Get answers from product management leaders
Ajay Waghray
Udemy Director of Product Management, Consumer Marketplace • August 26
We have a great podcast episode about this! To summarize, it’s less about explicit processes and more about tools in the toolbelt. It’s all about right tool, right job. The tools that come to mind for incorporating customer feedback are: 1. User research. This typically involves a full user research team, crafted questions and a lab that users visit to provide feedback on designs, prototypes, live product, whatever is being used for testing. But sometimes it’s something you do on your own with the help of a user researcher. 2. Surveys. This usually involves working with someone that specializes in surveys, product marketing or something you do yourself (very carefully!) to survey customers about what things they like and don’t like about new or current product features. You can also ask about how likely they are to promote the product or feature to their friends, prices they’re willing to pay for products, etc. 3. Customer Support Feedback. This is what customers tell your customer support team if you have one. A great way to collect this is to sit with your customer support team and either field calls yourself or listen in while others are fielding calls. 4. Written Feedback. Can come from a feedback widget on a website or app, app store reviews, emails to the CEO, etc. This tends to be lower fidelity but can be really useful when troubleshooting or looking for lots of feedback volume. 5. Quantitative Data. This is not something people usually think of when it comes to customer feedback! But Quantitative data is really just a data representation of customer feedback. It shows what customers are actually doing. And, when analyzed properly, can reflect what you see in the more qualitative methods above. There are more, but these tend to be the most common ones. Depending on what the need is for a product or feature you’re working on, you might want to use different tools for different purposes and project phases. For example, if you’re trying to redesign a product page for the whole website, it’s worth taking your time. It would make sense to start looking at quantitative data and written feedback early in the process. Then, once you have prototypes to test, user research can play a bigger role. But maybe you have some bigger questions to answer before then, like what kinds of elements do users want to see on these pages? Then engaging user research to help figure that out can be a big help since it’s less structured and more complex. And of course sometimes you need something fast to ship in the next few days. Written feedback, quick surveys and customer support feedback can be really helpful. Each of these tools have some bias baked in as well. For example, written feedback is more biased to more engaged, more passionate users. So it’s good to keep in mind what those biases are and figure out how best to use those tools depending. Great question!
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Deepti Srivastava
Head of Product, VP • December 14
At a high level, a 0 --1 product offers a completely new solution or functionality to a user problem, often creating a new market category or sub-category within an existing large market. The top thing in developing a 0--1 product is validating that there is a real user need in the market that will be served/solved by this new product, and, that the need is big enough to build a viable business around it. * Identifying/defining the top user persona for the product – their motivations, goals, tooling needs, and pain points with existing solutions, if any * Defining the buyer persona (if different from the user) – motivations, incentives, goals for themselves and their teams, and pain points with existing solutions, if any * Understanding the market – what existing market segment or category would the new product fit in, the competitors, incumbents, market sizing and basic TAM (total addressable market) analysis to validate there is a big enough market (or potential market) to build a business * If creating a new market category with the product, it is still important to understand what is the closest market segment to the new category you want to create. It helps gauge the TAM for business development purposes as well as the closest competitors to the new product.
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Ravneet Uberoi
Uber B2B Products | Formerly Matterport, Box, McKinsey • August 31
Before investing in engineering resources you want to build conviction around the following: 1. Is there a market need? Are you fulfilling a true gap in the market? 2. Do you have a differentiated vision to deliver on this need? 3. Is there willingness to pay? 4. Does the business model make sense such that you see a path to ROI for the business? 5. Is there a clear route to market (you know how to sell / acquire customers)? 6. Does your business have (or plan to have) the capabilities to deliver on this product (ex operational, technical or other expertise) such that it is strategic to expand in this direction? Overall you want to be able to articulate what the investment unlocks for the company and how.
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Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Strategy and Planning • November 10
Best product management candidates craft compelling, concise and inspirational narratives when they interview. They demonstrate clarity of thinking, knowing both the facts and the "why" behind their answers, and genuine curiosity. I always walk out of an interview with a great product manager feeling like I have learned something valuable, and inspired. I spoke to the skills I've seen among successful product managers in another answer to the AMA, but if you are looking to impress hiring managers specifically, I recommend practicing storytelling and becoming a great conversationalist in addition to the core skills you need to the job. The good news is that your conversational and story telling skills get better the more you practice - and you are not limited to interviews only. Any sort of verbal presentation mastery - Toastmasters, Improv and comedy, acting classes etc. will help you become a master storyteller.
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Start with a Total addressable market (TAM) * share of TAM you can get in next 3-5 years *confidence level *Revenue per user per year * 3-5 years. In the RICE framework, you would divide TAM * Share of TAM (influence) * Confience/ Effort to then help prioritize. (Desc) Calculating Share of TAM you can get in next 3-5 years is a art more than science. Do a SWOT analysis for yourself, incumbents in the market, if any and emerging players. Also keep in mind that market/users may not always be ready to adopt. So factor in the barrier to adoption/switching costs. Confidence level is based on your ablity to execute and deliver results- ship great products, great customer support, sales channels, marketing (even if lo-budget). Do you have the right team to get this done? Is the technology there yet? Are there high risk dependencies?
