AMA: Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence), Paresh Vakhariya on Building a Product Management Team

As a PM leader, it is imperative to balance individual work and managing teams of PM's. There are some key tasks I would focus on as an IC such as setting up the right vision/strategy for the entire group, clear business metrics and customer impact that need to be communicated across the organization (and to leadership) In terms of coaching PM's, I would focus on 3 areas: * Clear team wide priorities and OKR's: make sure the team is focusing on an overall goal to achieve. The way each PM+team might do it may vary but eventually the broader metric or goal should be well thought out and communicated * Feedback and resources to PM's: allow the team to share feedback and updates on their roadmap so that there are regular updates on how everyone is doing on the broader mission. Provide consistent templates for all PM's to utilize to communicate their progress. Make sure the team and individual successes are celebrated. * Blocker removal: address conflicts, resourcing gaps, team member performance, or other issues as they come up. There will be some inherent conflict in terms of time allocation but eventually coaching the team becomes a priority over individual project areas.

It is important to tailor your communication methods to your company's culture, teams, projects and their needs. Here are some of my favorites ones: 1. Slack (messaging) Updates: Send out regular email updates to relevant stakeholders via short but sweet Slack messages. These updates can recent product launches, upcoming features, and any significant metrics or even challenges. 2. Town Hall Meetings: Hold regular meetings to share updates. This could be a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting where you can share more details (beyond Slack). 3. Centralized Product Roadmap: accessible product roadmap that is visible to everyone. We use Jira Product Discovery which is super helpful. 4. Company wide Blogs or newsletters: Publish internal blogs or newsletters that highlight important product launches, share success stories, metrics impact etc. I use Confluence for this purpose. 5. 1:1 or team Conversations: Nothing beats meeting someone 1:1 or sharing updates in cross-functional meetings. 6. Ongoing Demos: Organize team demos on key feature rollouts or record them via tools like Loom and share them in Slack

Here is my advice for a junior PM in a small company: 1. Get to know your product. Learn to ue it everyday and document any issues you see 2. Talk to customers about their experience using your product. Document these issues 3. Create a prioritization framework: prioritize the problems you see that are biggest for the customers 4. Pick metrics you want to measure. What will drive the biggest impact for your company and customers? 5. Create a 3-6 month roadmap and share it with all your team members. Align on capacity to build these features. Only pick things that you will deliver within that timeframe. 6. Work with design and engineering on shipping these features 7. Measure impact and see if your metrics have changed. Share these learnings 8. Rinse and repeat for 6-12 months. Present to executives as needed. Make sure to build relationships, learn all relevant tools and celebrate your wins with the team!

Here is my advice for a junior PM in a small company: 1. Get to know your product. Learn to ue it everyday and document any issues you see 2. Talk to customers about their experience using your product. Document these issues 3. Create a prioritization framework: prioritize the problems you see that are biggest for the customers 4. Pick metrics you want to measure. What will drive the biggest impact for your company and customers? 5. Create a 3-6 month roadmap and share it with all your team members. Align on capacity to build these features. Only pick things that you will deliver within that timeframe. 6. Work with design and engineering on shipping these features 7. Measure impact and see if your metrics have changed. Share these learnings 8. Rinse and repeat for 6-12 months. Present to executives as needed. Make sure to build relationships, learn all relevant tools and celebrate your wins with the team!

Here are the top things I would look for in a product manager on my team: 1. Customer-Centric: understanding and serving the needs of the customers/users possibly via user interviews, surveys, or user testing. 2. Good understanding of the domain: Although this is not mandatory, it would be good to have a good understanding of the domain such as Social Networking, Security, Consumer products, Enterprise etc. 3. Communicates their ideas clearly via written and verbal communication at any level from team members to executives 4. Strategy, vision and roadmap creation: discover customer problems and deliver a roadmap that the team rallies around. 5. Data-Driven and good understanding of the metrics + impact: utilize tools such as Amplitude to make decisions. Launch experiments that measure impact 6. Tech knowledge to understand and make trade-off decisions with engineering 7. Work with a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, marketers, and other stakeholders. 8. Inspiring: ability to build a strategy and vision that everyone is inspired to achieve 9. Problem solving skills to understand and resolve issues on a daily basis.

Setting a solid product vision, strategy and a clear roadmap for atleast 3-6-12 months is the top activity for a PM leader. Some benefits of having this in place are: 1. Determine and solve customer problems 2. Clearly articulate the impact you will have on company or product metrics 3. Alignment across the entire organization on what you will deliver by and when 4. Make sure resources are allocated to the right initiatives as outlined in the roadmap 5. Inspire Engineering, Design, Marketing, Data Science and all other teams to achieve the vision 6. Communicate this roadmap and plan to executives and get their buy-in for resources and support