Why Product Managers should work with Business POCs and how to get them?

Every Product Manager has to work hand in hand with the Business Stakeholders to build and constantly improve the product in the right direction. But it goes without saying that meetings with Business Heads can be tough to handle. Now imagine if you need to have these meetings frequently, like almost 2–3 times in a week and that too with all the Business Heads in one place, sounds quite a job right! But what if there is an easy and much better way to handle these meetings and keep your Business Heads happy and informed as well. Yes, that solution is called — Get Your Business POCs (Points of Contacts)

In this blog you will get to learn:

Why have Business POCs?

How to get Business POCs if your company is not already having them?

Why have Business POCs?

1. As a Product Manager, you will need to discuss a lot of granular details about the product in the Business Stakeholder calls, which would be taking time and regular involvement from the business side to understand the overall progress or point out issues, etc. Business Heads are handling things at the top layer usually, where they might not be aware of the granular product issues or other related problems
2. Business Heads will be running busy most of the time, and they will be constantly prioritizing meetings. Chances are, your stakeholder meetings will get pushed down in their calendar when compared to other high priority items that they have to attend
3. It is easier to discuss, influence, debate with someone who is not a Founder or Business Head. Let the POC take charge of communicating the necessary details to the Business Head, in this way she/he will know what are the necessary updates that need to be shared with their Business Head
4. POCs will be accountable for the shared Business Requirements and will co-own the approved PRD. This will minimize PRD changes / new feature requests once the development work is in progress, resulting in you achieving timelines better and without any back & forth in the finalized PRD

How to get Business POCs?

1. Discuss with your Product Head or Founder why to have business POCs. Explain to them the above points and tell them how it will smoothen out the development process
2. Once your Product Head/Founder is on the same page with you, ask for setting up a call to introduce the new process to the Business Heads in presence of your Product Head / Founder
3. Send out meeting invites to the business heads and your department head mentioning the agenda of the call
4. Create a presentation for the call. This will help you to put forth this new process in a better and professional way
5. Highlight these points in the call to easily convince the business heads — better communication with business teams, faster product development, a platform for business to regularly share their issues, requirements, ideas, and get regular product updates
6. Highlight the responsibilities of the business POCs. Stay strong on your points, and lay your argument with data and logic
7. Take notes of any disagreements or suggested changes in your proposed process
8. Get on a separate call with your Product Head/Founder to come to a mutually agreed-upon process. Since your Product Head/Founder would have been present in the call, you need not give her/him a recap of what happened in the call. But ensure that you definitely get your department head on the call, which will help in the smoother implementation of your process
9. Once you have the agreed-upon process and responsibilities for the POCs. Shoot out a mail to the business stakeholders mentioning in detail what was discussed in the call and the finalized process and list of responsibilities for the assigned POC. Give the business heads a fair amount of time (about 7–10 days) to get back to the Product Team with the list of POCs for the respective Products in the company
10. Once you have your list of POCs, set up an introductory call with them
11. Create a presentation for the Introduction call, it will be easier for you to flow through the call without missing out on anything important. You can highlight the following points in the call

a. Talk about yourself and the product you are handling

b. If the POCs are not completely aware of the Product you can set up a Product Walkthrough session for them

c. Talk about your team — mention their names, role, department, years in the company

d. Talk about the latest developments in the product

e. Share the Product Backlog and ongoing Sprint or product development details with them

f. Align them on the process you will be following for product development and how, where, when they can contribute

g. Introduce them to the bi-weekly Business Stakeholders Catch-up and the purpose of this call. Send out invites to them and block their calendars for this call

h. Send out the Introduction presentation to all your POCs, for their future reference

To learn how to conduct the Business Stakeholders Catch-up read this blog — https://productpeas.medium.com/5-essential-meetings-that-product-managers-need-to-have-regularly-3-b34e1971cf84