Seven teams, five time zones
Several years ago I got every PM's dream and nightmare at once. After a lot of turnover on our team, I went from product managing 2 teams in one time zone to overseeing 7 teams across 5 time zones, all within a single year.
Part of it was great. I finally had the end-to-end control I'd always wanted. I didn't have to work through gatekeepers with conflicting agendas or watch good projects die in committee, and I could finally execute on the bigger initiatives that had frustrated me for years.
It was also brutal. Each team needed constant support, and every day brought new fires. I was keeping things running, barely. We did no planning for the future and just survived each sprint. I now call this the "reactive leadership trap." Your success makes things worse, because more responsibility piles on and you have no way to handle it.
The breaking point came when I noticed I was making the same decisions over and over. Teams escalated similar issues every day, and I was the bottleneck for decisions that should have been automated or delegated months earlier.
So I did two things. I convinced my manager to let me build a team with additional PMs to help me out. And, more important, I started building systems that scaled strategic thinking, where before I'd only been scaling tactical execution.
It took a while. By the end, those 7 teams were running smoothly and innovating faster than we ever had.
A monthly braintrust
At a large company where I worked, the problem was related but came from the other direction. We had many small, empowered teams, each solving specific customer problems well. That was great for autonomy. It also left us stuck making small iterative improvements, with nobody taking on anything big.
Each team tuned its own metrics, and nobody coordinated the opportunities that needed several teams working in sync. Big initiatives were impossible because no single team owned them, and cross-functional collaboration was too ad hoc to hold a complex project together.
I worked with other PMs to set up a monthly braintrust meeting to discuss market trends, industry shifts, and competitive moves. We also used it to find the bigger projects that needed cross-functional coordination and push for them.
Within six months we had kicked off several multi-million dollar initiatives that no individual team could have conceived or executed alone.
What I'd do in your first 90 days
With my 7 teams, I was the bottleneck because every decision flowed through me. Across the larger organization, nobody could think strategically across teams because there was no structure for it. Working harder wouldn't have fixed either one. Both got better once there was a system that made strategic thinking the default.
Weeks 1-2: Measure where your time goes. Track your time for two full weeks and mark everything as reactive or strategic. Expect the split to look bad. In a 2022 Gartner Peer Community survey, 48% of product managers named balancing reactive and proactive work as a key challenge. Find the top 5 recurring issues that pull you into firefighting. I wish I'd done this earlier with my 7 teams. I would have seen much sooner that the same kinds of decisions were eating my whole calendar.
Weeks 3-6: Get yourself out of the recurring decisions. For each recurring problem, create a framework or process so the decision doesn't need you. Write clear criteria for the frequent decisions so they can be automated, and put decision-making authority at the right levels. The extra PMs helped me, but what finally freed me was giving teams the guardrails to make their own calls.
Weeks 7-12: Spend the reclaimed time across teams. Put the freed-up hours into scenario planning, strategic roadmap reviews, and above all the cross-functional relationships that bigger initiatives depend on. Our monthly braintrust didn't require anyone to work more hours. It gave us a place to think together about things no single team could see.
The hardest habit for me to break was being the hero. For most of that year with 7 teams, being the person every escalation came to felt like the job. It was also the reason the teams couldn't move without me.