in my mind the important things for a vertical manager to do are:

1. maintain high editorial standards across the pages in their vertical.
2. support and motivate their page managers to create the high-quality pages possible.
3. build out a vertical to be as complete and delightful to our users as possible. for example, if you were to go to the gadget category and there was no page for a three of the top 10 popular phones that would be a bad experience that a vertical manager could easily solve by assigning those three phones in Tasks (or emailing their best page manager directly!).
4. checking in with page managers who might have forgotten about a certain page, and as a result it is not as up to date as possible.
5. training and recruiting new page managers for their vertical
6. marketing their vertical via social channels, blogs, contests, social media, etc.
7. maximize the revenue potential of the vertical in order to invest in quality.

as you will note above, my main focus of the vertical manager is increasing quality, comprehensiveness and recruiting.

we already have a lot of good page managers, but they don't really have a "coach" telling them what to do next. that's what the vertical manager should really be doing.... coaching the page managers on how to take things to the next level.
Permalink | Report

Can't really compete with the bosses answer there, but I'd like to add that @lon mentioned in the tutorial that Vertical Managers will essentially be doing people management the way staff has been doing so far.

This means your Vertical Manager should be your point of contact for any problems, questions or concerns you have during the building and promoting stages of your Mahalo Page.

To answer your next question, what I would hope for is that all Vertical Managers are dedicated full time Mahaloians (and I hope their earning can reflect that) - And they should be available throughout the day. One of the main goals will likely to be take a big load off the in-house staff, this way they can work on managing the vertical managers and not the individual page managers. Essentially Mahalo is wedging in a brand new type of Mahaloian between staff and users.

What is not an official VM job but one I would like to see is Vertical Managers creating tasks for Page Managers to work on. In turn, I would like to see the Vertical Managers being in charge of QCing the Tasks they assigned - and getting that QC pay as well. The current system is really just a free-for-all when it comes to QCing - I think putting VMs in charge of their Verticals tasks, it would be a great way to streamline the process and it would be very clear to users who to turn turn to if they encounter a problem during the task process. Along those lines I would hope it would be easy for Vertical Managers to sort through only their task list, and not have to rummage through all tasks.
Permalink | Report

QC
I envision vertical managers becoming the QC people for their categories. I think vertial managers should be the only QC people for their categories, though, and do away with the QC team. The requirements of the different categories are different, and a vertical manager is going to know his or her category better than anyone else. This is a lot of work, so of course the vertical manager should get the QC tip for each task they QC.

Related Mahalo Page links
I also envision the vertical managers having primary responsibility for determining which Related Mahalo Page links should be on each page in their category.

Advertising
I of course want the vertical managers to advertise their categories for an hour every day. ;) Not this last tutorial, but the one before, Lon said the vertical managers would have primary advertising responsibility.
Permalink | Report

I would also like the vertical managers to see if individual page managers have ideas for building out and marketing sub categories. I have ideas for each of the subcategories I'm working on, but Mahalo only sees my ideas one or two topics at a time. I do have a bigger picture view and I'm willing to bet that a few other folks do to.

I would also like them to learn from page managers what type of marketing efforts have proven most successful for their pages. Twenty percent of methods tested provide 80% of the payoff for a certain sub-category, focus on the 20% for the bulk of related pages.

Look for opportunities to pull groups of pages together with a leading topic page. Reduces how many pages there are to market as long as the related pages links are closely coupled to the page topic.

Help with redirects and topic name cleanups. Lots of duplicates and nonsense pages need to be cleaned up.
Permalink | Report