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My current product team has about 40 PMs (And we are hiring!). I would not dive into what each of the team does, but maybe talk about how we went about structuring it, which may be a more transferable skill. When I first joined Meta my VP asked me if the current team structure is the right one. Naturally, I did not know the answer. Frankly, I don’t think it was the right question for me to answer at the time. Instead, I engaged with the team on setting a 3 year plan - Write down what our strategy is, at a high level, and what are the key milestones that such a strategy would hit, if successful. This happened both at the org level and for the individual teams in the org. As the team presented the strategy to the stakeholders we started seeing some gaps in our org structure and the team leads started to raise a desire to organize differently. We recently re-organized the team accordingly. Setting a direction was a critical prerequisite before talking about team alignment. As for measuring success, it goes a bit to the first question I answered - I expect each team to define their own strategy, then set the milestones of that strategy. Our discussion can then be focused on the three elements I highlighted: * Strategy: Was the team able to set a good strategy? * Execution: Is the team hitting the milestone? If not, is it because the execution is not tight, or because the milestones are not achievable and we should pivot? This is a very important distinctions that some people are missing - A team can be executing really well and proving that the strategy is the wrong strategy. Being able to prove that point and move on without wasting years of struggles is a big win! * Org health: Are we hiring well? Growing talent? Retaining talent? How is the cross functional relationships going?
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Kie Watanabe
HubSpot Group Product Manager • October 13
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.
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Ajay Waghray
Udemy Director of Product Management, Consumer Marketplace • August 25
We have a great podcast episode about this! To summarize, it’s less about explicit processes and more about tools in the toolbelt. It’s all about right tool, right job. The tools that come to mind for incorporating customer feedback are: 1. User research. This typically involves a full user research team, crafted questions and a lab that users visit to provide feedback on designs, prototypes, live product, whatever is being used for testing. But sometimes it’s something you do on your own with the help of a user researcher. 2. Surveys. This usually involves working with someone that specializes in surveys, product marketing or something you do yourself (very carefully!) to survey customers about what things they like and don’t like about new or current product features. You can also ask about how likely they are to promote the product or feature to their friends, prices they’re willing to pay for products, etc. 3. Customer Support Feedback. This is what customers tell your customer support team if you have one. A great way to collect this is to sit with your customer support team and either field calls yourself or listen in while others are fielding calls. 4. Written Feedback. Can come from a feedback widget on a website or app, app store reviews, emails to the CEO, etc. This tends to be lower fidelity but can be really useful when troubleshooting or looking for lots of feedback volume. 5. Quantitative Data. This is not something people usually think of when it comes to customer feedback! But Quantitative data is really just a data representation of customer feedback. It shows what customers are actually doing. And, when analyzed properly, can reflect what you see in the more qualitative methods above. There are more, but these tend to be the most common ones. Depending on what the need is for a product or feature you’re working on, you might want to use different tools for different purposes and project phases. For example, if you’re trying to redesign a product page for the whole website, it’s worth taking your time. It would make sense to start looking at quantitative data and written feedback early in the process. Then, once you have prototypes to test, user research can play a bigger role. But maybe you have some bigger questions to answer before then, like what kinds of elements do users want to see on these pages? Then engaging user research to help figure that out can be a big help since it’s less structured and more complex. And of course sometimes you need something fast to ship in the next few days. Written feedback, quick surveys and customer support feedback can be really helpful. Each of these tools have some bias baked in as well. For example, written feedback is more biased to more engaged, more passionate users. So it’s good to keep in mind what those biases are and figure out how best to use those tools depending. Great question!
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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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Neel Joshi
Google Group Product Manager, Google Assistant • August 31
Without going into specifics, the biggest challenge has been cross-organization influencing. My time at both Microsoft and Google has exposed me to lots of intra-organization projects with varying levels of buy-in from each team. The level of effort and coordination required to pull not one, but two organizations in the same direction can be enormous. As a PM - at any level - it's your role to effectively communicate why what you're trying to acheive makes sense for other teams, your company and ultimately your customers. Even if you're aligned on principles and strategies, there are dozens of other factors that you need to be able to navigate such as resourcing, ownership, tech stacks, recognition, branding, leadership opinions and timelines.
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How do you retain good talent, especially when PM roles are in such high demand across the industry?
Mckenzie Lock
Netflix Director of Product • August 3
I’ll skip the obvious things - pay well, set a vision, growing company, skill building, career pathing - and highlight some under-rated ones: * Hire well and have high talent density. Most people who choose a career in Product Management are motivated by self improvement - being around other talented PMs who they admire and who push their thinking is motivating. * Stay lean. This may seem counterintuitive - isn’t it good to have enough PMs? Honestly, no. If you hire well you want to give people room to grow and stretch. The worst thing you can do is to staff up too quickly, only to have frustrate your stars who are ready for more in a year (or worse yet, sudden shift in the business which requires you to scale back projects). Having too many PMs will also lead to more work being generated, you then need to resource. It’s far better to have PMs that have 20% too much to do than 20% too little. My rule of thumb is: everyone should be just uncomfortable enough with their scope that they drop a few things, but not so uncomfortable that they burn out. * Autonomy. People choose a career in product management because they want to make or be at the center of product decisions. Allowing them to do so is one of the most important things you can do to keep them motivated. As a people leader your jobs is to set goals, give context, guide, and identify blindspots. It’s not to operate the product for the PMs on your team. At Netflix we have a value, “Context over control” - leaders should focus first & foremost on setting context so others can make decisions vs. making decisions for them. * Actually care about them. When I think about the best managers I’ve had they have one intangible thing in common - I felt on a deep level that they actually, genuinely cared about me. This had a ripple effect on every part of my job because I felt supported, was calmer, and did better work. Caring looks like regularly thinking about the growth & success of another person without being asked to. It looks like advocating for or elevating behind the scenes, especially if they are in a disadvantaged position. It’s something that you can’t fake.
