Who is still here
The third product manager in a year
A role that turns over repeatedly costs more than the sum of the departures, because each arrival restarts a relationship that never gets past its beginning.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerTwo of this person's five working pairs
- 02The senior engineerOn the team from the first day
- 03The second engineer
- 04The product managerThe third person in this role in fourteen months
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
When the manager is the only route between people, the group can find out more on the website and use project-level patterns to identify where direct collaboration would remove delay.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by The Management Center.
The two people who have been here for all of it, and the role that has changed hands twice
The team's manager
14 on the team61 in the companyHas worked with all three
The senior engineer
14 on the team38 in the companyHas worked with all three and formed a pair with none
The product manager
3 on the team3 in the companyThe third person in this role in fourteen months
three people · median 14 months on this team · the longest-standing has 14 months · two of them have been on it for less than half the time they have been in the company
Three of the eight people counted on this site, chosen because the distance between the first two rows and the third is the subject of this note.
Three months on the team, three months in the company, and the third person to hold this role since the team was made. The two longest- serving members have each worked with all three of their predecessors in the sense of attending the same meetings. Neither has a working pair with any of them.
A role that turns over at this rate produces a specific pathology, and it is not the one people expect. It is not that the work suffers from inexperience. It is that the relationships never get past their first phase.
The shape of a repeatedly-restarted pair
- The first month of any working relationship is spent establishing the basics: what the other person means by things, what they will and will not decide, how much detail they want, what they already know.
- The second and third months are the productive part. Both people now know how the other works, the preamble has gone, and the exchanges get shorter and more useful.
A role that changes hands every four or five months never reaches the second phase with anybody. The team has had three people in it, has spent three first months, and has had no second months at all.
From the team's side this feels like the role itself being ineffective, and the conclusion drawn is usually about the individuals. Three people in a row who did not quite work out is a strong signal and it is pointing at the turnover rather than at any of them.
What the incoming person inherits
Not the relationships, which cannot be inherited, and not the context, which was mostly in the previous person's head.
What they do inherit is the team's accumulated response to the previous two: a set of habits built around the role being temporary. Nobody invests in explaining things, because the explanation will have to be repeated. Nobody routes decisions through the role, because the role has twice been unavailable at the critical moment. The engineers have quietly developed a way of working that does not depend on it.
That adaptation is sensible and it is self-reinforcing. The third person arrives into a team that has learned to work around their job, and their first task is to undo an arrangement that has twice been proved necessary.
What it costs elsewhere
The pairs the role should have are the ones that bridge the team's seams. A product manager's natural pairs are with the people building, the people testing and the people measuring — which is to say, with several different clusters at once.
A role that reliably has no pairs is therefore not one isolated person. It is a missing bridge, and the clusters it should connect stay separate. On this team that shows up as the designer, the analyst and the engineers having almost nothing between them, which looks like a collaboration problem among those three and is a vacancy problem in a fourth role.
What to do, from each side
If you are the third person: do not try to rebuild the role. Build one pair, properly, in the first six weeks, with whoever your work most depends on. One real working relationship — something made together with a deadline — gets you further than three months of meetings, and it survives the team's scepticism because it is evidence rather than assurance.
If you are on the team: the adaptation you built is now a cost. The cheapest thing you can do is give the new person one piece of work that needs both of you, early, before the habit of working around the role hardens for a third time.
If you are the manager: this is the situation where deliberate pairing is worth more than anything else on offer. The role has no pairs by construction, and no amount of introduction will produce one. Assign a small joint task in the first fortnight and another in the second month.
Why the fourth one arrives into a worse position
Each cycle leaves a residue, and the residue accumulates.
After the first departure the team is patient. After the second it is pragmatic: it builds a way of working that routes around the role. After the third, that workaround is simply how the team operates, and it is nobody's decision any more — it is the thing the engineers, the designer and the analyst all learned independently.
So the fourth arrival meets a team that has three times as much evidence as the first one did that the role is temporary, and the politeness it is met with is thinner each time. The individuals are not being unfair. They are responding sensibly to a pattern, which is why the pattern has to be broken from above rather than apologised for.
And the harder question
Three people in fourteen months is not usually a recruitment problem. It is worth asking what about the role is making it unsurvivable — scope, authority, the gap between what it is asked to do and what it is allowed to decide — because a fourth person will encounter the same thing, and the team will have spent another four months in its first month.