INSPIRED, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 19The Delivery Manager Role

In growth‐stage and enterprise companies, many product managers complain that they have to spend far too much of their time doing project management activities. As a result, they have almost no time to address their primary product responsibility: ensuring that the engineers have a product worth building.

Delivery managers are a special type of project manager whose mission is all about removing obstacles—also known as impediments—for the team. Sometimes, these obstacles involve other product teams, and sometimes they involve non‐product functions. In a single day, they might track down someone in marketing and press them for a decision or an approval, coordinate with the delivery manager on another team about prioritizing a key dependency, persuade a product designer to create some visual assets for one of the front‐end developers, and deal with a dozen other similar roadblocks.

These delivery managers are typically also the Scrum Masters for the team (if they have that role). They are all about helping the team to get stuff live faster, not by cracking the whip but by removing obstacles that get in the way.

In growth‐stage and enterprise companies, many product managers complain that they have to spend far too much of their time doing project management activities.

These people might have the title project manager—or sometimes program manager—but if that's the case, then we need to make sure these people have defined the job like I did ...