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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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Upcoming AMAs
I will share first two steps that I follow. Step 1: Is this problem worth solving? 1.1 Problem definition and user segmentation * B2B product: A business customer must have a genuine painpoint that they are willing to pay for. Some problems are not big enough problems, hence not high priorirty for the business users, these are not worth pursuing. Fine tune the problems till they hit * B>B>C: The business user/stakeholder may have rightly identified a problem but may not have the best ideas in terms of what solutions can work. Validate the problem is real with user research. * B2C: Similar to B>B>C, some segment of users have a need. Identify who they are and what the real problems are. 1.2 Is the Problem TAM big enough Step 2: Why us? Why now? 2.1 Do competitive studies 2.2 SWOT analysis 2.3 Are you best positioned to build this and build now?
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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.
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Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product Management • February 9
The level of detail that people on other teams need depends on what they are using the roadmap for. Our roadmap planning tool enables us to create multiple views of the roadmap - we tailor each view to the use cases of the consumers. For example, we have the following views: * A view for our quarterly planning process - this view is primarily used to communicate to execs so it focuses on the high level business goals that each roadmap item supports and doesn’t contain many implementation details. * An internal view that go-to-market team members can use to understand estimated delivery dates for items in active development or beta - this view contains much more detail - for example the user needs that the release addresses and how to sign up for betas. * A public view that is available to our customers - this view contains customer facing explanations of each project and information on how our customers can help us develop it. For example, an item might have a few questions about the customer’s use case and interested customers can send us answers to those questions.
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Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Strategy and Planning • November 10
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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Avantika Gomes
Figma Group Product Manager, Production Experience • December 22
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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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 2
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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Roshni Jain
Volley VP of Product • November 23
PM to engineer ratios can range wildly from 1 PM to every 2-3 engineers to something 1 PM to 15 engineers. This largely depends on the size of the company and the type of product. In a more entertainment context, like a gaming start-up, you might have leaner engineering teams with more PMs to develop the ideas and concepts for all of the experiences. In a scaled big tech company you might require many engineers and teams to work across all the platforms involved, so the ratio of a PM and product initiative to engineers might be 1:10 or more. That said, the most typical ratios I have seen are 1:5. More technical the teams and products will tend to have fewer PMs and the more customer facing and experience oriented the product will tend to have more PMs
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Shahid Hussain
Google Group Product Manager, Wear OS • May 22
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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