Pyramid Power

When I first got into Product Management at a $60 million company, just two people were responsible for managing the entire product portfolio: an experienced Product Manager, and a new Product Specialist (me). Obviously, serving the needs of Engineering, Manufacturing, Sales, and Service was quite a challenge, and I learned a lot in a hurry.

So Many Calls, So Little Time

One of my early lessons was the importance of establishing a pyramid of support. There just weren’t enough hours in a day for me to personally answer all the inquiries coming at me, and I also needed to carve out time to work on proactive tasks, such as improving existing products and developing new ones.

I attacked the problem by investing time into training staff who were taking calls on the Tech Support Hotline. In addition to scheduling specific training sessions, I instituted and enforced a new policy: I’ll address any issue with my product that you can’t handle, but you have to stay on the line and hear how I did it, so that your team can handle similar issues without my help next time.

By helping Hotline Staff get more familiar with the products, I enabled them to directly answer many more of the questions coming at them, without them having to track me down for answers. That enabled them to resolve most issues more promptly, saving time for them and me, and increasing customer satisfaction. Of course, there were still plenty of calls for which I needed to be consulted, but the volume was much more manageable than it had been originally.

Extending the Concept

As the company grew, and we added staff to Product Management, I became more specialized in software and automation products. The Hotline also added staff and began to assign team members to cover specific product areas, but their increase in staff was unable to keep pace with the increase in tech support calls. They began to get overwhelmed, much as I had been before. I explained how I had gotten my situation under control, and encouraged them to train the next level of support staff—regional technical specialists—to a higher level of understanding of the products. Thus trained, the regional specialists were able to resolve most issues in the field, without having to escalate up to Tech Support. In turn, I got the regional specialists to apply the same model, and they were able to reduce calls from the field service engineers by an order of magnitude.

A similar issue arose in the Sales domain, and I handled it the same way: by first training Sales Support staff, and getting them to train regional Sales Specialists, who trained Account Managers in the field.

The result of these efforts was that I’d effectively built two Pyramids of Support:

It’s important to recognize that the different levels on these pyramids do not represent different levels of status or importance, but rather different degrees of specialization. At the top of each pyramid, the Product Specialist (or Product Manager) has deep knowledge of a relatively narrow range of products; at each successive level of the pyramid, the range of products covered increases, and the depth of knowledge of each product becomes necessarily shallower. The concept can be extended with additional levels; for example, the apex of the pyramid could have a project manager or software developer above the Product Specialist.

Manage Your Load By Keeping Escalation Under Control

To make Pyramid Power work, you must limit the escalation rate. If more than a few percent of the issues at any level get kicked up to the next, the volume at that next level becomes unmanageable, which drives more issues up to the next level, and ultimately up to the top of the pyramid. To keep the escalation rate low, you have to invest significant time into training, so plan for it. You also need to insist on working collaboratively on issues, so that learning is constant, rather than allowing people to pass off issues without participating in the resolution process.

Got a product with growing sales? Great! Get your pyramids in place, and keep the escalation rates low by ensuring that people are well-trained at each level. By getting your call load under control, you’ll be able to focus more of your attention on the future and less on frantically struggling to keep up with the present.

Copyright © 2016 Jim Schibler — All rights reserved

Pyramids photo courtesy of Yulia Mihayluta

#ProductSupport #ProductManagement #Management