4 Roles & Responsibilities Workshops to Bring Clarity to Your Team

Note: Being a Product Person examples in this article are biased towards Product Teams however these techniques can be used for any roles 🙌

[originally published on my site antmurphy.me 👉 https://www.antmurphy.me/blog/2021/4/5/4-roles-and-responsibilities-workshops]

As part of my job, I’m fortunate enough to see and experience many different companies and teams. I regularly see Product Managers and teams face similar problems when it comes to navigating the boundaries between different roles.

Either it’s the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc where Product Managers suddenly find themselves confused.

Or it’s due to the messy nature of Product work and working in a team causing the lines between roles to blur (which is for good reason).

However beneficial these overlaps are for collaboration too much ambiguity can cause friction.

This is where doing some kind of Roles and Responsibility type activity can benefit.

It’s important to note that the goal of these activities are not to create definitive lines between roles or completely separate accountabilities etiher. Rather their aim should be to bring clarity and reduce friction. As you’ll see my go-to exercises embrace the overlap and blurring of role-boundaries.

I’m not actually a big fan of using the term ‘Roles and Responsibilities’ for this reason — perhaps a more adept term would be ‘Role Clarity’ exercises.

So, here’s 4 different ‘Role Clarity’ workshops that I regularly use to help bring clarity to Product Teams and other Product roles, like Product Managers vs Product Marketing Managers, etc.

1) Role Expectation Matrix

This one is definitely my go-to of the four.

The Role Expectation Matrix is as the name suggests. You create a 2x2 matrix with everyone's roles along the X and Y axis. The matrix is then designed to denote the expectations from one role to another.