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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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Vasanth Arunachalam
Meta Director, Technical Program Management | Formerly Microsoft • May 4
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.
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Rapha Danilo
Gong Director of Product Management • April 27
Taking a step back, I think the 1st PM needs to act a lot like a head of product in the early days. The ones I see that do well for their company (and themselves) typically focus on doing 3 things well, where others only do 1-2: 1. PM Execution * Typical activities you expect from a PM i.e. research, talking to customers, ideation, roadmap * This is foundational, but I think you will likely fail or at least get overlooked for leadership opportunities if you only spend time on this 2. Building the PM playbook * A key part of establishing the function is to determine the stage-appropriate processes, tools and people (hires) needed to achieve our goals * By owning the execution piece, you have an unfair advantage (and incentive) in shaping what the playbook should look like * If you can take most of this off your founders' plate, IMO you almost instantly distinguish yourself in the top performance quartile * You will also have greater control of your own destiny i.e. who joins the team, how prioritization decisions get made 3. Stakeholder management and education * Expect to spend 1/3 of your time (ideally not too much more) aligning with key stakeholders not just on what will make it in the roadmap and be shipped when, but also on how decisions should get made, and why there is a business justification for certain resources to achieve your goals. * In a startup, your leadership and key stakeholders probably have a limited understanding of PM best practices. In fact, they may have a (somewhat biased) view that a lot of it is unnecessary red tape that will slow down execution. Know when to push back and when to optimize for speed of execution and document learnings later. * I think the best founding PMs think like mini-CEOs: they scrutinize the business value of features (output) as well as the inputs (imagine this is your own $ or resources). They push back and say no when it's needed, and they're flexible enough to update the playbook and processes as teams grow. To answer your question more specifically, here's a simple sequence I'd use to prioritize my startup product roadmap from first principles: * Align on north star goals: * Where do we need to get the business metrics to be in the 6-12 months in order to raise our next round of funding? (or whatever the company north star is e.g. reach profitability) * As a result, where do we need the product metrics/behaviors to be in the 6-12 months in order to raise our next round of funding? (or whatever the company north star is e.g. reach profitability) * Work backward from north star goals to your current reality: * What are the 3-5 key jobs to be done that our customers come to our product to achieve? * How well does our product help customers complete these jobs to be done today? * What customer behaviors do we need to see in the product for us to know this is true? What product KPIs/metrics can we use to measure and back up that these behaviors are really happening? * Which business metrics (e.g. revenue, retention) will this impact? * Other first principles I'd think about: * Leverage the fact that your team is smalll to talk to more customers. You should become the expert on your customers 'jobs to be done' and current workflows. This will give you all the ammo you need when having to confidently decide, slice, and justify your roadmap. * >50% of the time, in the early days, doubling down on features or a product area that already works (i.e. has usage) will yield better results than shipping a shiny new feature. Communicate this accordingly to your stakeholders. * Be very clear about whether a feature is to play offense or defense (i.e. filling a gap with a competitive product.) There's nothing wrong with either, but a large lack of either signal you are either focusing too much or too little on the products you are evaluated against.
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Navin Ganeshan
Amazon Head of Driver Products, Amazon Relay • May 31
(Reposting this from a related question) A technical product manager at Amazon is generally referred to as a Product-Manager-Technical (PM-T). A PMT can have ownership over a product, a functional area or even a program, but their primary focus is on formulating the vision, the strategy and roadmap for that area. They are also ultimately responsible for the end metrics of adoption, quality and effectiveness of the features they deliver. They are also the primary customer champions synthesizing their current pain-points, as well as anticipating future needs. They develop concept documents (PRFAQs), Business Requirements, and Product Definitions. These are not exclusive to PMTs since Amazonian culture drives the notion of ownership, customer obsession and invention into everyone, but these are responsibilities that are more core to PM/PMTs. A Product Manager (PM) shares all of these same qualities and responsibilities with a lower bar on technical expertise which may be more suited for specific roles involving less-technical products or less-technical functional areas within a larger portfolio. A Technical Program Manager (TPM) is a distinct role that sits at the intersection of product, engineering and program management. An Amazon TPM is a unique role that combines business ownership over delivery with high-level technical architecture. They are usually the program glue - that brings together PMTs, engineering teams and business stakeholders on all aspects of an initiative. To address a common misperception, TPMs are not project managers, but have far more involvement in business outcome, product decisions and typically posess engineering and architcture skills that allow them to coordinate efforts across product areas. However, note that this AMA is focused on the technical product-manager role or PM-T. So please make that translation whenever you see "TPM" in these questions.
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