[[Manager sync]] ### Compensation trend - March 2026 - TBD - Base increased by % + % bonus - % of base in LTI - March 2025 - Base increased by 4% +15% bonus - 20% of base in LTI - March 2024 - Base increased by 5.5% +15% bonus - 20% of base in LTI - March 2023 - Base increased by 4.5% +15% bonus - 20% of base in LTI - March 2022 - Base increased by 3% +15% bonus - 10% of base in LTI - March 2021 - Base increased by 3.9% +15% bonus - 20% of base in LTI - March 2020 - Base increased by 0% +8% bonus - 20% of base in LTI ### Feedback from PMs post-reorg - 2024-07-22 - No clear roadmap after August, all major programs are getting descoped. - Not clear if the backend product management teams will be relevant after NDA is implemented in 1-2 years - Teams are anxious about what will happen next, whether there'll be layoffs in our team, team reduction, work reduction - Very less transparency from leadership. With Sarika, Sai not being there, we are merging with bigger team, so unsure if we have any clear support from leadership, don't know what to expect going forward ### Feedback on PMs Overall, got basic feedback from PMs. Did not get feedback on numbers, accuracy of data to be shown. Expectation is to run the show myself. No one is asking to coordinate how we will handle the 30-min conversation. - No feedback from Shivani on Growth board. ##### Sriram May 3 PM sync meeting Had connectivity issues in the beginning of the call, but seemed like he could hear us properly after 5 min, he didn't drop and join back after that. Still he did not unmute himself and attempt to talk. At 30 minute mark, he promptly left the call without saying anything. That shows bit of a disregard for whatever we were discussing. Sriram can always say that I wasn't able to hear anything on the call. Share this feedback with Surendra. May 4 multi ship meeting Accepted the invite, but didn't join. Had to sync later with him separately. ##### Shivani - May 26 - Increase accountability - wanted to take up more workstreams and learn about discovery - Contact svc confluence page - Shared about DCQO vision doc - Jul 21 - 2 different inputs - one from Shivani, one from Saurabh - Losing bond with my team, so I need to back off and come to Shivani for any new requirement - PM's need to own acceptance criteria - ##### Nilotpal **Jul 20** - Grooming - more often we discuss solutioning - Sprint planning call - use the time to discuss requirements - In certain aspects, I feel we limit ourselves only to the requirements, we don't tend to get more involved into other aspects like solutioning... you tend to get into solutioning discussions. Because of that we sometimes couldn't conclude the solution. - Example - GOP arch call - online team looking for passing attribute downstream, parallel discussion happening on further set of attributes, that led to inconsistent design Oct 31 - EndUser contact perf impact observed too late, causing launch to get delayed - Perf schedule is not followed due to change of priorities - Perf sign off 2 weeks before actual release date, so that we can do analysis and get perf sign off before actual prod launch ##### Karthi **Jul 25** - Documentation helps clear things a lot, - Roadmap and epics can be linked in the documentation - RTM - requirement traceability matrix - started 2-3 years ago, but starts with requirements (acceptance criteria) and test cases ##### Manpreet ##### Friyana LargeTransaction - Friyana led the discussions with DSA that are supposed to be led by product line lead. - I am not clear on where to draw the line for what I should lead vs what Friyana should lead. Plus, what are the responsibilities of PLM when onboarding clients on to existing DCQO capabilities? - Need to define success criteria better as an immediate ask. ### Performance feedback [[2022 DCQO feedback]] [[End of FY21 feedback]] [[End of FY22 feedback]] [[End of FY23 feedback]] [[End of FY24 feedback]] [[End of FY25 feedback]] [[FY24 priorities]] [[Praveen, Surendra, Thameem Apr 3 session]] ### Feedback about all hands **Suggestion to improve CP All Hands:** It would be great to have product managers successes acknowledged. I have not seen leaders appreciating product-thinking, or highlighting case-study of recent success of how PMs are using product principles to help prioritize our roadmap or build product vision or strategy for respective product lines. **Improvement for CP:** As a senior product manager, I see that PMs are responsible for managing workstreams and outcomes. I feel the workstreams are prioritized outside of PM role, and solution trade-offs are often discussed with architects first and then PMs get looped in for formality. As a senior PM with advanced business background, this gives me a feeling that the value add is substantially lower from PMs in CP. PMs are supposed to build business proposals targeting key business metrics, bring trade-offs and present to leaders for roadmap alignment. I feel CP leaders need better definition of PM role and responsibilities to bring more ownership of goals, metrics and strategies to PMs to manage trade-off decisions instead of looping PMs just as FYI in any new workstream. Today, PMs are acting as project managers to a large extent, and are not expected to build product vision/strategy beyond the next 2-sprint horizon. Product managers do not have any avenue of presenting thought leadership with leaders. On the other hand, architects and engineers are always given a voice and support by leaders. This creates an environment where there is minimal incentive