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Vasanth Arunachalam
Meta Director, Technical Program Management | Formerly Microsoft • February 4
This response also applies to one of the other questions asked here - "What qualities stand out in some of the best TPMs you know?" I strongly believe that you can be a successful technical product manager regardless of your background, as long as you have the passion and growth mindset. It is not rocket science (for that matter, look at Elon Musk for rocket science). So I’ll focus on some of the desirable soft skills that makes one a successful technical product manager - * Able to technically grok how things work, very fast * Balanced (between Strategic and Technical thinking) & Objective * Data driven * Extreme ownership * Being thorough * Strong communication * High EQ & Empathy * Dealing with ambiguity and chaos * Growth mindset I’m intentionally not focusing on domain skills, because they can learnt. A good technical product manager should be able to take up any problem and build something to solve for it. Along the way they’ll likely gain the domain skills required to meet that goal (Eg: ML/AI, Integrity/Risk, Distributed systems, Autonomous vehicles, Game theory, Ad Auctions etc). I personally don’t fret over incrementally building my career around a set of ‘domain skills’. I’ve always looked at my career as a mosaic, I’ve done a variety of roles as a technical product person and gained a wide range of experiences. What matters is 3 things: 1) Do you find your work to be meaningful? 2) Are you learning something in that process? 3) Are you having fun?
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Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product Management • February 9
Good framing is essential for effective prioritization, especially in cases where departments have different perspectives on what to prioritize. In many companies, including my own, the sales team is an important stakeholder in the product roadmap. When working with other departments or teams, you want to ensure that there’s a common language in which to communicate. For example, are both departments aligned on the prioritization of high level business goals? Is there a clear ownership model? Once there's tentative alignment on these topics, it's much easier to have an objective discussion about the opportunities to influence a goal. At Braze, feedback and observations from Sales and Sales leadership is one of the many inputs that we incorporate into forming a perspective on the best way to achieve high level business objectives.
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Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations • March 23
My “north star” vision for the Product Operations team is to “unlock Oscar’s ability to ship more product, better and faster.” While this is a pretty broad statement, I want to highlight a few elements. 1. Product Operations is not a function to make the life of a Product Manager better or easier. We do not “support” Product Managers. Our focus is unlocking Oscar’s capacity to ship software. In our context, this means that Product Ops focuses on the goals and delivery of our engineering pods. If there are opportunities to increase efficiency of engineering or design, those are on the table. 2. Product Operations adds value in a few different ways. Here are a few examples: * Ship more product - We can maximize the time each member of the pod is spending at their “highest and best use.” This may mean that Product Ops takes on execution oriented work while we advocate for automation or create an operational process. * Ship product better - We can improve product quality by ensuring that we follow necessary testing protocols, or ensure downstream teams are fully enabled before product releases. * Ship product faster - We can create efficiencies by building repeatable processes and playbooks, both for ourselves and for other stakeholders. In real life, this might manifest as a Product Ops Manager taking on the product launch process for a particular pod, which frees up capacity from the Product Manager and the Tech Lead (ship more product). Product Ops can ensure that their operational counterparts have visibility into the feature work and are communicated about launches in a timely manner (ship products better). Product Ops then codifies this improvement by creating a product launch checklist for themselves and other feature teams, thus avoiding “recreating the wheel” for each team (ship products faster).
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Zeeshan Qamruddin
Cloudflare Sr. Director of Product | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb • April 13
Today, our org structure follows the ethos of "Small, autonomous teams". In this structure, we generally have a PM paired with a Technical Lead (Eng), somewhere between 3 - 5 Engineers, and a Business Systems Analyst to focus on operational and analytical tasks. Some teams have a Design/UX representative as well, where applicable. Hierarchically, we have these teams organized into Pillars, with a shared broader mission/remit. Pillars are led by a triad, with a Senior PM, Product Lead, or Group Product Manager aligned with an Engineering Lead (above TL) and a BSA Lead or Design Lead where relevant. Finally, those Pillars roll up into Groups, where the Director level can provide guidance to the respective teams. The main thing to note about these structures, though, is that they take time to mature; where we are today is a step function change from where we were last year. Eventually, I do hope to land in the formation outlined above, but we will continue to transform as individuals grow in their roles or are brought on board over time.
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Richard Shum
Splunk Director of Product Management • January 11
Ideas can come from many places. They include customer feedback calls, customer troubleshooting sessions, customer submitted ideas (at Splunk, we have an idea submission portal called ideas.splunk.com), conferences (at Splunk, we host .conf where we have the opportunity to meet many customers in person), ideas from your engineering team (they generate some of the best ideas), and ideas you dream up yourself. Once there’s a list of ideas, we typically do a full re-prioritization at annual planning. Throughout the year, we also slot in new ideas and do minor re-prioritization as things change.
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