AMA: Atlassian Group Product Manager, Trello, Victor Dronov on Product Management Career Path

Product Manager position could be optional. A team building a software product will have someone fulfilling a product manager role either way. Who will take accountability for the market success of team’s work? Who will deeply understand the market, the customer and their pain worth solving? Who will fight for the team inside of the organization to acquire needed resources and to defend existing? Who will be a “PR manager” building team’s brand inside of the organization? Who will detect early l ...Read More

PM work life is a firehose of Slack/Teams message, customer emails, meeting requests and deadlines. Here is what I find helpful to make sense of the chaos and stay on top of the key things. Capture, Organize, Get Shit Done. Resist the urge to jump on every message or email the same moment - you may find yourself exhausted while still behind on your goals. Instead, find a tool which lets you to quickly “capture” a thing which require your attention - and move on. Organize these to-dos thoughtfull ...Read More

Here are some of the areas one can look to potentially increase engineering team velocity, i.e. do more over the same period of time. Cross-craft collaboration: PM, UX and Engineering. Do you make decisions quickly, or spend a lot of time debating the direction? Do you trust each other? Do people have to go back to PM for clarifications all the time (and stay blocked, while waiting for such clarification)? External dependencies: are you sell-sufficient working on your thing, or have to rely on o ...Read More

Let me assume you are staying within your software (or hardware) realm, as switching from software to hardware product management (or vice versa) could be way steeper hill than entering a new domain like AR/VR. Here is something that would made me seriously consider a candidate without a specialized AR/VR experience - for an AR/VR position: Stellar track record in non AR/VR product management. You rock as a product manager - many will consider this more valuable than hands-on with the domain. Th ...Read More

Okay, you are not happy with your recent track record - good opportunity to flex your analysis, story telling and “marketer” muscle. Goals. These features didn’t seem to support your goal - but they likely supported someone else’s (even if you were unhappy about it)? Demonstrate how you supported supported those goals or how you thought outside of the scope of your immediate team, to support some fellow team. Learning. Did these features fail, though you knew this from the start? Focus your stor ...Read More