How to stop being an unintentional bottleneck for your team

Some product managers become bottlenecks because they want to control all decisions and information. For others, company culture creates bottlenecks. Regardless, whether it’s excessive approvals, fear of failure, or unclear accountabilities, product managers often become the single decision maker for product development.

It’s a lot of pressure to have team members waiting on you for something and to unblock them in their progress. To help you contend with this challenge, here are a few strategies to remove yourself as the bottleneck and empower your team.

Communicate about changing the company culture

Some team members are used to a certain way of doing things. Maybe they insist on a meeting instead of using asynchronous communication tools. Or perhaps your predecessor was a micro-manager, and their habits still affect the current team’s dynamics.

You’ll need to communicate the goal of changing the company culture and set expectations for what it’ll look like. Discuss what you’re trying to achieve and the overall benefits for your team.

Once you’ve gained support, it’ll be easier to implement changes. There might be some short-term growing pains, but reassure everyone that this is a phase and the long-term outcomes are worth it.

Culture change works because a culture that promotes autonomy, trust, and experimentation unleashes faster decision-making and innovation. Some action steps include:

• Getting key leadership on board with empowering teams
• Embed shared ownership
• Eliminate unnecessary approvals and micromanagement
• Create psychological safety so failure is seen as a learning opportunity instead of a blame game
• Implement collaborative async communication tools and norms
• Solicit feedback on cultural blockers and address them

Delegate and empower employees to make decisions

Many team members turn to their product manager to make decisions, even if it’s unnecessary. There are a few reasons why this happens. Some team members want to avoid accountability or potential fallout if the decision leads to a poor result. Others may feel like they don’t have the authority or knowledge to make the choice.

Creating a RACI chart, or a responsibility assignment matrix, can define who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed during product development. The chart identifies which decisions require product management input and which decisions the team can handle. It speeds decision-making without waiting for the product manager to sign off each time:

Another strategy is to encourage your team members to build their skill set. It’ll help them gain confidence in their abilities, and they can make decisions without oversight.

It may also help to delegate problems instead of activities. Tell team members the desired outcome, some guidelines for decision-making, and when to check in with you again. This encourages problem-solving and shared ownership with team members.

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Create new processes to prevent single-person bottlenecks

Product managers often have specialized knowledge or handle unique tasks. This can create a bottleneck that only you can fix. Relying on one person can make a project vulnerable to absences or overload.

Take a look at your most time-consuming or bottleneck-prone tasks. Here are a few ideas to create new processes or make the tasks easier to delegate:

• Write clear guides or checklists on how to perform tasks — It makes your knowledge accessible to others. You can also add criteria for when you want to receive notifications about potential problems
• Train team members on how to do the task — Training multiple team members means that there is a backup if someone is unavailable
• Use AI to automate repetitive tasks — Automation can reduce manual effort and free up your time
• Create templates for standardized tasks, like roadmap updates and metrics reporting — Templates can help others create documents without your involvement
• Establish ownership for learning — Assign team members responsibilities for learning and maintaining processes

Streamline communication and minimize approval bottlenecks

Tell team members the desired outcome, some guidelines for decision-making, and when to check in with you again. Slack gives you constant interruptions. Engineering needs clarification, UX needs approval, and marketing has a question about timelines. It’s not realistic that you can reply right away and then teams end up waiting for half the day for a response.

Here are a few things you can do to minimize approval bottlenecks:

• Encourage autonomy on small issues — Ask questions like what they think should happen or present ideas to solve a problem. This empowers team members to solve problems by themselves
• Set “no need for approval” expectations — You may not need to be involved, but team members may think otherwise. Sharing that there isn’t a need for your approval can help move the process forward without you
• Create formal guidelines on what needs your approval — Documenting thresholds for decision-making could reduce approval bottlenecks
• Delegate approval authority — Empower qualified team members to approve certain tasks, which can reduce approval dependency on you

It may take some effort to find the right approval workflow. The goal isn’t to have no involvement and leave team members alone. Instead, aim to check in and understand what’s happening without needing to participate in every detail.

Promote open information sharing

Bottlenecks get worse when information is siloed or there are unclear communication channels. Product managers end up as the de facto information hub. It can cause repeated inquiries when team members don’t know where to look for information.

You may want to create a resource that displays your project status in big, visible charts. In agile, it’s known as information radiators and could be dashboards, roadmaps, or Kanban boards. Making this visible to all team members and stakeholders can improve transparency and proactive problem-solving.

Resist overanalyzing every decision

Many people have high standards and perfectionistic tendencies. It can cause bottlenecks as people tend to overthink small details before moving forward.

Lowering your standards to “good enough” can make it more achievable for your team members to reach those metrics. It can also help scrutinize which decisions make a true impact on outcomes. Over time, this might make team members feel more comfortable with making decisions by themselves.

You can also consider the 80/20 rule to balance speed and quality. The concept is that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. For example, 80 percent of complaints come from 20 percent of customers. The 80/20 rule works because it forces you to spend energy on what can make the most impact. Finding simple solutions can enable quicker testing and learning cycles:

Embrace failing

As a product manager, it’s your job to consider what could go wrong and reduce risks. But there’s always the chance of failure.

It’s possible your team doesn’t want to suffer any blowback if something goes wrong, so they loop you in during the decision-making process to avoid total accountability. The fear of failure can hold back decisions and slow progress.

Product managers may need to normalize failing as a learning opportunity. Errors happen, but it’s more important that a decision was made instead of being stuck in analysis paralysis. You may need to foster psychological safety and celebrate lessons learned to change attitudes towards failing.

Key takeaways

No product manager wants to become the bottleneck of their team. It’s stressful to know that your team is waiting on you. Removing yourself as the bottleneck ensures that your team can work independently.

This level of change may require cultural support and deliberate delegation. Product managers must balance being involved without becoming the only decision-maker. This may involve company cultural shifts and establishing clear processes.

Putting in the effort to make these changes helps improve team morale and productivity. It also gives you back more time to work on strategic assignments.

Featured image source: IconScout

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