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Ibrahim Bashir

AMA: Amplitude Vice President, Product Management, Ibrahim Bashir on Establishing Product Management

July 7, 2022 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. Our engineering team has been building features based on ideas, and I’m the first PM. How do I change the culture and help them buy into being customer focused?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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, reviews, etc work on Day 1. But if the team already ideates then I'd try to introduce customer conversations / user research as another avenue to generate ideas, then connect the dots to show that ideas tha ...Read More

    626 Views
    3 requests

  2. What is your framework to prioritize product areas and features when you have limited engineering or product management resources as the head of the product area?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 / business? If there is any surplus from this exercise, you take on more of the backlog and can do more ambitious thing. If there is a deficit, time to deprioritize certain investment areas until the team is staffe ...Read More

    814 Views
    2 requests

  3. How do you think about your first 30/60/90 day goals when coming in as the Head of Product Management in a startup that didn't have product management before?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 / killing product bets, etc)
    434 Views
    3 requests

  4. How does product management differ between a small and large company?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 exist (i.e. small company), the PM can become a jack-of-all-trades. 

    Neither is better per se, they just offer different learning opportunitie.

    410 Views
    3 requests

  5. How do you drive alignment across all parts of the organization?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 strategy broadcast regularly?
    3. is the strategy planned logically?
    4. is the strategy executed effortlessly?
    1,721 Views
    1 request

  6. What are the challenges you have encountered establishing the product management function in product areas that do not have it？

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 activities fro the team are in service of the broader business goals and user problems, but in many orgs that role has been played piecemeal by various folks and solidifying into a formal function can feel pre ...Read More

    468 Views
    2 requests

  7. Let's say sales is making requests directly to engineering, how would you deal with that situation?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 they are accountable to the business for real revenue. Some of the things I'd diagnose if faced with this situation: is there a documented process for sales to make product requests? does any follow up ...Read More

    1,306 Views
    1 request

  8. Question about org structures - what does your product team org structure look like?

    Ibrahim Bashir
    Ibrahim Bashir

    Amplitude Vice President, Product Management • 4y

    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 usually have some combination of a engineering / product / design (EPD) functions, and may also include user research, data science, and/or quality assurance.

    690 Views
    6 requests