Customer feedback is critical to how we build, and we incorporate it at every step of the product development process. We get customer feedback from a variety of places. When building new products we proactively reach out to customers to learn about their needs and make sure we’re creating the right solutions for them. We have a User Research team that regularly speaks to customers via a variety of methods - everything from interviews and surveys to card sorting and field studies. Along our product development process, we have specific touchpoints where we make sure to utilize user research to get deep insight into the pain points our customers face, and the best solutions to help them. Our customer-facing teams, like sales and customer success, are also talking to customers constantly as part of their daily jobs. These teams rigorously record all of the feedback they hear and compile it into a ranked Voice of the Customer (VOC) list, all managed within Asana. Asana’s VOC program is a critical input into our roadmap process, and helps us prioritize the most pressing needs brought up by customers.

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.

The ideal product manager to engineer ratio can vary from company to company and even team to team, but it usually depends on the company size, product complexity, the skill level of the engineers, and the role scope of the product manager. A general rule of thumb is 1 product manager for every 5-10 engineers. * 1:5 - This is common in startups or small teams where the product manager may need to be in the details. * 1:10 - As the team and company grows, a product manager may manage larger engineering teams. Sometimes it's one large team or multiple engineering teams. Since product managers don't have time to be in the details for every project, they are expected to work at a higher level on setting product vision and direction rather than detailed product requirements. It is common for senior product managers to manage multiple teams. * 1:7 - This is the sweet spot where a product manager can still get into the details of a project while also having a lot of impact with a team of this size.

There's a lot written about basic PM competencies (https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/), and for any PM on my team, they should be able to do all these things you'd expect from a PM (write specs, understand the customer, communicate upwards and outwards, GSD). I'll focus my answer on a few attributes that I think are really "make-or-break" for me: * Good communication skills, both written and verbal, are an absolute must-have for any PM on my team. Whether it's through writing specs, influencing stakeholders, or pitching product ideas, PMs have to be able to communicate effectively across mediums (written, verbal), forums (large groups vs. small groups vs 1:1) and audiences (to developers, marketers, sales, executives). In particular, they need to be able to tell good stories (e.g.,, can they get their team inspired about an idea?), structure their communication effectively (e.g., can break down ambiguous problems using a framework?) and make technical concepts easy to understand for non-technical folks (e.g., can they explain how routers work to someone without a CS background?) * Great PMs "own" the problem. They're not afraid the step outside the boundaries of their function to do what it takes to get the product out the door. They rarely ever use phrases like "that's not my job" or "this was the designer/developers responsibility". Their strong sense of ownership of the problem leads them to passionately debate about the right solution, speak truth to power when necessary, but also be open to other points of view (because it's not about "them", it's about solving the problem).

Great question. It's really hard to prioritize small, iterative product improvements against large new features/bets. In my experience you need both, as well as a few other aspects. The way we do it in my teams is to think of it as balancing investment levels between different buckets, and to dedicate capacity to each of these buckets. Otherwise it's a constant struggle. We've tried to describe it in this section of the Atlassian product discovery handbook talking about ideas, and that one about prioritization. A couple of different types of buckets: * Boulders, rocks and pebbles * Boulders: large investments with potentially big payoff but high uncertainty, too. E.g. one or multiple teams over one or multiple quarters. * Rocks: medium sized investments with fewer risks, but potential for delighting users. E.g. one team for a month. * Pebbles: Small, typically straightforward change. E.g. one person for a week. * Don't underestimate the impact of rocks and pebbles! In my experience users LOVE to see the app they use get better every time, that's a great way to create fans. * RUF: Reliability + Usability improvements + new Features. Think of the RUF framework as a pyramid: * At the base of the pyramid there's Reliability. Reliability is about building trust. Trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed very quickly — a single event of data loss or security breach can be a serious source of churn, let alone repeat incidents. So you need to invest in your product's reliability first and foremost. * Usability Improvements comes second: a feature is rarely “done” — it’s part of a system and that system needs constant tuning. In your roadmap, it is important to allocate budget and resources to keep investing in improving your current feature set. * At the top of the pyramid is new features, both large and small. Then you decide how you want to invest in each: E.g. for a super early stage app you might be spending all your time on boulders and rocks, and little in reliability or usability improvements. For a more mature product you might spend 50% in the reliability bucket and only 10-20% on new features. Then how you actually implement that in your team can vary. In my teams we look at it at investment over time: we might be focusing on a boulder for a quarter, then go back and tackle a few rocks and pebbles. Some of the teams have a rotation where 1 engineer is focusing on pebbles each week. etc. But the important part is to have a strategy and make it a conscious choice, vs something that you react to every time you get a new request from a customer or stakeholder.

Will add my favorite question to ask the managers of product managers (GPM, Director and above): "Tell me about a product manager you've worked with, and who's better than you and inspires you. What about them makes you say so?" Best answers usually involve leaders speaking about people on their team (reports etc), or someone more junior than them who they helped grow. If someone has been a people manager for a decade or longer, and they have never had a more junior person on the team who's better than them, this makes me probe more into their ability to lead, recognize talent and be humble enough to see that someone has better craft skills than they do. As a leader, you are guaranteed to have to lead people who are smarter, better and more talented than you. Having the humility to recognize that and work with it is key to scaling as a product leader and being able to attract and retain talented folks.

Ultimately Product Management is about people. I do approach stakeholders differently, but it’s based on who they are, rather their role. Some stakeholders like to be consulted ahead of time, some prefer being briefed in bigger forums where they can gauge the reactions of others. Some like structured approaches, others react to the anecdotal evidence. Some may have specific trigger points on specific topics. Part of my role is to understand those differences and be able to navigate through them.

Collaborating with Product Marketing is a key part of any product's success. In smaller teams/companies, that role can fall on to the Product Manager directly, whereas at bigger organizations that is a more dedicated role. I am fortunate now at Cisco to have access to some of the best product marketing resources in the business. The work that we do together from product strategy, execution planning, and external marketing helps ensure our business objectives are met and made visible within our specific market. We work closely throughout the GTM process and fostering this relationship is one of the key components to a solid product launch.

No-one can, or should ever be sure that they have a 100% right product strategy. But you can do a lot to de-risk your approach, and your tactics should vary depending on how much time you have to plan. * Is your strategy ultimately going to drive the change in behaviour you want? Find the key participants in your strategy -- e.g. the customers -- and talk, talk, talk to them. You'll learn a ton from the first 5-10 conversations, and suddenly you'll start to hear the same themes and be able to predict what they'll say. Then you can move on. * Read, and connect with people who are familiar with this situation in your industry or other industries. How did things work out? Is the current market / environment similar enough that you can draw conclusions? * The more experienced you are, the more confident you can be about relying on product intuition. A phrase I often use is "we've seen this movie before" and, it's surprising how many times the same situation gets repeated.

This is a good one. I think there are two that often get missed and largely it is because they are hard to measure and expensive to move. 1. Product excellence. How do you measure customer delight in an impactful way? CSAT and NPS have lots of opportunities to be gamed and are frankly easily ignored. Some of the best products I've used focus on finding the right critical user journeys and continuously measure the success rates of those quantitatively and qualitatively 2. Product health. Cold boot, warm boot, latency for critical actions, crashes, uptime. All of these things contribute to Product excellence but are much more directly measurable and can really sneak up on you