How to fire a PM
Beyond compassionate firing, how do product leaders think about the firing decision?
[Have questions or topics you’re curious about? Influence what I’ll write by providing feedback. 7 questions and I read every response.]
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I wrote an article last year, “Setting up a good product manager hiring process.” It planted a seed in my mind about PM firings. You hear “hire slow, fire fast”, but if hiring is hard, the few times I’ve been involved in terminations for cause, it’s been much harder, both emotionally and time spent. A leadership professor once said to me about managing people, “I’m not teaching to help you. I’m teaching you so you don’t fuck up other people’s lives.” What does “fire fast” beyond “with compassion” mean in practice?
Why is firing hard?
A quick search turns up several articles about firings and to-dos:
Don’t surprise people -> Firing with Compassion
Help them find a job -> A More Humane Approach to Firing People
Be respectful -> Preserving Employee Dignity During the Termination Interview: An Empirical Examination
Good general advice, but the big assumption is that your decision to fire someone is the correct decision. Most firing advice focuses on execution (i.e., how to fire someone), less on decision-making (i.e., how to decide if someone should be fired). This assessment problem is more difficult for people managers who are still developing their own skills and competencies (aren’t we all).
What makes firing PMs harder?
Assessing a product manager as an individual contributor is difficult. Compared to a role like sales, PMs can’t be evaluated based on a single metric such as revenue quota. You have to use a combination of qualitative (e.g., communication, relationship management) and quantitative (e.g., hitting specific product outcome or output metrics). Balancing this type of assessment is mentally tiring and subject to human bias. Furthermore, many startups haven’t developed a PM performance evaluation framework, making starting an evaluation more difficult.
How to create a good termination decision-making process
The steps below aren’t about how to “cover your ass” if you want to terminate a PM. Nor is this for cases where individual’s actions are blatantly wrong (e.g., harassment, fraud). It focuses on how to run a good process regarding a difficult decision at a startup (less than 500 ppl), which increases the likelihood of a high-quality decision.
Start with your feelings. You get that feeling, “this isn’t working.” Tune into the feeling as the indicator to start asking questions.
Break down your feelings by performing a quick assessment. What isn’t working? What specific actions triggered the feeling it isn’t working? Four areas to consider: execution, relationship with other people, work effort, or a hard skill.
Execution covers the quality and speed of product discovery and delivery.
Relationship with others covers a person’s working and communication style. This includes how the person works with you and your working and communication style.
Work effort covers how someone deals with adversity, not just how many hours they put in.
Hard skills cover specific skills required for the role. While many people will say there are no hard skill requirements for PM, my experience shows that different companies at different stages do have hard skills beyond analytic thinking. Examples include writing SQL queries to performance analytics or setting up A/B tests.
Vince Law, former DPM @ General Assembly now Product Consultant and Berkeley MBA Faculty said he focuses on three big issues when evaluating execution: “[I look at if the person is] using only intuition/instinct without rationale or structure to back it up their decisions, [if the person] cares more about being right than doing the right thing, and [if the person] is unwilling to change their decision in the face of new information.”
And the issue doesn’t have to be in “execution” only. For example, PMs can charge ahead based on the right logic, but damage working relationships with engineers or designers. This can quickly cause the product team’s morale to drop and subsequently, sink overall productivity.
Evaluate performance issues relative to company/product need and stage. If the PM’s poor performance is across multiple areas, it’s an easier decision. However, more frequently, a PM is great in one area (e.g., relationship with others), but poor in another (execution). Thus, you need to evaluate the PM’s performance against the current company’s needs. My experience shows that execution and work effort are more valued at earlier stage companies (less than 150) and products (less than 2 or 3 products). With fewer people and less complexity, speed and quality of execution are more valued.
Larger companies (150+) with more complex products require PMs who are stronger at developing working relationships with others. While we all value PMs who can lead with and without authority, larger organizations have more distributed power and authority, requiring individuals with better influence and persuasion skills to “get shit done”.
Decide to escalate and create an evaluation team. If after a quick assessment, you find you need to move forward, start the conversation with management and HR. Pick 2 - 4 individuals (typically HR lead, another people manager, and legal) and create an evaluation team using the SPADE method. The goal of the team isn’t to make a decision by committee. You need to inform everyone about your thinking and create the process that you’re using to make a termination decision. Be as explicit as possible on how you’ll make the decision (e.g., must meet 4 out of 5 specific measurable actions from improvement plan). Ask those on the team to checking your decision-making process. “It’s important to [get perspective] to de-bias yourself [as the evaluator],” says Tushar Kirtane, VP of Product @ Kevel. “You can become hyper aware and focused on a particular negative behavior, but other people many not see it that way.” That’s why your evaluation team is a critical resource of support, to veto any incomplete decision-making process. One specific way to remove biases is to write down detailed examples of positive and negative specific actions by the employee. However, don’t forget the ultimate decision to fire an employee rests on you. I recommend from kick-off to final decision to last no more than 2 months.
