AMA: Atlassian Head of Product, DevOps , Suzie Prince on Product Management Career Path

I don't think there is a typical product career path! Many of the PMs I have worked with or hired have changed careers and moved around in different roles. I see people enter from college with software engineering backgrounds, or experienced senior people moving from other software crafts such as design, engineering and project management into product management. For example, I have former startup founders and former DevOps engineers on my current PM team. If there is something typical about all ...Read More

Before working on developer products I was an technology consultant leading Agile and DevOps transformation and I have seen a lot of slow teams, get faster. Here are the common ways to improve velocity. Deliver less. Deliver the smallest possible thing you can to solve a user problem. Think you made it small, make it smaller. Put it out there and understand whether it had impact and iterate. Pull work in. Keep a flexible backlog and pull work in rather than plan weeks in advance. This ensures th ...Read More

I believe that even in situations where you "had to build the features" you can still show impact. Impact is not just about more users, more dollars for the business - impact can be about learning. If you have to ship features, use the time after you delivered them to learn and to bring that learning back to the organisation to impact the future roadmap. For example - you shipped feature x because you had to but you can still show whether feature x was impactful or not and why it was impactful o ...Read More

The most important thing is identifying a project that has the potential to be impactful for the product or business. I often see new PMs do 1 of 2 things:1. Go after easy "low hanging fruit" - this is the easy work the whole team knows we need to do but we didn't do it yet. It can be very tempting to take that work on because you will deliver it. 2. Go after the known too hard problems. These are the "we know we have to fix it at some point" problems that all products have. Newer PMs often see ...Read More

I am fortunate that Atlassian has very clear hiring guidelines for all product management roles however, in general I also look for: Flexibility. Flexibility is key for product managers, especially when tackling daily challenges. Unexpected situations happen all the time, and it's important to handle them well. I do not just look for people who can manage change, I look for those who even find joy in uncertainty and work hard to add clarity in these situations. Resilience. Building on flexibilit ...Read More

General advice is to tell as many people as possible that you want to make that career change. I see time and again that if you are successful in your current role, make it clear what you want next then opportunities will come to you.More specifically, in larger organisations the two main ways I have seen people shift into new roles is: 1. Secondments. Look for internal mobility opportunities to try the role out of a while. Often hiring managers are more open to taking on an entry level person w ...Read More