AMA: Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Strategy & Planning, Natalia Baryshnikova on Building a Product Management Team

At Atlassian - and I know this is true for other product organization with a strong writing culture - we invest a lot into internal comms about PM updates and activities. My general recommendation is a ratio of 80/20 for sharing updates async (think in writing or recorded form) vs sync (think enablement calls for your sales/customer success teams). My favorite examples of async updates that keep the team informed, and their frequency that has worked best for my teams: Weekly Loom updates (or any ...Read More

It's easy for teams to over-index on day to day customer issues and lose sight of innovation; the opposite is unlikely. If your team has customer focus figured out (if not, tackle that first), there are three things that have worked well for my teams to keep the balance: Every member of the team (especially junior!) understands and can speak to the big picture product strategy and market Intentional and structured approach to include customers into discovery (vs letting them always drive the age ...Read More

First, let's define what "well-rounded" means. Commonly, there are a few types of parameters that go into this: Seniority balance - you don't want the team to be all too senior or too junior Skillset type - this often implies having a diverse team with a variety of backgrounds and life experiences that shape their skills Newbie/oldie ratio - often overlooked, but I believe teams perform best when they have a steady, but not overwhelming influx of new voices I would argue that the definition of w ...Read More

The hardest part in this scenario is to accurately capture the moment when you tap out of your own capacity and need to bring on someone else. One potential framework for this: keep a list of things (as in, capabilities to explore/build) you would want to start today if you had bandwidth; the moment this list has five items on it is the time to hire another PM. Make sure you're honest with yourself and only list things that you 100% believe in and that are truly major, not small improvements. Th ...Read More

There is nothing inherently wrong with having someone with a title "product manager" reside on a CX team. The caveat is depending on what the expected scope of that PM is, they may not be set up for success, or they even may be playing a role that (unintentionally) puts customers at a disadvantage. Situations when it's good to have PMs be a part of CX org: They help build internal tooling for CX or integrate company's own product and CX internal tooling in ways that helps teams better understand ...Read More