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I’m assuming the question is about setting a ‘team’ vision/mission and one doesn’t exist yet. The mission statement is the “What” and the vision statement is an ambitious future state of what the world might look like when you accomplish your mission. A crisp vision/mission statement serves as a strong identity for your team and guides them during critical moments of decision making, gaining alignment, prioritizing resources etc. Here is a framework that I’ve leveraged in the past to arrive at a vision/mission statement for my teams, collaborating with our cross-functional partners. Have e...

“Rushing to prove value” is one of the common pitfalls of starting in a new role. Having said that, you want to make steady and incremental progress in delivering value. See my response to the question "What's your best product management 30-60-90 day plan to make a big impact at a new company?" for the framework you can adopt for a 30-60-90 day ramp up plan. Here I’ll outline some quick wins you can aim for but I can’t stress enough on not coming across as ‘rushed’. * Relationship building with your team. Get to know them better as individuals, take the lead on setting up that recurri...

The listening tour is what I love most while taking on a new role. I’m a social person and I love meeting people. What better than getting to know the people you are going to work closely with? I typically have a ledger that I carry with me into these 1:1 conversations with my cross functional team members and take notes diligently. This also helps me to organize those into themes. Towards the end of my 30-60-90 day ramp up, I do a share out of my perspective on what works, what doesnt and where we could do better. Here is how my 1:1 conversations during the listening tour are structured -...

I’ll apply the framework outlined above to this question and talk about setting up a Technical PM function for the first time. 30 days of LEARNING: I’ll start with a listening tour, meeting with all cross-functional leaders (Engineering, Data Science, Design, Marketing, Operations etc) and trying to understand where the Technical PMs can add value. I usually get a list of all the areas where help is needed. I ensure that the expectations from the team aligns with the Technical PM job profile and career expectations defined for that job profile. Next I get a deeper understanding of the foll...

I worked at Microsoft for about a decade and then moved to Meta to take on a new role, a few years back. That was the most unsettling period of my professional life. I’ve gotten accustomed to a certain culture, way of work life, people, tools & processes etc at one company and the thought of having to do it all over again was intimidating. I decided to build a 30-60-90-day plan in my new role at Meta to provide clarity to my team (and to my manager, myself) about how I’m going to ramp up. Deborah Liu, currently CEO at Ancestry, who was at Meta at that time, pioneered a template that is wid...

This is a question that is close to my heart and I love to see folks transition from Product Owners to Stellar PMs. Taking a step back, I truly love to see people become the best versions of themselves and it doesn't matter if they are Product Owners, Product Managers, Program Managers or any & every role they like to see themselves in!  The key to excel in any of these roles is to understand that every role has a few basic requirements but once they are met, there is the opportunity to bring a lot of creativity, one's unique interests and leverage the strengths that you bring to the table...

* Product Vision is similar to a compass for explorers! Product Vision sets the North Star for the product teams and ensures that the Product Principles, Values & Strategy aligns with the Vision on a daily basis * Its easy for Product teams to devolve into a mess of features or play catch-up to competitors, etc without a singular vision thats bigger than the team's daily activities. Sony Ericcson, Nokia & Blackberry (smartphones), Bolt (electic cars) or Yahoo (Consumer & AdTech) are examples of firms that lost sight of their vision

* Data & Metrics are at the heart of every product, be it Consumer, Enterprise or Platform. A metrics tree or hierarchy is critical and should follow the Execute -> Features -> Roadmap -> Strategy -> Vision structure highlighted in another question * The metrics dashboard should track the metrics across these different parts of the Product Strategy Stack. Each level of metrics is relevant for a different stakeholder or leadership layer in the firm. The metrics around Company Vision & Mission matter for the Exeuctive Leadership team, the metrics around the Company & Pr...

Product teams and firms should think about the relatioship between the Product, features & goals, the products' & companies' roadmap and finally the company strategy & mission! All these are related and are critical to build disruptve firms at scale * Company Mission is how the world sees your company and the change it wants to bring * Company Strategy is the logical plan to bring your company’s mission into being * Product Strategy is logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy * Product Roadmap is the sequence of features that implement the P...

* For any Product, the hierarcy, in terms of immediate to long-term is Execute -> Features -> Roadmap -> Strategy -> Vision * The focus for any product team should be to execute & launch and then working on the features & building on the roadmap from a bottoms-up perspective. They should also embark on a top-down appraoch of understanding the market landscape, the user problems they can solve profitably and setting the vision. The intersection of these approaches can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to a few years and depends on the stage of the firm, th...