I will share first two steps that I follow. Step 1: Is this problem worth solving? 1.1 Problem definition and user segmentation * B2B product: A business customer must have a genuine painpoint that they are willing to pay for. Some problems are not big enough problems, hence not high priorirty for the business users, these are not worth pursuing. Fine tune the problems till they hit * B>B>C: The business user/stakeholder may have rightly identified a problem but may not have the best ideas in terms of what solutions can work. Validate the problem is real with user research. * B2C: Similar to B>B>C, some segment of users have a need. Identify who they are and what the real problems are. 1.2 Is the Problem TAM big enough Step 2: Why us? Why now? 2.1 Do competitive studies 2.2 SWOT analysis 2.3 Are you best positioned to build this and build now?

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.

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.

A super common question! Traditionally the term "product manager" can often mean different things depending on the size of the company, the product's stage, and sometimes the overall market segment. I often times bucket them into these core groups: 1. Technical Product Managers (TPM): These PMs work closely with engineering teams on more technical products, thinks like API driven products where the end "customer" is technical in nature. For these roles, you will need a deeper level of technical expertise and the ability to understand the technical aspects of your customers needs. 2. B2C (Business to Consumer) Product Managers: In a consumer-facing environment—like mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, media consumption products — I find that PMs often emphasize UX and product design (along with core PM responsibilities). One of the key areas that this group focuses on is leveraging a typically broader/larger customer base to do things like A/B testing, and quick iteration on product designs to validate assumptions and feature value. 3. B2B (Business to Business) Enterprise Product Managers: These enterprise PMs focus on delivering products that solve businesses' complex problems. I spent a lot of my career here and this type of PM spends a lot of time on sales enablement, strategic account engagement, and roadmap management. Given that most B2B solutions have a longer sales cycle, their relationship with sales is key to success. Depending on the size of the organization, this type of PM also focuses a lot on the financial side of the product. 4. Infrastructure Product Managers: These PMs (sometimes internally facing only) focus on building components that other teams and products rely on, oftentimes within an organization. For them, the GTM isn't as relevant but they need to understand and balance things like scale, interoperability, and business alignment. Figuring Out Your Best Fit: 1. What are your Interests: Consider things like Do you enjoy getting into the weeds on technical discussions? Do you more get energized by user research and design? Do you geek out over analytical data and love looking at usage metrics to drive feature development? Each type of role has a different focus, so find the things that excite you. 2. Consider the Environment Do you want to reach a huge market of customers and iterate on minor feature developments and enhancements? Or do you want to work closely with larger business customers and develop a deeper understanding of their problems and how your product can evolve to meet those specific needs? No right or wrong answer, just what gets you pumped up each day. Remember, it’s about aligning your career desires, your core strengths, and the types of challenges that get you fired up to solve each day. We are problem solvers, so what types of problems do you love solving and how do you like solving them? Many PMs start in one area and end up in another. All the roles share a common framework of ensuring we are delivering business value for our organization and delighting our customers with innovative and useful solutions to problems they either have or don't even realize they have yet.

FIRST OFF, TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND REMEMBER, CRUSHING THOSE OKRS IS GOING TO TAKE TIME AND EFFORT. NEXT, SET CLEAR GOALS FOR EACH MILESTONE AND BUILD A PLAN AROUND IT. JUST LIKE YOU WOULD WHEN DEFINING A PROJECT, IDENTIFY SUCCESS METRICS FOR YOURSELF AND CREATE A PLAN. HERE’S AN EXAMPLE: First 30 days: Learning and Absorbing * Establish good working relationships with stakeholders: the key to being effective is having open lines of communication with your coworkers. Take the time to get to know them and learn from their experience. * Immerse yourself in data: learn where to find pertinent information, which dashboard to follow and how to query data on your own (or work with a data scientist). * Familiarize yourself with your product’s users, their needs, pain points and Jobs to be Done (JTBD). * Spend time doing competitive analysis to better understand the product landscape. * Integrate into the team’s current work and process and identify ways in which you could be helpful. 30-60: Ownership and Leadership * Assume responsibility for a project: work with your team to define the project’s scope and add requirements. * Define success metrics for the project and work with your engineers and data scientists to ensure impact can be measured and tracked. * Identify cross-functional dependencies and reach out to relevant teams. * Give a demo and solicit early feedback. Continue to do so throughout the project. * Report on the project’s progress and impact to keep everyone involved and interested. Speak clearly about the business impact and how the project ladders up to the company’s goals. 60-90: Strategy and Vision * Leverage your understanding of the business and its users to craft a vision and strategy. * Translate the above into an actionable roadmap and work with your team to define success metrics for each. * Run brainstorming sessions with your team regularly to generate ideas and prioritize them. * Evangelize: this is where your storytelling skills will come into play—make your team’s mission known, its projects familiar and its rationale clear to everyone. Write posts, speak at company meetings and bring feedback back to your team. * Become an expert: be the go-to person for your focus area.

