Soft Promotion
What to do if you can't give promotions or hire senior leaders, but you need more leadership capacity
A short play - this is one I learned from Amer Hamzeh a little bit too late. But maybe it will help you!
Context
The product team has grown to a size where you no longer have time to partner with each PM. You are unable to get budget to hire leads or directors, or to increase pay. Your best PMs are not yet experienced at leading other PMs.
The ideal play would be to grant promotions and a small pay increase, and help your leads to grow into the role. Often they will succeed; if they don't, you can offer a lateral move, and the extra cost isn't so high. But salaries are politically tricky; depending on the current business environment and the organization, product leaders often have trouble getting the org formally set up the they want.
Play
Quietly ask your top 2-3 PMs to take on additional leadership work. This could mean:
- Setting up a weekly brain trust meeting with them where you solve problems together and share leadership tasks
- Asking them to organize work with a couple of other PMs - for example, roadmap development or stakeholder meetings
- Asking them to ideate about specific long-term targets and how we might achieve them
- Enlisting them to help solve organizational problems by guiding them in change experiments.
This play partners well with Product Lines and Portfolio Map