Get the Coffee

A Lesson I Never Forgot

Early in my career, a manager I deeply admired gave me two pieces of advice that have stuck with me ever since.

"If your team needs coffee, you get the coffee."

"If your team is out eating, you pick up the bill."

Simple. Almost too simple. But what he was really saying was: your job is to serve the people doing the work, not just the people receiving it. A team that feels cared for performs differently than one that doesn't. And as a PM, that's on you.

The IC Who Still Has to Show Up

I don't manage anyone. I'm an individual contributor. On paper, I could draw a clean line between myself and the engineers, designers, and managers I partner with. We have our swim lanes. I do my job, they do theirs.

But I've never believed that's the right way to operate.

A team is not a collection of individuals executing tasks in parallel. It's a system. And like any system, the quality of the output depends on how well the parts work together. When the team is stressed, siloed, or feeling unseen, it shows up in the work. Bugs get missed. Decisions get deferred. The thing you build for customers suffers because the people building it aren't at their best.

That's not a people problem. That's a product problem. And it's one a PM can actually do something about.

The Telephone Game

When I was at Adobe working on Premiere Rush, the team hit a rough stretch. The app was new and needed a significant amount of rewriting and fixing. The backlog was heavy, the pressure was real, and you could feel the team starting to fray. People weren't gelling. Energy was low.

I knew that if we didn't address it, the stress would bleed into our work and ultimately into the experience we were shipping to customers.

So I organized an onsite.

We played a version of telephone: the starting person described what they wanted, the next person drew it based on that description, and then the cycle repeated until it came back around to me. The results were genuinely hilarious. But underneath the laughs, something useful surfaced: the gaps. What one person said and what another person heard were often miles apart.

It was a game, but it was also a mirror. After that day, we came back to work with a clearer shared language and a better sense of how to communicate with each other. The efficiency followed.

The Dinner

More recently, at VSCO, I found myself in a similar situation. My team was heads down marching toward a major release. You could feel the stress from across the room. Everyone was grinding, and everyone knew it.

I wanted to do something small but meaningful. I planned a team dinner.

I knew my teammates well enough to know what they liked. I arranged the ride. I picked a place I thought everyone would enjoy. A few of them asked if I was sure I wanted to handle all of it. I always am. My job is to make sure you're all taken care of.

When we got there and the drinks arrived, I took a moment to go around the table and thank each person individually: for the sacrifices they had made, for the favors they had pulled, for the grace they had shown when I dropped last minute changes in their laps.

It seemed small in the moment. But those acts of acknowledgment are what turn a group of professionals into a team that actually trusts each other. A team that feels confident enough to push back. To challenge ideas. To show up when it counts, not because they have to, but because they want to.

And that team, in turn, builds better things for customers.

The Bill Is Part of the Job

PM is often framed as a role about prioritization, roadmaps, and strategy. Those things matter. But the part that doesn't make it onto most job descriptions is the service layer underneath all of it.

Get the coffee. Pick up the tab. Organize the onsite nobody else is going to organize. Say thank you in a way that's specific enough to actually mean something.

It doesn't show up in a metrics review. But it shows up in everything else.