Communities
Sign Up / Sign In
AMA: Amplitude Vice President, Product Management, Ibrahim Bashir on Establishing Product Management
July 7 @ 10:00AM PST
View AMA Answers
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management, Ibrahim Bashir on Establishing Product Management
Top Questions
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
My # goal is to provide leverage around the strategy: * If we're having impact, accelerate and expand * If we're not having impact, get into that mode * ensure all work connects to top level outcomes * anything that derives from the above (alignment on strategy, hiring PMs, initiating /......Read More
274 Views
3 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
I think the PM role can be very narrow when there are many fully staffed cross-functional partners with expertise across engineering / UX / testing / data / marketing, which leaves the PM as a dot connector and customer proxy (i.e. large company). And when many of those partner functions don't ex......Read More
268 Views
3 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
Ideally, you have "vertical" product teams whose charter is shipping end-user-facing features around a particular problem / persona. You may also have "horizontal" product teams that own certain shared services / infrastructure / components that multiple vertical teams leverage. These teams will ......Read More
352 Views
6 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
I would start with minor tweaks to the existing process vs trying to completely re-do things - most changes that stick only tweak 1 variable at a time vs trying to change the whole system. So I would certainly not come in and try to redefine how ideation, scoping, planning, commits, shipping, rev......Read More
448 Views
3 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
There are obviously a bunch of goal setting / tracking frameworks that are designed to do this (for example OKRs) but I tend to start with where and why any misalignment exists - usually there are 4 levers, and they all come back to strategy: 1. is the strategy clearly written? 2. is the str......Read More
1000 Views
1 request
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
The biggest challenge comes from cross-functional partners (engineering, sales, marketing) who may not have prior experience partnering with PMs and aren't bought in to introducing the function. The real value of a PM is to have a dedicated resource thinking about what the highest-leverage activi......Read More
292 Views
2 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
I try and start with a combined top-down / bottom-up exercise. Top-down: what are the top 1-3 business objectives that we can move the needle on with product work? Let's prioritize those. Bottom-up: what is the bare minimum keep-the-lights-on staffing level required to run our service / bus......Read More
384 Views
2 requests
Ibrahim Bashir
Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • July 7
This does happen, and it's usually the result of a communication / execution dysfunction. To start with, no salesperson wakes up and says let me go around and undermine the PM - they usually have trying to follow a process that doesn't work and eventually take matters into their own hands becuase......Read More
721 Views
1 request
Upcoming AMA's
Show All