From the Ask Tom mailbag –
Thumbnail from last Tuesday’s post Which Manager is Accountable?
There are three roles in play.
- Product Manager
- Marketing Manager
and
- Marketing Services
The question is, which, of the two managers listed, should be the manager of the Marketing Services role? There are four questions that must be answered before making this decision. So far, we’ve looked at three questions.
- What is the level of work in each role described?
- Which manager is in the best position to bring value to the decisions made and problems solved by the Marketing Services role?
- Which manager is accountable for the output (quantity, quality, within timeframe, using allocated resources) of the Marketing Services role?
Today, the last question.
- Is the work assigned to the Marketing Services role by the Product Manager full time or part time, and is the duration of that work forever, or in defined projects that start and stop?
If the work is only part time or the work is in defined projects that start and stop, then the relationship between the Product Manager and the Marketing Services role is a classic cross-functional (service getting) relationship.
If the work assigned by the Product Manager to the Marketing Services role is full time, then it might be more appropriate for the relationship to be a managerial relationship. The Marketing Manager would then likely be in a cross-functional (advisor) relationship to the Product Manager.
So, the question posed last Tuesday sounded simple, but there are a number of questions to consider when designing the managerial and cross-functional relationships in your company.