Guy Levit
Guy Levit
Meta Sr. Director of Product ManagementApril 26
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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Boris Logvinsky
Boris Logvinsky
Vanta VP ProductDecember 12
The answer depends on the stage of company and product you're working on. At Vanta, where we're growing very quickly and are still formulating many of our process, I've found that the most successful PMs / candidates: * Customer focus. I look for past examples where they have deeply understood their customers and users. * Agency and comfort with ambiguity. In high growth environments, there often isn't a beaten path. PMs need to be able to make progress and drive when there's not one. * Commercial mindset. The best PMs don't just think about what to ship, but think about how to position what they're shipping in the context of the market.
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3111 Views
Natalia Baryshnikova
Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Strategy and PlanningNovember 9
A common pitfall that slows teams down is inability to make good decisions quickly, especially if these decisions involve many stakeholders. One of the best-kept team velocity secrets, especially in larger organizations, is having a consistent and efficient decision-making framework that is practiced across teams. With a small initial upfront investment of agreeing on a decision making framework within your organization (or just starting to practice it consistently), you will be able to save many weeks and months by unblocking the team quickly and moving on with your important decisions. There are many frameworks out there, and you can develop your own, too. I absolutely love the Atlassian playbook's DACI which we use religiously, and something I have heard from ALL Atlassian alumni they brought to their new teams. Check it out here: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci
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2999 Views
Marion Nammack
Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product ManagementFebruary 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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9982 Views
Ajay Waghray
Ajay Waghray
Udemy Director of Product Management, Consumer MarketplaceAugust 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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5382 Views
David Cutler
David Cutler
CookUnity VP Product & DesignJune 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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2907 Views
Mani Fazeli
Mani Fazeli
Shopify Director of ProductDecember 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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4162 Views
Suhas Manangi
Suhas Manangi
Snap Head of Product - Trust & SafetyJune 6
Product School, Try Exponent, and Product Allinace are good resources for PM interviews prep. Later is a good question. Interesting idea. I don't know of any, but it so interesting that someone should be offering it. Perhaps they might have rolled into certification or cohort courses with live projects!
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5400 Views
Maxime Prades
Maxime Prades
Meta Director of Product Management | Formerly Algolia, ZendeskNovember 28
I don't 😬 Obviously it depends on the size and scale and the situation so take this answer with a grain of salt, but I am a firm believer that you shouldn't ship the org chart when it comes to product goals and KPIs and landed impact. You're one team, one unit. You build and ship together, marketing included. Of course you have different techniques and tactics and skillset but you should all goal towards the same KPIs and the same landed impact. Ultimately you should optimize for the same things and the breakdown of who does what should be pretty clear once you have agreed on the end goal. If it isn't I quite enjoy employing a very traditional framework called a "RACI framework" that helps clear roles and responsibilities in a very blunt way.
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Puja Hait
Puja Hait
Google Group Product ManagerSeptember 13
I recommend thinking about these questions: 1) Is this worth solving? * What is the problem statement? Who are the users? * Is this a real problem? * What is the TAM? What can we influence? * What is the definition of success 2) Why us? Why now? * Are you the right team/org/company to solve this problem? * Should you work on it now? What happens if you do not? 3) How Might We break up the problem? What sub-problems should we go after(repeat steps 1-2) ?
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