Get answers from product management leaders
Generally, I am thinking of success in 3 dimensions: Vision, People and Execution. All three need to work well for a team to succeed over time. Early in your career Execution takes a bit of a higher focus. You can get your first 2-3 promotions by launching bigger and more complex projects. However, as you grow in your career the ability to offer broader, more ambitious vision and have others join you in the journey become more central for your success. Your already proven execution skills help in attracting people to work with you since they know you will deliver. It’s important to invest in all three dimensions throughout your career, since honing these skills takes time. When I joined Meta I was excited to find out that here we are formally aligning PMs expectations with similar axes: Impact (which includes Strategy and Execution) and Capacity Building (which includes healthy team and cross functional relationship as well as broader contributions to the organization). I believe this structured view creates the right incentive and culture.
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Upcoming AMAs
Avantika Gomes
Figma Group Product Manager, Production Experience • December 21
There's a lot written about basic PM competencies (https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/), and for any PM on my team, they should be able to do all these things you'd expect from a PM (write specs, understand the customer, communicate upwards and outwards, GSD). I'll focus my answer on a few attributes that I think are really "make-or-break" for me: * Good communication skills, both written and verbal, are an absolute must-have for any PM on my team. Whether it's through writing specs, influencing stakeholders, or pitching product ideas, PMs have to be able to communicate effectively across mediums (written, verbal), forums (large groups vs. small groups vs 1:1) and audiences (to developers, marketers, sales, executives). In particular, they need to be able to tell good stories (e.g.,, can they get their team inspired about an idea?), structure their communication effectively (e.g., can break down ambiguous problems using a framework?) and make technical concepts easy to understand for non-technical folks (e.g., can they explain how routers work to someone without a CS background?) * Great PMs "own" the problem. They're not afraid the step outside the boundaries of their function to do what it takes to get the product out the door. They rarely ever use phrases like "that's not my job" or "this was the designer/developers responsibility". Their strong sense of ownership of the problem leads them to passionately debate about the right solution, speak truth to power when necessary, but also be open to other points of view (because it's not about "them", it's about solving the problem).
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Boris Logvinsky
Vanta VP Product • December 12
Perhaps a contrarian take, but technical skills aren't the most critical for the majority of PM roles out there, except for deeply technical products or platform positions. For the general PM role, it's much more important to demonstrate your ability to delve into customer problems, set strategy, execute, and drive impact that aligns with your organization's mission and vision. Technical skills matter, but they are secondary. They usually revolve around your ability to work with engineering counterparts and understand enough technical concepts to make trade-offs, and to work with data and perform analysis for decision-making. In my experience, both of these skills are often inquired about directly.
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Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product Management • February 8
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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Ajay Waghray
Udemy Director of Product Management, Consumer Marketplace • August 25
I think the best way to break into the industry as a PM is to get after building tech products yourself. Personally, I left a well-paying job in the energy sector to work on a start-up with no reliable paycheck. Thinking back on that experience, it was crazy beneficial to learn how to work with designers & engineers to build a great product or feature. The act of building a product or feature is the best teacher. I’m not advocating that you should quit your job and not get paid to build stuff like I did! There was a lot that wasn’t so awesome about that. 😅 But I definitely WOULD encourage everyone here to think about how you could do that in your spare time. What problems are you passionate about solving? What kind of product or feature could help you solve that problem? How could you bring that solution to life? How can you talk to prospective customers about it? Even PM candidates that make wireframes or prototypes to show a product that solves a real problem have a leg up over most of the other candidates. I’ll take someone with drive, initiative and passion for the work 10 times out of 10.
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Mani Fazeli
Shopify Director of Product • December 14
Service Level Agreements (SLA) are driven by three factors: (1) industry standard expectations by customers, (2) differentiating your product when marketing, (3) direct correlation with improving KPIs. For checkout, you'll have uptime as an industry standard, but it's insufficient because subsystems of a checkout can malfunction without the checkout process outright failling. You could consider latency or throughput as market differentiators and would need instrumentation on APIs and client response. With payment failures or shipping calculation failures, you would directly impact conversion rates and trust erosion (hurting repeat buying), which are likely KPIs you care about. So your SLAs need to be a combination of measures that account for all of the above, and your engineering counterparts have to see the evidence that these matter in conjunction. Of the three types, the one that's most difficult to compare objectively is the third. In your question, you mention 1.5% error rates. You could go on a hunt to find evidence that convinces your engineering counterparts that these are elevated vs. competition, or that they're hurting the business. What's more likely to succeed is running A/B tests that attempt to improve error rates and demonstrating a direct correlation with improving a KPI you care about. That's a more timeboxed exercise, and with evidence, you can change hearts and minds. That's what can lead to more rigorous setting of SLAs and investment in rituals to uphold them.
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David Cutler
CookUnity VP Product & Design • June 30
I've noticed a trend in the tech industry for product organizations to follow a structure that Spotify helped craft over the years, in which a company is organized into business sub-orgs that roll up into their own respective product and engineering leads. And those leads oversee various squads that make up the product areas within that sub-org. At CookUnity we call the product areas "zones", in which a product lead exists to drive the product strategy and manage the PM team. In smaller companies (<500), those product leads are likely the direct leadership team for the Head of Product. You can follow this model at any size company, you'll just see a different scale of how many and how big the sub-orgs are.
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1. Not validating the problem statement enough. Is this really a problem? 2. For a B2B product, I think its important to think through early on whether this is a problem they are willing to pay for. Often times, this is an after thought and expensive to pivot. 3. Giving up too soon. Its easier said than done to validate the problem statement. Sometimes this take iterations where you get live feedback from real users. So you might be dancing around the problem space for a bit and that's okay.
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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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Shahid Hussain
Google Group Product Manager, Wear OS • May 21
No-one can, or should ever be sure that they have a 100% right product strategy. But you can do a lot to de-risk your approach, and your tactics should vary depending on how much time you have to plan. * Is your strategy ultimately going to drive the change in behaviour you want? Find the key participants in your strategy -- e.g. the customers -- and talk, talk, talk to them. You'll learn a ton from the first 5-10 conversations, and suddenly you'll start to hear the same themes and be able to predict what they'll say. Then you can move on. * Read, and connect with people who are familiar with this situation in your industry or other industries. How did things work out? Is the current market / environment similar enough that you can draw conclusions? * The more experienced you are, the more confident you can be about relying on product intuition. A phrase I often use is "we've seen this movie before" and, it's surprising how many times the same situation gets repeated.
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