Get answers from product management leaders
As you progress from PM to senior PM, competencies in these 3 areas should grow: Autonomy💪🏽, Scope 🌫️ and Leadership 🙋 . There are a few clear indications that someone is ready for the senior level, like increased scope, being a reliable partner and being results driven. Here are some less obvious ones: #1 You recommend initiatives based on your strategic evaluation, instead of waiting for them to be handed to you. You are influential in your field and feel confident putting forward these initiatives. #2 You leverage relationships across the org. You can drive results from partners outside of your immediate team. You are fully entrusted to tackle complex, multi-team problems with little necessary supervision. #3 You are seen as an available and trustworthy mentor and actively seek out opportunities to help others be their best. This is my favorite by far. What are the key stages that distinguish the different levels of PMs? I think a little bit of this depends on the problem space and company. In my mind, PMs are professional collaborators, strategic assassins and bring out the best in their peers. If you can look yourself in the mirror and say you’re doing these things at scale, well, I’d say you're on the right track.
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Vasanth Arunachalam
Meta Director, Technical Program Management | Formerly Microsoft • February 3
I’ll try to answer this first question along with the question of - “What metrics do technical product teams look at to define success, what do you find to be the most important?“ because they are similar. KPIs or Metrics are essentially a way to measure how successful your program or product is. There are a few traits any ‘metric’ should possess - they should be explainable, able to move/influence by the team, able to test for impact, without any bias and more importantly tied to the business goal you are trying to accomplish. The metrics you’d want to define and track will likely vary based on factors such as - what type of program/product you are building (Eg: External consumer focused Vs Internal scale focused)?, what stage in the lifecycle it is in (Eg: Prototype Vs Growth Vs Mature), what matters to you within that lifecycle phase (Eg: During growth - User Acquisition Vs Revenue). Generally speaking you’d want to have a set of business (Eg: User growth, Revenue) and technical metrics (Eg: Availability, Latency) to provide a more balanced view. And don’t be afraid of (re)defining your success measures as your products/programs evolve. One of the common pitfalls I see is technical product/program managers having a myopic focus on legacy metrics that has far outlived its purpose.
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How do you retain good talent, especially when PM roles are in such high demand across the industry?
Mckenzie Lock
Netflix Director of Product • August 4
I’ll skip the obvious things - pay well, set a vision, growing company, skill building, career pathing - and highlight some under-rated ones: * Hire well and have high talent density. Most people who choose a career in Product Management are motivated by self improvement - being around other talented PMs who they admire and who push their thinking is motivating. * Stay lean. This may seem counterintuitive - isn’t it good to have enough PMs? Honestly, no. If you hire well you want to give people room to grow and stretch. The worst thing you can do is to staff up too quickly, only to have frustrate your stars who are ready for more in a year (or worse yet, sudden shift in the business which requires you to scale back projects). Having too many PMs will also lead to more work being generated, you then need to resource. It’s far better to have PMs that have 20% too much to do than 20% too little. My rule of thumb is: everyone should be just uncomfortable enough with their scope that they drop a few things, but not so uncomfortable that they burn out. * Autonomy. People choose a career in product management because they want to make or be at the center of product decisions. Allowing them to do so is one of the most important things you can do to keep them motivated. As a people leader your jobs is to set goals, give context, guide, and identify blindspots. It’s not to operate the product for the PMs on your team. At Netflix we have a value, “Context over control” - leaders should focus first & foremost on setting context so others can make decisions vs. making decisions for them. * Actually care about them. When I think about the best managers I’ve had they have one intangible thing in common - I felt on a deep level that they actually, genuinely cared about me. This had a ripple effect on every part of my job because I felt supported, was calmer, and did better work. Caring looks like regularly thinking about the growth & success of another person without being asked to. It looks like advocating for or elevating behind the scenes, especially if they are in a disadvantaged position. It’s something that you can’t fake.
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Ultimately Product Management is about people. I do approach stakeholders differently, but it’s based on who they are, rather their role. Some stakeholders like to be consulted ahead of time, some prefer being briefed in bigger forums where they can gauge the reactions of others. Some like structured approaches, others react to the anecdotal evidence. Some may have specific trigger points on specific topics. Part of my role is to understand those differences and be able to navigate through them.
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Ravneet Uberoi
Uber B2B Products | Formerly Matterport, Box, McKinsey • August 31
One way I like to prioritize problems is based on the level of risk these will pose to the final solution. Which are the riskiest assumptions or riskiest bets that will affect the success of your product? (Risk can be defined crudely in terms of Low, Medium, High or in some cases you might have a model with some sensitivity analysis built in). Regardless, if you can quantify the risk (and thus impact) of the problem to the final solution, you have a clear blueprint of where to begin. A related method is to consider one-way vs two-way decisions. One way decisions are challenging or impossible to reverse - these have multiple downstream effects on the solution. Two way decisions can be reversed easily or adjusted over time once you have more data. I prefer to focus my time and energy on one way decisions first, as these will build the pillars of the product. If there is considerable time or effort spent by your team on a two way decision, you can make the argument to come back to this once you have more information or once all the one way decisions have been made.
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Richard Shum
Splunk Director of Product Management • January 10
When I prioritize or stack rank a list of items, I typically find it helpful to understand how each item can (a) deliver customer impact and (b) increase engineering happiness. Additionally, I also find it helpful to understand each item's level of (c) feasibility, (d) urgency and (e) effort. I weigh customer impact and engineering happiness at 50:50 -- after all, you need to make your customers happy while also keeping your team excited. Things that are less feasible are often pulled down the list. Whereas things that are higher urgency or less effort might be pulled up the list. At the end of the day, prioritization is an art.
