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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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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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Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology Partners • April 28
In taking an end-to-end business leadership approach to this role, it opens up multiple career paths. For example- if your goal is to become a product GM, this is well aligned. If your ambition is to be a future COO, I think this is a great role to dig into. I think it's also a great extension to leadership roles in customer success and GTM as well. I definitely see it as a choose your own adventure skillset.
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Vasanth Arunachalam
Meta Director, Technical Program Management | Formerly Microsoft • February 3
It could be a combination of any of these things - * Look at data (dashboards, customer feedback channels, internal partner team feedback) to check progress (on product success, platform performance) -Take any actions necessary (filing bugs, resolving a SEV) * Supporting your cross functional team to deliver on roadmap projects -Brainstorm product and technical solutions. -Sprints, design reviews, code reviews -Removing blockers * Look at data to proactively surface opportunities, hot spots, technical bottlenecks etc * 360 communications often tailored meticulously for the target audience * A lot of meetings (Product reviews, Roadmap planning, Decision making etc) * Ideating and planning for the future (Strategy) * Upkeep or morale and motivation for team. TPMs often act as the glue for the entire team. * And ideally they are having loads of fun doing all these
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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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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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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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Shahid Hussain
Google Group Product Manager, Wear OS • May 21
Prioritise with respect to the key goal that is important to the org -- but balance with your estimation of what you think can land. That sounds simple, but in large matrixed organisations, that can get hard quickly. * Sometimes it's not clear what advances the org's goal -- is there a key metric? Can you forecast a project's impact on that metric, and is that forecast credible? * If shipping a particular project needs alignment from lots of teams, do all of them share the same incentives you do? If not, can they support your goals, or will they deprioritise?
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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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Roshni Jain
Volley VP of Product • January 27
The jump from IC PM into product leadership whether as a Group PM or a Director of Product is one of the most challenging progressions in a product career. At this step a Consumer PM's career, the skills and behaviors that have helped them excel as an IC PM - excellent execution, strong PRDs, great squad management are not the exact ones required at the Director level. To earn this role, it's important to really think about the responsibilities about the Director - the main criteria of success are around building a strong team, ensuring that they're working on the right things and that the sum of that work aligns to the outcomes the business needs. A lot of the job becomes setting the vision and strategy for this broader area, setting up the organization to best deliver against it and then focusing on enabling PMs, not making the specific decisions for each feature or launch. To succeed as a Directors it's important to have strong cross-functional relationships at your level and to have really strong executive communication. You want the other company leaders to really understand what your team is doing, why, the impact and how it moves the company forward. The way a PM might be evaluated as ready for this role is demonstrating an ability to take on larger and larger strategic scope. Even without the formal role, they've enabled others enough to have the bandwidth to think and act with a larger scope than one or two teams, but rather a broader area. One way I've seen PMs successfully bridge this is by taking on strategic projects that cross outside their teams. In articulating an approach that works across this scope and then working across the teams to have this delivered - they show the ability to own larger initiatives. Lastly as a Director of Consumer PM, it's important to have a strong understanding of your core customer. This is an area that you cannot delegate away - you must stay close to the customer and have a strong perspective on the most important problems you can solve for them. This, in addition to staying up to date on successful consumer products and experiences will enable you to keep innovating while ensuring your product meets your customer needs.
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