This question is impossible to answer in the abstract. It depends entirely on where you are in the technology adoption lifecycle. If you haven't read "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado," go get them immediately and work your way through them. They are relatively short reads and timeless classics you will want to re-read throughout your career. As you will learn, at some points in the lifecycle you might focus 90% on new customers, at others 90% on your existing base (and no, it's not as simple as early=new, late=existing). The real trick is understanding the strategic context of where your product sits in the market at any given time.

Personally, I believe in having a very transparent roadmap. Not all companies are going to be able to communicate everything that is on their roadmap for legal and/or regulatory reasons, but, in my opinion, you should try to have as much of it public as possible. The main difference between an internal and external roadmap is that I would advise to never put exact dates on an external roadmap. If you have to put dates down, general timelines of this quarter, next quarter, this year, etc. are good enough to communicate what you are working on now, what you will be working on next, and where you'd like to go in then future. Also, always make sure to include a statement that things will change. Timelines, priorities, known vulnerabilities, and regulations can all change and impact your roadmap. Make sure that your customers know that you reserve the right to change things. Above all, be transparent when things change. Don't lead customers on if you know that the timeline has drifted and you won't be delivering the feature they want until next year. On your external roadmap, I think that it is prudent to include the following information: 1. What the feature is and isn't. * Be clear about what it will do when it is released. * State what problems the feature will address and how it will help your customers. 2. If necessary, general timelines of when you expect features to ship. 3. Dependencies on other work, especially if it is dependent on other teams. 4. If possible, for the features you are currently working on, include designs or wireframes to show what it will look like and how it will be used. 5. Forward looking statements acknowledging that things can change. * Be clear that nothing in your roadmap is a commitment, whether it is the timeline, functionality, or specific design. On an internal roadmap, I'd expect to see more details. 1. Work with engineering to determine an estimated timeline and work towards shipping the feature within that timeline. 2. Define engineering dependencies and capacity. * Externally, your customers don't care about who is working on the feature, but internally, you should be clear about who is critical path to releasing a feature, in case anything comes up that affects the capacity of those people. 3. Communicate the details when things change. * What caused the change? Technical dependencies? Bugs? Security issues? Marketing timelines? UX research? 4. Show how this feature contributes to the company's vision and goals. Of course, when you publish a public roadmap, you are going to have pushback. You are never going to have a roadmap that makes all of your customers happy. Different customers need different things. You should embrace the fact that you will get negative feedback from specific customers when you haven't prioritized what they want. Hear them out, value their input, explain why you are prioritizing the features on the roadmap, and use their input to make future decisions. Maybe there's something that you hadn't understood when prioritizing your roadmap and their input is what you needed to unlock the realization that their issue has broader impact than you had originally thought. The more people you have providing input, the more data you have. The more data you have, the better decisions you can make.