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Mani Fazeli
Shopify Director of Product • December 14
Products must have some connection back to profitability, helping to either increase income or reduce costs. You otherwise wouldn't want to make an investment unless you're choosing to make a donation to the greater good (e.g. open source). It's OK if that connection is indirect, and in some cases, even difficult to measure. The latter requires leaders to agree that the approach to measurement is inline with the values and product principles of the company. It's easiest to use examples, and I'll go to the extreme to make my point. Every piece of software has a substrate and lattice work of capabilities upon which all the direct value driving features are built. Take your administrative dashboards, navigation UI, settings pages, notification systems, design systems, and authentication and security features. In the modern web and mobile landscape, it's dubious to think investment in any of these areas can be causal to growth and differentiation. But not meeting the Kano "threshold attribute" means that your product will feel janky and poor quality, which can lead to poor adoption or retention (and good luck with attribution there). Therefore, you need continuous investment just to meet the bar of expectation and that means time away from other KPI driving initiatives. There is no way to get there without the product principles that make space for this type of investment and improvement. Principles have to be paired with health metrics and trip wires that help diagnose the lack of investment (e.g. task completion time, dead clicks, clicks to navigate to common actions, duplicate code, account takeovers due to lack of 2FA, etc.) I learned the phrase "anything worth doing is worth doing well" from Tobias Lütke. At Shopify, we've created a culture where improvements in many of these examples I shared are celebrated and seen as table stakes. The same is true with things like API performance, UI latency, and UX consistency. All of this takes time and investment, and we uphold it as part of the "definition of done" for most projects. We were a much smaller company at Wave, but still made some investments in our substrate to maintain our perception as the easiest to use financial management software for small businesses. Let's circle back to products that are not directly monetized, but also not part of the substrate of software. The technique to measuring impact is about identifying the input metrics that ladder up to higher level KPIs that do ladder up to revenue. For example, the ability to do per-customer pricing is a feature expected of business-to-business (B2B) commerce systems, but not direct-to-consumer (D2C) ones. But no merchant adopts a B2B system for that single feature alone, and to some, that feature may not even matter. So while we measure win/loss reasons from the sales team along with churn reasons, we also measure usage rates of the feature and impact of per-customer pricing on average Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) per merchant. Put another way, we're looking at the relationship of leading metrics and the KPIs that ladder up to, thus telling us how we should invest further in per-customer pricing.
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Brandon Green
Buffer Staff Product Manager | Formerly Wayfair, Abstract, CustomMade, Sonicbids • August 16
Everywhere! Users themselves, colleagues, market research, competitors, randomly in the shower. Generally, I like to consider each idea seriously and work through a few questions to help decide if they are worth building: 1. What, fundamentally is the problem this idea is meant to solve? How worth it is solving that problem vs. others I know about? Does solving this problem create opportunities or risks in any form that I should think about? 2. Is this a problem I need to solve now, in 6 months, in 2 years, etc.? What's the risk of just putting it off? 3. Has this idea been validated in some form already? What's the "why" behind this being an idea? Is there a good hypothesis around it? 4. If it hasn't been tested yet, is there a low-cost iteration of this idea that my team could build and test quickly? What (rough swag) impact or learnings could a low-cost iteration yield? This feels like a lot of questions, but I've gotten good at answering them quickly with a few driving assumptions to help keep myself moving. This is really hard early in one's product career, and potentially when you're working in a very new job or problem space - but as you ramp up, you start to be able to answer them faster.
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Kie Watanabe
HubSpot Group Product Manager • October 13
In my previous answer, re: finding the right opportunities + making decisions - I mentioned four lenses (Customer, Business, Market, and Technology) as key components of coming up with ideas and making decisions. The best advice I have to offer is to be intentional about spending time developing your muscles in those areas. It can be as simple as picking a product or service in your day-to-day life and thinking through what inputs might have contributed to the experience you’re having as a user. Additionally, a lot of product strategy is about being able to identify the opportunity that will maximize impact. How will you hone in on the right problem and arrive at an excellent solution? I’ve found that strong problem-solving intrinsics and the ability to make effective decisions are very valuable. Here are two frameworks I’ve always found helpful: * McKinsey’s Seven Steps of Problem Solving - Helps abstract underlying problems/issues * Playing to Win - Strategy book by the former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley Lastly, communication is essential for being able to get buy-in and execute product strategy. Work on simple, effective communication.
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Boris Logvinsky
Vanta VP Product • December 12
Product management decisions should ideally be data-informed rather than purely data-driven. Being data-informed means leveraging data to guide and support decision-making, while also acknowledging the context, the subtleties of customer behavior, and the broader market trends that quantitative data might not fully capture. Data is invaluable for validating hypotheses, understanding user behavior, and measuring performance against goals. However, it's equally important to recognize the limitations of data and the potential for it to lead to suboptimal decisions if relied upon in isolation. Product Managers should indeed lead with an informed intuition—a blend of experience, understanding of the customer, and strategic vision. This intuition is then refined and validated through the use of data. By using data to back up assumptions, Product Managers can challenge their biases and ensure that their strategic direction is grounded in reality. Ultimately, the most successful Product Managers are those who can adeptly interpret data, understand its implications, and also know when to question its suggestions. They balance the art of intuition with the science of data, using each to enhance the other. This holistic approach allows for innovation and creativity, driving product decisions that resonate with customers and succeed in the market.
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