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I love this question! It happens a lot and working through it is part of our role as PMs. There are a few layers to my approach here: First, start with building the relationship. (I hope this theme is clear by now ;-). While your goals may conflict, at a higher level you are playing for the same team, and having constructive, trusting relationships is a key for any team’s success. You don’t need to agree, but at least seek to understand and show empathy. Second, focus on higher level framing, rather than your own goals - You both want the company to succeed, and if you start double clicking into what success means, you will likely be in agreement for the first few clicks. As you go deeper, call out the framing e.g. “We want to grow revenue, but also want to ensure good customer satisfaction. We may disagree on the relative importance of those factors”. I specifically recall a leader I worked with with whom I philosophically disagreed on the overall direction of my product, but could still have very productive conversations about how to think about the space. We were not trying to persuade each other, but rather use those conversations to enrich both of our thinking. Third, As you lay the framework and get to the crux of the disagreement, try to think of the “what needs to be true” statement. If two reasonable, capable groups of people look at a problem and get to a different conclusion it may be because they put different “weights” on different considerations. You can then enumerate “A is better than B if X, Y and Z are true. Otherwise B is better than A”. Example: Driving revenue up by X is more important than driving customer satisfaction up by Y if we believe that the change in customer satisfaction will lower attrition by XX and drive increased spend fro existing customers of YY”. Then the discussion can be about the conditions, not the goals. Fourth, when the discussion does move to goals, look at counter metrics. “Grow metric X while keeping metric Y within certain guardrails”. I’ve seen this technique used a lot at Meta. Last - Escalate. I encourage my teams to escalate disagreements so we, as a leadership team, can unblock them. If the work above does not solve the challenge, at least it allows for a very structured discussion among the leaders of the conflicting parties.
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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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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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Hiral Shah
DocuSign Director of Product Management • March 30
There are several things that you can consider mistakes, but I do view them as learning opportunities. Every PM goes through some of these in their career (including myself). Here are some of the common mistakes I have seen PMs make: * Not talking to customers to validate the problem: A lot of times I see PMs jumping to solutions for a not well-defined problem. How will you know you have solved the problem when the problem definition itself is not correct? * Ignoring customer feedback: Worse than not talking to customers is talking to them to tick a box but not listening to their feedback. You become so fixated on the solution that you believe they know what's best for users. * Trying to build too much: Combination of creating a feature factory and going after shiny objects vs truly understanding the pain points and narrowing it to start small. In this scenario, PMs spend months or a year to build the right product and then when it gets launched no one uses it * Lastly not communicating enough: You should be able to articulate the value proposition of your product to anybody, your teammates, your customers, your cross-functional partners, investors, media, etc. This is why Amazon press release has taken popularity to force you to think through everything and communicate to inspire your team and others
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Rodrigo Davies
Asana Director of Product Management, AI • May 17
I transitioned from journalism to product management earlier in my career, and although it’s not a straightforward path, it’s actually pretty common for PMs to join tech from other sectors. An Asana PM teammate of mine, Ari Janover, actually has the best articulation of how to make the transition that I’ve ever heard. He says there are three common paths: * The Ninja: Join a small startup as another role and push to own PM work until you become a PM. * The Expert: Apply for roles where the value of your specific knowledge trumps your lack of PM credentials. Think Engineers for technical products or a real estate agent for a real estate tool. * The Hail Mary: Follow the few PM Apprenticeships that don’t require previous experience (learn more about AsanaUp here). I followed the Expert path when starting out, and I’ve seen it work quite well in early-stage companies. One of the biggest challenges in starting in an early-stage company, though, is that you’re often the first or only PM, so although you have lots of things to learn, you may have fewer people to learn from. I spent a lot of time observing and learning from PMs at other companies and building up a group of folks I could exchange ideas and challenges with, and this is a practice I still find incredibly useful today.
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Zeeshan Qamruddin
Cloudflare Sr. Director of Product | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb • April 12
Today, our org structure follows the ethos of "Small, autonomous teams". In this structure, we generally have a PM paired with a Technical Lead (Eng), somewhere between 3 - 5 Engineers, and a Business Systems Analyst to focus on operational and analytical tasks. Some teams have a Design/UX representative as well, where applicable. Hierarchically, we have these teams organized into Pillars, with a shared broader mission/remit. Pillars are led by a triad, with a Senior PM, Product Lead, or Group Product Manager aligned with an Engineering Lead (above TL) and a BSA Lead or Design Lead where relevant. Finally, those Pillars roll up into Groups, where the Director level can provide guidance to the respective teams. The main thing to note about these structures, though, is that they take time to mature; where we are today is a step function change from where we were last year. Eventually, I do hope to land in the formation outlined above, but we will continue to transform as individuals grow in their roles or are brought on board over time.
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Apurva Garware
Upwork VP Product and GM • April 28
1. Ability to communicate well - Someone told me early in my career: The single most important PM skill he looks for when hiring a PM is communication. Communication is really a proxy for building trust, driving alignment, having healthy debates when there’s conflict and committing to a path forward. That’s all under the hood of good communication, and is instrumental in driving product teams forward. 2. Data driven mindset - relevant to qual as much as to quant. Ask yourself and teams the right questions. Become familiar with qualitative research tools, understand what your dashboards need to look like, and get your dashboards in place. Be empowered to make data-driven decisions. 3. Ruthlessly prioritize - every day you have more you want to do than you will have time to do it. That’s just the reality. Every human has 24 hours, and one can’t change that. Make sure you prioritize your team and the team's time and resources.
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Rupali Jain
Optimizely Chief Product Officer • March 1
While there are different specific metrics that marketing and product teams track for product launches, what's critical is the alignment between the two and agreement on the metrics to track prior to the launch. Some examples of metrics tracked by each team: * Product team: Satisfaction, usage by users and individual accounts, full funnel from a user trying the feature to actually using it * Marketing team: % of reps enabled on the new product, leads generated, competitive win rate changes * Metrics that require deep partnership: Number of customer stories/references for the capability
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Kie Watanabe
HubSpot Group Product Manager • October 13
In my previous answer, re: finding the right opportunities + making decisions - I mentioned four lenses (Customer, Business, Market, and Technology) as key components of coming up with ideas and making decisions. The best advice I have to offer is to be intentional about spending time developing your muscles in those areas. It can be as simple as picking a product or service in your day-to-day life and thinking through what inputs might have contributed to the experience you’re having as a user. Additionally, a lot of product strategy is about being able to identify the opportunity that will maximize impact. How will you hone in on the right problem and arrive at an excellent solution? I’ve found that strong problem-solving intrinsics and the ability to make effective decisions are very valuable. Here are two frameworks I’ve always found helpful: * McKinsey’s Seven Steps of Problem Solving - Helps abstract underlying problems/issues * Playing to Win - Strategy book by the former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley Lastly, communication is essential for being able to get buy-in and execute product strategy. Work on simple, effective communication.
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Suhas Manangi
Snap Head of Product - Trust & Safety • June 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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