Status: 

HoP: Head of Product

"We are a well oiled machine with happy customers, a happy team and good project financials."

• Identify key improvements that the Product Team would benefit from, prototype these in small circles, suggest them and trial them with the wider team, gather feedback, and eventually formalised them into a gameplan and roll them out.

• Escalate critical project decisions to the CEO. A critical decision is one like firing the customer, drastically departing from our minimal margin, bringing in outside help, etc.

• Plan holidays of the PM Group. See PM Group Holiday Scheduling

• Actively and immediately warn Management when expected project margin dips below the low watermark

  • project margin low watermark: 30% gross margin. Defined as profit/revenue. This is not a target, so don't treat it as such, it's a red alert line.

• Prepare a report of all customer project Activities, and present a short update at each Management meeting. This can be a quick flash of a dashboard with commentary level-of-detail that is up to your discretion. It must include for each project:

  • projected gross margin

  • current customer satisfaction

  • current team happiness

  • traffic light style project health. See IBM's 7 keys.

• Run the resource planning and Team Jour Fixe meetings. And drive improvements to this process.

Optional

• You are responsible for making sure that there exists a knowledge base where Activity Leads can record lessons learnt. Activity Leads are responsible for setting up these meetings and gathering the notes, but you need to make sure that they have a centralised place to put them, and that they do it.

• When Activity Leads report that customer satisfaction has fallen, ensure that a short entry is added into our knowledge base along with a short interpretation of why it happened. You may delegate this to the Activity Lead, but you are responsible that it gets done.

• Archive projects on Jira when they're dead.