for PMs to outperform and grow their "product mindset". As commerce platform is a product-model operating organization, it needs to evolve the role of PMs to bring long term strategic value to the table along with necessary leader support that it is lacking today. I am happy to help in this regard too as I have launched products to market, gotten customer feedback, worked on NPS/CSAT and business metrics like URM. ##### Dell Digital All Hands Open unanswered questions - How are we measuring success for co-pilot? - We operate in product model where product managers (PMs) work on understanding capability requirements based on "program asks". DD PMs are not brought in building program vision and experience strategy. PMs don't have product vision as a key responsibility expectation. What steps we are taking to bring us to mature product model where product teams have freedom to explore key problems to solve and prioritize them considering company priorities (not program release asks) and ROI estimates using business and product metrics as KPIs? We see these approaches used everywhere in the big tech but not in DD. - With so many metrics at 100% every quarter, that's a clear sign that our metrics need to change on priority. What is our point of view on our metrics and will there be any feedback from product linesto improve them? - With commerce platform moved to domain level, what ways we can use this change to benefit platform-first mindset? ### Tell Dell feedback ##### FY25 Rated 2 out of 10. Processes and duplication of roles and responsibilities make us go slow. Dell has not yet evolved to push teams enough to invest in AI innovations. Dell needs to make efforts in improving leadership focus on building AI products, innovating existing products with AI and infuse AI into processes to speed things up. We don't need so many product owners to manage Jira and similarly, we don't need so many types of marketing/experience/program managers in our company to 'gather requirements' and 'pass requirements' from one team to another. Few strong product managers who know their domain are sufficient to figure out 'what' and 'why' build a new idea or proposal. Similarly, few strong architects are sufficient to build 'how' for a new solution. We don't need so much complexity in our innovation cycles. VPs and senior leadership must have ruthless focus on innovation and cost reduction. We have too much fat in the company and senior leadership is not doing enough due diligence. Product managers need a seat on the table to negotiate priorities. Dell's top-down approach leaves no space for deliberations by the time the requirements come to product teams. Plus, several duplicate roles exist who act as messengers. For example, program manager, project manager, cross-product lead, experience manager, product manager, product line manager. These processes are from pre-technology era when computers did not exist. They make us slow and create fat in the company. SVP has no concerns on business impact of capabilities delivered in last 2-4 quarters. Failure and learning are is not celebrated ever. Expectation from all leaders is to deliver what sales heads are asking and act as a feature factory without calling it that way. In most occasions, there is no long term vision to evolve our products in iterative manner (in Dell Digital). Product managers have no authority to say 'no' as a product manager because most times, a business leader has been given commitment without assessing how that fits into overall priorities. In my BU, funds are allocated based on high-level sizing of capabilities to be delivered. Only some of the capabilities are approved by management each year. This incentivizes teams to falsely bump up their teams' expected work (size) to get more funds so that they can grow/retain headcount. Throughout the year, there is also effort to justify that we are 'burning the allocated funds' the right way (aka meeting digital fuel utilization expectation by program capability). This leads to unethical practices at multiple levels and adds additional need of resources to 'manage digital fuel' to meet digital fuel utilization expectations, irrespective of if there is real work happening on that capability. This unethical practice must stop. We must free up resources to do something more productive. I rather suggest that the teams are given key metrics to improve each year and key capabilities to deliver each year and let the teams manage how they deliver on these goals. If teams don't deliver, there needs to be accountability at all levels so that there is focus and pressure to perform. Q: Why Dell is behind in its AI strategy? A: Our strategy is to make AI simple and to bring AI to the data. However, we have not yet figured out our differentiation and unique value add to the AI ecosystem. Dell does not have a flagship software platform that can bring AI to the data. Dell is simply relying on integrating with other industry platforms who are building LLMs and making APIs to connect to ingest customer data. Rather, as a technology assembler, if Dell wants to bring AI to the data, Dell must lead and create industry standard platform that can scale to AI needs, that can be integrated with customer data of various sizes, that can understand the type of problems AI can solve for a given customer data and suggest integrations from ecosystem of available AI models (LLMs, inference models, etc.). This will be a killer platform innovation Dell can bring which can work most efficiently on Dell's hardware products.