AMA: Asana Product Management Lead, AI, Rodrigo Davies on Establishing Product Management

It's important to differentiate size of company and stage of company here, although there are some overlaps. The larger a company, the more stakeholders a PM needs to manage, and the more important it is to scale impact by having defined processes that speed up decisions and drive alignment. PMs are usually the folks who design and run these processes, so at a larger company that becomes a greater part of the role. The more mature a company, the more the role of PM is dealing with known problems and metrics, and optimizing the product's performance within those bounds. At an earlier stage company (e.g. pre-product-market fit), there are many more unknowns and more incomplete information, so it's more important for PMs to move quickly and creatively to validate/invalidate hypotheses, and be prepared to pivot their (and the company's) thinking regularly. Of course there are lots of mature companies launching new business lines or trying new strategies, where those early stage PM skills will be essential.

This is obviously very context-specific, but here are some ideas: 30 days: * Understand the business strategy, what stakeholders want and levels of confidence * Understand the customer base, what's known and not known, and sit in on sales calls and UX research (if that's happening). * Understand how the company is shipping product today and where the problems are * Understand what data the company has and what else could be collected * Build high-trust relationships with your peers and leadership stakeholders * Understand what key team members hope for from product management and what they fear * Identify the first high-impact / low-medium effort project or priority that a product manager could accelerate/unblock/deliver, and do it. Model "what a PM does" on a small scale. 60 days: * Meet and build trust with the next layer of stakeholders – if this is e.g. a 20-person startup, this probably means you've talked with every person at the company. * Meet as many of the most important customers that you can. If there isn't a UX research cadence, lead some research to validate the company's top product priorities and bring cross-functional partners along for the ride. * Share what you've learned about where the org is, and the problems you're going to work on, with your stakeholders (and possibly the whole company). Get feedback and enlist collaborators to work with you. 90 days: * Share your recommendations for how the product strategy should evolve or change based on your investigations at 60 days. * Depending on what you found at 30/60 days, you might prioritize: * Establishing a cadence of customer research that you lead but other functions participate in regularly * Defining a product prioritization and development process to help the team ship faster and with higher quality * Regularly analyzing metrics and sharing learnings with the team, and using it to drive decisions

I think this starts with making sure that your design counterparts understand the business strategy and have deep empathy for the customers you're serving. Without those two ingredients, it's hard for anyone to think strategically. As a PM you should invest time in helping design understand the business and customers by sharing what you know – that's a prerequisite – and then regularly invite designers to co-create strategy with you. For instance, share a strategic problem you're struggling to solve, and ask for advice.

If you're the first PM, building trust is your #1 priority. So I'd start with curiosity about their ideas – where are they getting them from? How are they validating them? What have they learned so far? Where are they getting stuck? It's possible that their ideas are based on some notion of a customer that you can expand and make concrete, by introducing the team to real customers and their needs. If they're not, it's likely the team is running into trouble getting traction for their ideas, and you can find customers to give your team feedback on why the current set of ideas aren't a fit for the problems those customers have. Either way, I would start by exposing your engineers to real customers – through video interviews, or in person, so they can build empathy and understand who they're trying to serve. For example, you might consider inviting engineers to join user research sessions, record the sessions, and share highlights and learnings every week.

The one attribute that is hardest to coach and most likely to be make-or-break is customer centricity. It's essential that PMs always start with the customer and their needs, and are extremely curious about them. This often comes through in case study-style interviews: some candidates can generate interesting solution ideas without being customer centric, but they will likely then find it hard to explain why they made certain choices over others without a foundation in which customer they're serving and what their needs are. It still surprises me how often folks forget this.