Get answers from product management leaders
Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product Management • February 8
The level of detail that people on other teams need depends on what they are using the roadmap for. Our roadmap planning tool enables us to create multiple views of the roadmap - we tailor each view to the use cases of the consumers. For example, we have the following views: * A view for our quarterly planning process - this view is primarily used to communicate to execs so it focuses on the high level business goals that each roadmap item supports and doesn’t contain many implementation details. * An internal view that go-to-market team members can use to understand estimated delivery dates for items in active development or beta - this view contains much more detail - for example the user needs that the release addresses and how to sign up for betas. * A public view that is available to our customers - this view contains customer facing explanations of each project and information on how our customers can help us develop it. For example, an item might have a few questions about the customer’s use case and interested customers can send us answers to those questions.
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Katherine Man
HubSpot Group Product Manager, CRM Platform • May 3
I’ve held roles as both platform and non-platform product managers and I’d say being a platform product manager is definitely the most challenging but rewarding. The most challenging part is your solutions are more abstract and less obvious. Instead of building solutions directly for customers, you’re buildings tools for customers to build the solutions themselves. Does your head hurt yet? Let me give an example. Let’s say you’re trying to let customers customize the way their HubSpot UI looks. While you could try to build all the customization requests you get, no two customers want the same thing and it’d be impossible for our product teams to keep up with that demand. Instead, you build tools for external developers and admin users to configure the UI in the way they need. But how do you figure out which tools? Here is the usual process for regular product management: 1. Collect customer use cases 2. Identify a pattern 3. Build a solution that solves for the majority of use cases. Here is the process for platform product management with an extra step: 1. Collect customer use cases 2. Identify a pattern 3. Identify a pattern across solutions 4. Build a solution that solves for the majority of use cases. Still confused? Let me make the customization example even more specific. Let’s say you notice that a lot of customers want to display their HubSpot data in a table format on the CRM record page. Taking a non-platform approach, you’d build out every single table request that customers make. But this isn’t scalable. Instead, you build a configurable table component that customers can populate with their own data and then display. Believe me, I struggled for a long time with this adjustment in thinking but I promise if you choose to pursue it, you’ll love the wider impact that you’re able to have on customers!
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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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Maxime Prades
Meta Director of Product Management | Formerly Algolia, Zendesk • November 28
I have sometimes seen Product teams focus on impact instead of landed impact. And while there is a lot of nuance in that answer I think landed impact is often the most overlooked KPI or OKR or goal (however you like to call them). Teams will goal on number of users or shipping a feature rather than goal on the impact enabled by those metric. Take your typical B2B SaaS for instance. 200 active users of a feature on day 1 is an ok measure of success. But what really matters is what those 200 active users have achieved with your product. Or what those 200 active users have led to in terms of business impact. The visual below is a good illustration of what I mean: https://www.useronboard.com/imgs/posts/mario-water.png
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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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Avantika Gomes
Figma Group Product Manager, Production Experience • December 21
There are a few that I consider important to set up (and refine) as you grow your team: 1. Processes for top-down sharing: As your team grows, knowledge sharing becomes harder but also more critical. PMs can only do their best work when they have context about conversations and updates from across the organization. For instance, "context" could include new product updates, changes in company strategy, takeaways from executive conversations and board meetings. I'd explore ways that you can provide this context either synchronously (e.g., through a team meeting) and/or asynchronously (e.g., through a "here's what's top-of-mind" slack message or email 2. Processes for upwards sharing: It's important to also think through the best ways for your team to share what they're working on (product updates), but also for them to share feedback on how the team is operating (upwards feedback). This is necessary with a smaller team too, but in larger teams becomes more challenging to do this ad-hoc and 1:1 - additional processes like a recurring survey or a shared product launch calendar. Keep in mind that this is not just important for you, but for the entire PM team and XFN partners too, so be sure to do this in a transparent way. 3. Team-building processes: Often overlooked, these are important to increase the cohesion and connection that your PM team feels. I like to use a weekly meeting or a private slack channel to share wins, talk about product news, share personal updates. It should feel like a trusted space for your team to share their thoughts and get to know each other more personally. Also, in today's remote climate where team members can often feel more disconnected, you might want to think through team rituals (e.g., beginning of every meeting with a win, learn and a "smile" - something that made you smile in your personal life) and in-person bonding (e.g., as a team, we meet in person once a quarter). A helpful tip - carve aside 30 mins each quarter to also do some "housekeeping" of your team processes. Audit what's working and what's not, which meetings are useful vs. not, what are themes from your team surveys. Iterate on your team processes just like you'd iterate on a product!
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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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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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Tamar Hadar
The Knot Worldwide Senior Director of Product | Formerly Trello (Atlassian) • February 2
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.
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Patrick Davis
Google Group Product Manager • August 18
Thank you for the question and I'm sure this is exactly not the answer you're looking for which is, "it depends" You're balancing building trust and relationships, understanding your users and the business, and likely an evolving company strategy. So the question you need to ask yourself is what are you optimizing for? The runway of your company is critical to consider, but I always lean towards how might we prioritize learnings and building trust to build out a strong product roadmap
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