Allocating Your Time as a PM When Several Teams Compete for It

You are a product manager whose product depends on several teams, and each of them wants more of your time than you can give. How would you decide where your time goes, and how would you make sure the product still succeeds? Describe your approach and support it with an example from your own experience. ```hint Let the product goal set the calendar Before discussing calendars or tools, state what the product has to achieve and sort the requests by how much each one affects that. Then show how you would reduce the number of requests that need you in person at all. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Are these several engineering teams building one product, or different functions such as engineering, design, marketing, sales and support? - Is the pressure tied to a launch or deadline, or is this the normal state of the role? - Do I have people to delegate to, such as other product managers, a program manager or strong team leads? - Is success for the product already defined by a goal or metric that every team agrees on? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - An explicit rule for ranking demands on your time, tied to the product's goals and critical path rather than to who asks loudest. - Mechanisms that scale your input without more meetings: written context, decision owners, a regular cross-team cadence and asynchronous updates. - Open communication about what you will not do or will do later, including how you renegotiate with stakeholders and with your own manager. - A concrete example with your own actions, a measurable outcome, and the signals you used to check that the approach worked. ### Follow-up Questions - Two senior stakeholders each say their request is urgent, and you can only handle one this week. What do you do? - What signal tells you that you have become the bottleneck for your teams? - What did you stop doing to free up time, and what did that cost?