The candidate must “spike” (“8/10” or higher) in all of these areas, in order of importance: 1. Critical Thinking Given how many decisions and complex problems are thrown at PMs, this the #1 most important attribute I screen for. They don’t need to be a rocket scientist (top 0.5% of population) but they should be exceptional at this (top 5%). Good looks like: * Take large ambiguous problems and break them down into smaller pieces * Uses logic to convince others * Gets to the root of the issue: Think about things from multiple angles but then focuses on what matters (this is key and hard to find). The more senior a candidate the more critical thinking/problem solving looks like: starting the why and bigger picture, being principles-based, helping others to structure their thinking (good frameworks, simplifies and structures conversations etc.). I usually test for this both in the initial phone screen and through a product thinking interviews (case questions, panels) 2. Drive PMs have a lot of responsibility, get very little direction, and get too much credit and blame, so they need to a) self start and b) be motivated to keep trying even when faced with obstacles. Good looks like: * Ownership over outcomes vs. just doing the activities? A former manager of mine once called this “an insatiable desire to ship” * Self starter - Can we throw them at a problem and trust them to figure it out without hand holding? * Vigilance - do they generally think ahead to the outcome they are trying to achieve? Do they proactively address what may get in the way? This is very hard to screen for in an interview but you can get signals from behavioral questions, their questions to you, and follow ups. 3. Bridge Building There are two parts of bridge building 1. EQ - not easily coachable 2. Communication - this includes both written and verbal communication skills and both the quality and frequency of comms. Verbal and written comms are usually coachable. It’s ok if someone isn't a perfect communicator because people improve on this over time. But it’s not ok if they don’t have sufficient EQ. Good looks like: * Self aware - seeks to know (and improve on) their own strengths and weaknesses, self reflects without defensiveness * Situationally aware - skillfully navigates people situations and figures out how to influence others towards an outcome * Concise and clear answers that are easy to follow, verbally and written. I usually test for written and verbal comms in the panel exercise and interview questions. I test for self awareness and situational awareness in behavioral interviews.

This is a two-part question. Let me first articulate how I like coming up with ideas for new opportunities, followed by how I like to make decisions about what to build. Hopefully, you don’t mind that I’m thinking about “opportunities” because it might not always be a feature that’s the right solution. I should start by saying that there isn’t one right approach to coming up with ideas. In my experience, I’ve had success ensuring that there are: 1. Insights from the four lenses: Customer, Business, Market, Technology 2. Effective methods to facilitate ideation At the core, you have to have a deep understanding of the underlying user pain point you’re trying to solve through a thorough investigation of the Customer by talking to customers and product usage. You might actually learn very quickly that the user problem is around discoverability or activation, not necessarily a feature gap. Ideally, the customer impact is so deep that it translates effectively into Business impact. The Market context is critical to help understand how your user will experience the product within the broader competitive landscape and the direction an industry is headed. Finally, the Technology lens offers insight into what capabilities could be used as part of a solution. Preferably, these four lenses come together through cross-functional ideation that has the right participants (e.g. PM, UX, Eng, and even folks go-to-market teams). In a hybrid world where we’re working across time zones, I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to ideate together synchronously and asynchronously. In terms of decision-making, the ideation process should lend itself to initial layers of prioritization. I won’t go into prioritization frameworks here, but there are many out there. They do tend to distill back to impact and effort and sequencing. At HubSpot, depending on the type of decision we are trying to make, we may use a “driver, approver, contributor, informed” DACI model used by other companies we admire like Atlassian.

Given that it’s such a nascent function, I think there’s a lot of flexibility – I see that as a good thing! But I know the flexibility can also be daunting, so here’s how I talk about it with my team. Once you’ve been a Product Operations Manager, I think there are four primary paths: 1) Stay in Product Operations – “level up” within Product Operations and find a way to increase the scope or complexity of what you’re working on. At Oscar we have 6 levels for Product Ops, from Associate to Director and we promoted someone this past performance cycle! If your company has only one Product Ops role or title, make the business case for expanding your scope and a title change. Or look externally – many companies are building Product Ops and prior experience can be a huge asset. 2) Transition into Product Management – a benefit of working closely with Product Managers is that you get exposure to what they work on day-to-day. There are overlapping skill sets between Product Ops and Product Management, including translating needs into actionable requirements, strong prioritization skills and a deep understanding of the product you work with. I’ve had folks on my team successfully transition from Associate Product Operations Manager to Associate Product Manager – they enjoy that they’re working earlier in the Product Development Lifecycle. Note: I would be cautious if you are planning to use Product Operations as a stepping stone into Product Management. It can be a very different role from being a Product Manager and you may not get an opportunity to demonstrate Product Management skills in your day-to-day. For most folks on my team, they’ve had to take on side projects or volunteer for work outside of their swimlane to build those PM skills. 3) Transition into another Operations role – if the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning is improving processes or how things function, you may want to consider another Operations role after Product Ops. This could be within Product and Engineering – large Product Design teams are starting to build out Design Ops and/or User Research Ops. Engineering teams can have Engineering or Tech Ops (distinct from DevOps), to focus on optimizing the Software Development Lifecycle, improving Engineering onboarding and/or evaluating tools to increase developer productivity. You may want to get more creative and look beyond the Product and Engineering – the skill sets of organizing chaos, making playbooks, putting structure around things that are ad hoc, etc. are invaluable and very transferable. 4) Transition into Program/Project Management – I believe there is a big distinction between Product Ops and Program Management (I answered another question about the differences!), but there are overlapping skill sets as well. In both roles, you need to make sure people are delivering on their commitments. If your company does not have a specific Program or Project Management function, it’s likely that these responsibilities are bundled with another role – maybe even Product Ops! If your favorite parts of Product Ops are when you are coordinating across teams, tracking dependencies or chasing follow-ups, you might want to consider transitioning into a Program Management role. This can take the flavor of Technical Program Management (which may require specific technical skills) working with engineering teams or more general Program Management, which can span across all lines of business. If this career path is exciting to you and Program Management doesn’t exist at your company, define the opportunity and make a business case for these new responsibilities. There may be an opportunity to incubate the role within Product Ops, maybe as a component of your day-to-day. In talking to other Product Operations leaders, some have had Program Management teams organically form within Product Ops and before spinning them out into their own team.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

Collaborating with Product Marketing is a key part of any product's success. In smaller teams/companies, that role can fall on to the Product Manager directly, whereas at bigger organizations that is a more dedicated role. I am fortunate now at Cisco to have access to some of the best product marketing resources in the business. The work that we do together from product strategy, execution planning, and external marketing helps ensure our business objectives are met and made visible within our specific market. We work closely throughout the GTM process and fostering this relationship is one of the key components to a solid product launch.