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Sirisha m

AMA: Uber Director of Product, Sirisha m on Stakeholder Management

May 1 @ 10:00AM PST
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Uber Director of Product, Sirisha m on Stakeholder Management
Top Questions
What's a good way to approach decisions that other teams feel they should own vs. Product feels they should own?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
Making any discussion data driven helps drive meaningful outcomes. Start with understanding why a different team thinks they own the decision, which helps with your conversation. Given decisions lead to outcomes and hence impact KPIs, leveraging that correlation helps with alignment. Clarifying w......Read More
492 Views
1 request
What kinds of ongoing, cross-functional meetings do you think are important to have? Which teams are involved, and what agenda items do you recommend?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
The structure and frequency of cross functional meetings vary by audience & project phases.  With your core development team of engineering, design, data science and productOps, if there is one meeting I recommend - that would be a weekly touchpoint. Try to make every one participate in this tou......Read More
473 Views
1 request
How do you ensure alignment when you have two senior executive stakeholders who disagree with each other on the proposed strategy and you are stuck in the middle?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
When you are stuck between the disagreement of 2 executives, there is no prescriptive playbook to help resolve this since the solution depends on the people involved, the phase of the company and the complexity of the problem. Some guiding principles to adopt to resolve the gridlock would be: ......Read More
502 Views
1 request
How do you manage people who don't necessarily report to you? This could be while giving feedback on a piece of work? Or getting them to prioritize the project you're running.
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
As a PM, you are always “influencing without authority”. The main factor that helps with influencing is identifying shared goals. Once you have shared goals, the discussion is on even ground. The shared goals could be KPIs around a project or around completion of a job. If there are no obvious sh......Read More
480 Views
1 request
How do you measure your own success in your role? How much have those performance indicators evolved as you grew within your role?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
As a PM/product lead, success is defined by both quantitative and qualitative metrics. I measure success - be it mine or anyone of the team across 4 pillars. 1. "Impact and ability to be visionary/innovative" - they are more quantitative than the others. For projects that failed, understand......Read More
458 Views
1 request
What guidance can you share around communicating effectively with stakeholders, once you've determined you will not be including their product request into your roadmap?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
“Saying No” is a soft skill every PM will exercise through his/her career. How to say No is something you will continue to learn and evolve with experience.  Some guiding principles on when delivering bad news on prioritization: 1. Make your stakeholder part of the decision making journey.......Read More
465 Views
1 request
What do you think junior PMs struggle with the most in regards to working with executives?
Sirisha m
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product • May 1
The areas that junior PMs struggle with the most when working with leadership are:  1) communication - An IC PM is in the weeds of their specific charter but not the executive. When asked a question, keeping the response to the right level of verbosity and the right depth is where most junior PM......Read More
478 Views
1 request