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Twilio

Twilio

Twilio Overview
Website: twilio.com
Employees: 7750
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Founded: 2008
About
Twilio is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web serv...

Insights from the Twilio Product Management Team

Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
I've noticed it's pretty common that this role can be overlooked / under resourced. Instead, companies will rely on product ops being addressed via a team effort between Product Market & Product Management. I tend to think every meaningful product within a company should be set up as a 'mini company' within the parent company. In this way, I'd see prod ops more widely understood as a COO of a specific product / set of products.
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1203 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
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.
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10794 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
Ultimately I define success as new customer acquisition, ARR, and realized revenue. However, I also think it's critical to establish strong feedback loops across departments & customers to understand how successfully you're building a connected culture that your customers & internal stakeholder teams feel good about engaging with. I say this because I've noticed that product teams can often operate in a fairly isolated way- remaining in a world of engineer-to-engineer and this can sometimes inhibit growth, learning and success. 
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634 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
It all depends on the size of the product and requirements scope. I tend to see this role as a right-hand to product VPs / GMs, so oversight of the product portfolio within that construct often determines the scope for the prod ops person. Alternativley, I've also seen the role built out in a way that's similar to product marketing. 
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869 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
Great communication and intellectual honestly are of the main traits I look for. It's pretty important to be extremely resourceful and confident in one's ability to make a lot with a little and to influence teams to buy into your mission enough that they want to contribute / jump in. I also get really excited when I meet people who have had experience in both product and GTM organizations and have a competence in translating across teams / tying both worlds together. It's pretty rare, but I see it being more and more critical.
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878 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
30: listen, learn, pull data, conduct cross-dept & key stakeholder interviews. Immediately get with finance to understand the product business model & resourcing. 60: Propose high / medium / low plans in alignment with revenue / customer acquisition targets. Get approvals across key stakeholders. 90: Start phased build against proposed plans. Run internal campaign across key leaders / stakeholders to socialize plan, timelines, feedback loops.
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1351 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
I've found it's been critical to feel competent in running a business end-to-end. By this, I mean I've focused on taking a 360 view regardless of where I've sat within my organization (be it product or GTM). Every product needs buy-in across the entire village to make it successful- GTM, support, customer success, legal, partners, product / engineering, etc. Being great at communicating with and influencing engineers, for example, is a wonderful trait, but success comes out of one's ability to translate goals & requirements + drive consensus across departments. The key tools I've consistently relied upon to help translate goals and build consensus / cross-department support are 1) a solid business model & 2) a resourcing plan. If, for example, a product team sets a certain revenue forecast without GTM owning the targets, support designating capacity, partners enablement, etc. it's a recipe for underachievement and conflict across teams. Business models / resourcing plans pull teams together to agree on targets and prioritization. Surprisingly, I've found that more times than not, these key assets are either missing or incomplete, but it's absolutely worth the time to partner with finance to establish a great baseline that you can use to drive more productive and actionable conversations. The whole goal is to get all departments collaborating together to row the same boat in the same direction toward your product's success. Lastly- I'd say it's critical to feel really comfortable being able to zoom out just as quickly as you can zoom in. This role requires that you can get your hands dirty in building processes and tools and running fault analysis (pretty much all the time), but I've seen too many people get stuck in the weeds at the cost of the bigger picture / vision / goals. Alternatively, I've also run into many examples where folks can stay too high level and big picture at the cost of timely execution. Walking the middle line can be challenging, but in my opinion, it's a very big part of being successful in the role.
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1348 Views
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology PartnersApril 28
Data teams are critical partners to product ops. I've tended to structure product operations as the owners of the plan, strategies, operations, outcomes. We partner with data teams to inform strategies, measure ops effectiveness and report on growth / trends. As part of a product resourcing plan, having data team alignment / designation is critical. 
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645 Views
Tasha Alfano
Twilio Staff Product Manager, SDKs and LibrariesFebruary 10
The framework I use for setting KPIs for a new product or area typically looks something like this: 1. Framing: I think big picture about the product, what is the purpose, and how can I measure whether or not we are tracking towards that ultimate purpose. This can even be thought of in terms of a user story, “As an [x] user, I want to be able to [y], so that [z].” 2. Brainstorming: I like to start with many different categories that we can consider for KPIs such as usage, adoption, customer sentiment (NPS), sales friction, impacted ARR, tangentially related products, direct ties to business value, the list goes on. During this time I recommend not curating the list. 3. Crowdsourcing: At this point, enlist your team to keep building off this list. I can’t say this enough - Product Management is not a one person team. I just went through some pretty big launches and the core working team of PMM, engineering, product operations, customer success, and PM all collaborated on the many facets of the launch. Work is way more fun this way and you get the benefit of an entire teams collective experience. 4. Prioritizing: This is where the focus comes in. I recommend whittling down your target KPIs list to a few items that you can talk about and share often to really focus on. I'm definitely guilty of having a ton of different items on my dashboard, and those extra things can definitely be useful to understand what is happening with your product in the market. When it comes time to share cross functionally or with a leadership team, I find that fewer, focused targets can be useful. 5. Measuring: Whichever framework you like to work with, OKRs, KPIs, BPMs, make sure you are able to measure your targets. 6. Iterating: Start tracking, making reports or dashboards, sharing, and analyzing. Without the analysis we just have data points on a page. Ask for feedback and adjust when needed. When in doubt, share again! 
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1234 Views
Tasha Alfano
Twilio Staff Product Manager, SDKs and LibrariesFebruary 10
I’ve worked with developer focused tooling for almost 7 years so I know exactly what you mean here. On almost every new feature or product our teams put into motion, we have a huge list of factors to consider such as security, legal, or billing. For developer tooling, there’s usually no change to pricing or billing, no new SKU. Does that mean these types of products don't provide value? No way! Libraries, SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and other developer focused tools are a huge part of the overall product. They can open your product up in a way to create value you never imagined. When it comes to making a business case for investing in a product feature or measuring value created by these efforts, I look at other ways the business will be impacted. Will this feature help reduce friction in the sales cycle, or is this library a market differentiator amongst similar products? Will change this improve customer sentiment if we roll it out? Will it help accelerate time to value for our customers? Will it help our customers operationalize including our product in their stack and ultimately make our product more sticky within an organization? You can put KPIs, metrics, and even dollar values around so many of these items.
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1602 Views