to focus (they want to do 30% execution, but you need them to be 70–80% on execution). The capability problem is really about them knowing how to master the skills — maybe, they simply don’t know how to approach a XFN situation, structure the PRD, or come up with the right product strategy. As soon as you recognize that the problem is about motivation, the burden is on you — you need to move faster as spending more time with these outliers will be a waste of both you and their energy.
- Allow them to tell you what they need first: For under-performers, proactively feedback and give them a chance to self-review the gaps and propose a plan of actions. Sometimes, they may not even know what to propose, still ask them to do that. For over-performers, they might have too many ideas and don’t know what to focus on first. It can be a thought exercise when you ask ‘what would you like to see yourself doing better next month?’ Then, you can help identify the organization needs and scope a task to match their aspiration. Don’t assume that all under-performers need to have a smaller scope — doing so without first listening to them might make them feel being managed out or mistrust. Also, don’t assume that all over-performers want a bigger scope — sometimes, they might want to do something totally different or go deep in a particular vertical. You need people with the right ownership of their career, so listen and coach them to have this direct conversation with you.
- Monitor your time spent and leverage other resources: an extra one hour spent on an under-performers means a one hour less you spend on other high-leveraged area of the organization.
First, you need to assess how much time you have and purposely try to spend more time with the over-performers. A common tendency is to spend time with under-performers first and have no time left. A common mistake is misunderstanding between spending time vs micro-management. Mangers asks ‘what else can I do to my over-performers without making them feel micro-managed?’ There are a lot that you can do: reviewing their proposals that they send to you carefully, coaching them to unblock and gain more resources faster, assessing where they want to go next and open the doors earlier for them. You can also engage them in strategic discussion about your organization, your products, and future vision. Making them feel like a partner to you and genuinely spend more time on what they care about is how you should spend time with your high performers. Once you put your big rocks down first (your over-performers), your time budget will re-adjust itself to less time on under-performers.
Second, you need to build a scalable support system for under-performers. Group mentorship on a specific subject, shadowing opportunities, product training (through company vendor or outside of the organization), cross-functional support pairing (provide Eng support on execution so that your PM can focus on product strategy or PRD execution) are all examples of resources (other than yourself) that you can consider.
When the time comes?
For over-performers, unfortunately, you are not in the control of the time. They would leave if you can’t match their expectation.
For under-performers, you have the burden to control the time. A documented history and feedback loop will help. There is no one-size-fit-all when it comes to timing. Different companies have different mindset about managing outliers, especially under-performers. Each industry also has different behavior: over-performers in certain places will not leave since the industry mobility is low — while in some industry, over-performers will assess their career every one or two years. In the tech industry, a 6–8 week period after the first feedback, another 6–8 weeks on documented changes, following by the PIP process are common.
If you are not sure about your industry, your company, your org culture, talk to your HRBP and managers early to build the right mechanism in place. Most of the time, under-performers would choose to leave rather than being put on PIP. Some companies would be willing to let go under-performed employees with packages as it is actually less costly.
Hope to learn more about the best practices out there from other product leaders and managers.