Expanding the team from 1 to multiple people comes with a set of pitfalls that I’ve learned the hard way. And many other factors such as Org culture, line of business, product lifecycle etc, have a telling effect on the type of pitfalls you’ll encounter, so take this with a grain of salt. Here are a few things worth considering - * N degrees of separation: The larger your org grows, more layered your teams are (typically). Ensuring that you and everyone on the team feel connected to each other in a meaningful way is super critical. Here are a few tactical things you could do - * Regular team meetings for sharing broader context * Async modes of information dissemination (via ‘Top of mind’ type notes, ‘bite sized’ videos etc) * Skip level 1:1s at a certain cadence to get a pulse on the ground (and also to get feedback about you) * Curating culture: I recently read somewhere that team culture is nothing but ‘Behaviors you reward and behaviors you punish’. As your team grows you’d want to ensure that the culture or identity of your team is well understood and reinforced regularly. Coaching your managers/leads on that front should be top priority because they ultimately play a key role in sustaining that culture. * Delegating decision making: When you manage a small team, typically a lot of the decision making (and tie breaking in terms of conflicts) comes to you. As your team grows there might be a tendency to follow the same approach which you should discourage. Empower your sub-teams and sub-team leads to take ownership. Have a clear sense of when you want to get involved. Here is the framework I use: * Just inform me as FYI for X set of topics * Seek opinion from me for Y set of topics. * I’d like to be the approver/decision maker for Z set of topics (ideally this is a very narrow list) * Goal mapping: As the org/team grows ensuring everyone’s work ladders up the org level goals is of paramount importance. In our roadmap templates we have a way to ‘map’ each team's goals to the org level goals. The teams articulate how their deliverable move the needle on the org level top line goals.

From metrics perspective, it's no different from standard product metrics. I've seen many different metrics frameworks being used, all of which essentially boil down to these 4 metric categories: 1. Operational metrics: Is the product functioning as expected? Success rates, Latency etc. 2. Usage metrics: Is the product being used? DAU/MAU, Frequency of use, customer retention/churn, Requests/sec, data volume etc. 3. Satisfaction metrics: Are customers satisfied? In-product feedback (thumbs-up, thumbs-down), NPS scores via surveys etc. 4. Impact metrics: How is the product helping customers achieve business impact? This is subjective and need to be defined per product and is also typically based on customer scenarios.

Great question! The move from Senior PM to Director level and above is a challenging one. In general, the change really involves the transition from product management to product leadership. You are typically going from managing one team at a high level with one roadmap and no direct reports to a role managing multiple teams at a high level with multiple roadmaps and direct reports AND driving an effective vision & strategy for your portfolio that brings those elements together AND provide tools and conditions for the whole org to get better at being PMs. Whew! Given the changes in responsibilities, you’re likely going to have to evolve into performing at the Director level so you can set your” opportunity table” for a Director opportunity. Given where the Senior PM level usually sits, here are probably the kinds of skills and experiences you’ll need to try to acquire: 1. Learn how to manage and mentor people. Does your company hire interns? Manage one or more of them! Does your company hire new people that need mentors? Become a mentor! Manage people volunteering somewhere! There’s lots of ways to get skills and experience here, great books too (Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek I highly recommend.) But in general the best teacher for managing people is experience. 2. Learn how to build product strategies at the portfolio level. If you’ve gotten to the Senior PM level, you probably know how to develop a strategy for your product or feature. But doing this as a portfolio level is different. It requires thinking longer term about multiple teams with multiple strategies & roadmaps. The best way to learn this skill is to take on the responsibility of doing this or sharing it with your boss or higher-ups. This is a stretch to do in the beginning, but the more you do it the better you get at it. Some good practice is also crafting strategies for products you like or companies you admire. See how many of them come true and how right or wrong you were. Learn, rinse and repeat. I also recommend Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rummelt. Amazing book on this topic. 3. Help your fellow PMs in the org level up via skills like org design, policy design, tooling upgrades, etc. Basically practice the art of leveling up a team by creating an environment for PMs to level up and do great work. Think about your own experience doing your best work. What kinds of tools, policies and cultural norms were in place that really helped you level up? Now think of ways you can get from where you are today to that ideal. What tools do you need? What policies need to change? How does the culture need to change? From here, learn how to drive the highest priority items. You don’t need to be a Director for this, you can pursue it by speaking up in feedback forums on these topics, work with your peers or managers to make things happen, etc. If someone was taking initiative here, you can bet managers will be considering them for leadership spots. That’s the high level summary! The opportunity actually presenting itself requires being at a company where there is a need for someone at that level, which requires a bit of luck and timing. So all places aren’t going to be best fits for you, and you should assess that on your own as well. As for types of tracks, PM leadership skills are pretty transferrable. Director, Senior Director and VP are more traditional paths. But I’ve seen old bosses and colleagues go lots of different ways. Something I hear a lot is that the PM role prepares you for being a start-up CEO. Have certainly seen that happen! An old boss is CEO now. But I’ve also seen lots of people end up in Marketing, Design, Engineering, Strategy…there’s no one set path!