first format take of an EM-PM partnership responsibility page
Created by: Joelkw
This is one formatting attempt for the EM/PM matrix we want in the handbook.
I cut the "stakeholders" out because I felt like they were obvious in nearly all cases, they were just a few roles just listed repeatedly, and don't want to create a culture of "someone needs to be listed somewhere in the handbook for you to feel comfortable contacting them, if you think they are relevant." We hire smart people and they likely know when to inform the VP of Product or VP of Eng.
Update 2020-11-19 3:41pm PT: People prefer the alternate chart format for the "partnership" definition of this page, but there's a discussion about what the purpose of the page should be. You can probably skip to the discussion.
What I like about this format
- It makes it really easy to understand the responsibilities of the role (see this conversation)
- It makes it clear there are "accountable" and "responsible, but someone else is accountable" sections
- The formatting is easy to read.
What I don't like about this format
I'm not sure it gets at the "partnership" angle enough, and it repeats some sections in both the PM and EM area. I have an alternate proposal for a format (currently commented-out) at the end of the product_manager_engineering_manager_responsibilities page, where we keep the EM/PM section-level split but rather than have the "EMs help PMs with" sections, we just put all that in an "EMs help" column of a table that goes in the PM section, and vice versa. For example, in the "PM accountable" section you would have:
Product marketing
| PM expectations | EM expectations |
|---|---|
| - Speak to customers about upcoming features - Promote new features internally in the company - Communicate with marketing + sales around upcoming or recent feature releases - Reach out to customers when heavily-requested features are released - Make sure the CE + Sales team understands and is excited to sell new features |
- Look out for instances of gaps in product trust and understanding - Encourage engineers to provide demos of newly delivered features |
And then you would have no "Product marketing" section repeated on the page again in the EM section.
I like that this alternative gets more at the partnership. I don't like that this alternative means the role descriptions are now split across both sections (some in the owned section, some in the "help the other manager with" column of the other manager's section). But my opinion is that perhaps the purpose of this page is to show how EM+PM partner on a specific task rather than give separate role descriptions. I also don't love that without adding a bunch of html+css (which I will do if we want to go this way) the table format here will be a bit uglier and less readable.
Other questions
We separately have PM and EM role descriptions (in the other two modified pages in this PR). This project started as a way for @jeanduplessis and I to figure out how to best work together. I'm worried it is morphing in to "here is a PM role description" and "here is an EM role description" and I wonder, is that useful in this page as well as the descriptions we already have in the handbook on the dedicated role pages?
I justify this with "yes, this is additionally useful because it is about the partnership," in which case I return to my above concern that this format is best for "role description" rather than "partnership description." I think the core question here, if we agree this page should be partnership focused, is just what others find to be most readable/clear: the current format, or the suggested alternate format with 1/2 as many sections that have little table/columns in each section.