Create the improvement plan. Given the 2 month timeframe, create a 4 week improvement plan with specific, measurable action you want the PM to demonstrate. You need to be explicit to the PM when presenting the improvement plan that the PM is currently not meeting expectations. Follow up by documenting the discussion and improvement plan in writing. Then set up weekly, 15-minutes where you can give evaluation feedback if the person is meeting those measurable actions. These meetings aren’t coaching sessions, which you can have as-needed throughout the improvement period, but evaluations of the week’s performance. Note that your last meeting is also an evaluation of the prior week’s performance, it is not the time to make the final decision. You should state at the last evaluation meeting, when you’ll make the final-decision (typically 1 - 2 day afterwards).
Make a decision, inform your evaluation team. Once the improvement plan period is over, quickly evaluate if the PM has met the specific, measurable action. “If the person has meet all the specific actions, make sure you set the expectation with the employee that they can’t slip backwards into old habits,” says Tushar. They’ve demonstrated they have the capability to perform and you don’t want to get into cycle of improvement plans, which is stressful for everyone. If the decision is to terminate, inform the rest of the team, give the reasons why, referencing back to your decision-making criteria. It’s most common to see a PM able to meet only some of the specific, measurable items, but not all. In that situation, I recommend continuing with termination.
How to execute a termination
Make sure others leaders are aware and committed. You don’t want to surprise your HR or your managers. Make sure they understand your decision-making process that you went through and they support you. Any disagreements need to be resolved or everyone must “disagree and commit.”
Write a script. Be direct. “Shaw, I called you in to give you bad news. I am terminating your employment, effective immediately.” The script will help you think through what you need to say, how you should respond to different emotions, and how to answer common questions. You can role-play with your HR lead.
Schedule a private and short meeting. Keep it between you and your direct report. While some companies recommend for legal protection reasons, having another person in the room with you, research shows including another person in the room decreases the person’s feeling of respect. Thus, I recommend it’s generally better to have the conversations 1-1.
Listen, but don’t respond with misdirected compassion. People will be shocked, angry, in denial, defensive, sad, etc. Listen, but don’t respond emotionally. Stick to your script for how you handle different emotions. Don’t defend the reasons, stick to the reason. Don’t renegotiate on the decision. Don’t say compassionate statements that sound good, but aren’t helpful such as “I know this is hard.” “I’ve been down this road myself.” “It’ll get better.”
Wrap it up. From your script, inform termination options and process, which will vary from company to company based on local laws and risk-mitigation. You should have something also in writing that you can hand to the PM about the process. It can be difficult for the employee to listen and comprehend given the emotions. It can also be difficult for you to tell the information.
Walk the person out of the office. Don’t have security or HR do it. Give them the dignity to pack up and say goodbye to coworkers by providing a set time. Not only is this respectful to the individual employee, but other coworkers.
Take a breath and a few minutes for yourself. It’s a hard task to do. So, take a few minutes, breathe for yourself because your work isn’t done.
Tell everyone else. Product managers often have built close working relationships with many others at the company: engineers, designers, marketers, etc. Some of those individuals will be shocked, angry, or have other emotions. It’s now your job to explain to everyone. This explanation should not go into individual performance details, but you should, at a minimum, send out an email acknowledging what occurred. Have written communication prepared that will go out to people company wide, at team levels, and at individual levels. Managers hoping nothing will be said are digging their head into the sand. It is better to acknowledge what occurred and reassure others that their jobs are not affected (i.e., this isn’t due to business issues or anyone else’s performance).
Lots more to unpack
In writing this article, there are multiple areas I touched upon, but not in sufficient details.
Timing isn’t on your side. A learning oriented PM, given enough time will generally succeed. However, most startups don’t have the time. “It’s insanely common at series A/B startups going from the 20-ish company size up to 80-150 as they hit product market fit, and so much of the original team who contribute to the success feels displaced,” said Vince. He continues, “If the org has grown to a point where there is no place for that PM anymore, that's not a firing … and should be treated very differently.” I strongly echoed Vince’s sentiment and the article here doesn’t address this situation.
Perceived risks of lawsuits prolongs process. I’m not a lawyer, but in the U.S. the adversarial legal system and uncertainty of lawsuits, I believe, are strong incentives for people to “cover your ass.” This includes long improvement plan periods, multiple rounds of improvement plans, extra written paper documentation, consultation with lawyers, etc. All are meant to minimize the likelihood of a lawsuit and the unknown consequences. There is no single solution, but it’s why I think it’s important to form an evaluation team to check your decision-making process. Individuals on that team can help you determine your company’s risk appetite.
Startups value PMs that increase the probability of success There’s a popular saying that PMs should focus on outcomes over outputs, a way to discourage teams from building features that no one uses. But there’s no guaranteed process to creating outcomes. That’s why some believe you can increase the probability of success by increasing output. If you throw enough ideas at the wall, hopefully some will stick so throwing more ideas (output) gets optimized. But what everyone really wants is to increase is the probability of success, we just don’t agree on “how” because there is no one method that works consistently. So, PMs should think about communicating what they recommend is better at getting to a successful outcome versus another option.
Special thanks to the following individuals who contributed thoughts for making this article possible:
Vince Law, Product Consultant, Advisor, & Coach, MBA Faculty @ UC Berkeley and CCA, ex-DPM at General Assembly
Michael Gackstatter, SVP of Product @ CLARK
Tushar Kirtan, VP of Product @ Kevel
Sources:
Why Firing Brilliant Assholes Is Required to Build a Great Engineering Culture
Preserving Employee Dignity During the Termination Interview: An Empirical Examination
Additional Reading: