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.

Design a product for drivers driving in rush hour. I am betting every human stuck in traffic has once thought... “Dang this traffic sucks, I wish I could [insert idea].” The best answer I’ve heard is a tablet-sized visual, that is connected to the internet with key apps such as email, song playlist, podcasts, call functionality; along with the capability for partial self-driving in traffic. Once in rush-hour it kicks in, frees your attention to do other things, improves health of the driver by reducing both physical and psychological strain of commuting in rush hours and is highly scalable to autonomous-capable vehicles. I liked the answer because I’d buy this product 🤪 but also because the answer was (1) optimized for reducing real pain points (2) accounted for the future of driving (3) was a little wild, but not too out there. When I heard this answer I could tell the PM was both imaginative but grounded in solving real problems.

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.

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.

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. 

The answer depends on the stage of company and product you're working on. At Vanta, where we're growing very quickly and are still formulating many of our process, I've found that the most successful PMs / candidates: * Customer focus. I look for past examples where they have deeply understood their customers and users. * Agency and comfort with ambiguity. In high growth environments, there often isn't a beaten path. PMs need to be able to make progress and drive when there's not one. * Commercial mindset. The best PMs don't just think about what to ship, but think about how to position what they're shipping in the context of the market.

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.

A super common question! Traditionally the term "product manager" can often mean different things depending on the size of the company, the product's stage, and sometimes the overall market segment. I often times bucket them into these core groups: 1. Technical Product Managers (TPM): These PMs work closely with engineering teams on more technical products, thinks like API driven products where the end "customer" is technical in nature. For these roles, you will need a deeper level of technical expertise and the ability to understand the technical aspects of your customers needs. 2. B2C (Business to Consumer) Product Managers: In a consumer-facing environment—like mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, media consumption products — I find that PMs often emphasize UX and product design (along with core PM responsibilities). One of the key areas that this group focuses on is leveraging a typically broader/larger customer base to do things like A/B testing, and quick iteration on product designs to validate assumptions and feature value. 3. B2B (Business to Business) Enterprise Product Managers: These enterprise PMs focus on delivering products that solve businesses' complex problems. I spent a lot of my career here and this type of PM spends a lot of time on sales enablement, strategic account engagement, and roadmap management. Given that most B2B solutions have a longer sales cycle, their relationship with sales is key to success. Depending on the size of the organization, this type of PM also focuses a lot on the financial side of the product. 4. Infrastructure Product Managers: These PMs (sometimes internally facing only) focus on building components that other teams and products rely on, oftentimes within an organization. For them, the GTM isn't as relevant but they need to understand and balance things like scale, interoperability, and business alignment. Figuring Out Your Best Fit: 1. What are your Interests: Consider things like Do you enjoy getting into the weeds on technical discussions? Do you more get energized by user research and design? Do you geek out over analytical data and love looking at usage metrics to drive feature development? Each type of role has a different focus, so find the things that excite you. 2. Consider the Environment Do you want to reach a huge market of customers and iterate on minor feature developments and enhancements? Or do you want to work closely with larger business customers and develop a deeper understanding of their problems and how your product can evolve to meet those specific needs? No right or wrong answer, just what gets you pumped up each day. Remember, it’s about aligning your career desires, your core strengths, and the types of challenges that get you fired up to solve each day. We are problem solvers, so what types of problems do you love solving and how do you like solving them? Many PMs start in one area and end up in another. All the roles share a common framework of ensuring we are delivering business value for our organization and delighting our customers with innovative and useful solutions to problems they either have or don't even realize they have yet.

Great question! The move from Senior PM to Director level and above is a challenging one. In general, the change really involves the transition from product management to product leadership. You are typically going from managing one team at a high level with one roadmap and no direct reports to a role managing multiple teams at a high level with multiple roadmaps and direct reports AND driving an effective vision & strategy for your portfolio that brings those elements together AND provide tools and conditions for the whole org to get better at being PMs. Whew! Given the changes in responsibilities, you’re likely going to have to evolve into performing at the Director level so you can set your” opportunity table” for a Director opportunity. Given where the Senior PM level usually sits, here are probably the kinds of skills and experiences you’ll need to try to acquire: 1. Learn how to manage and mentor people. Does your company hire interns? Manage one or more of them! Does your company hire new people that need mentors? Become a mentor! Manage people volunteering somewhere! There’s lots of ways to get skills and experience here, great books too (Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek I highly recommend.) But in general the best teacher for managing people is experience. 2. Learn how to build product strategies at the portfolio level. If you’ve gotten to the Senior PM level, you probably know how to develop a strategy for your product or feature. But doing this as a portfolio level is different. It requires thinking longer term about multiple teams with multiple strategies & roadmaps. The best way to learn this skill is to take on the responsibility of doing this or sharing it with your boss or higher-ups. This is a stretch to do in the beginning, but the more you do it the better you get at it. Some good practice is also crafting strategies for products you like or companies you admire. See how many of them come true and how right or wrong you were. Learn, rinse and repeat. I also recommend Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rummelt. Amazing book on this topic. 3. Help your fellow PMs in the org level up via skills like org design, policy design, tooling upgrades, etc. Basically practice the art of leveling up a team by creating an environment for PMs to level up and do great work. Think about your own experience doing your best work. What kinds of tools, policies and cultural norms were in place that really helped you level up? Now think of ways you can get from where you are today to that ideal. What tools do you need? What policies need to change? How does the culture need to change? From here, learn how to drive the highest priority items. You don’t need to be a Director for this, you can pursue it by speaking up in feedback forums on these topics, work with your peers or managers to make things happen, etc. If someone was taking initiative here, you can bet managers will be considering them for leadership spots. That’s the high level summary! The opportunity actually presenting itself requires being at a company where there is a need for someone at that level, which requires a bit of luck and timing. So all places aren’t going to be best fits for you, and you should assess that on your own as well. As for types of tracks, PM leadership skills are pretty transferrable. Director, Senior Director and VP are more traditional paths. But I’ve seen old bosses and colleagues go lots of different ways. Something I hear a lot is that the PM role prepares you for being a start-up CEO. Have certainly seen that happen! An old boss is CEO now. But I’ve also seen lots of people end up in Marketing, Design, Engineering, Strategy…there’s no one set path!

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