AMA: Atlassian Head Of Product Management, Confluence Experience, Natalia Baryshnikova on Developing Your Product Management Career

Will add my favorite question to ask the managers of product managers (GPM, Director and above): "Tell me about a product manager you've worked with, and who's better than you and inspires you. What about them makes you say so?" Best answers usually involve leaders speaking about people on their team (reports etc), or someone more junior than them who they helped grow. If someone has been a people manager for a decade or longer, and they have never had a more junior person on the team who's bett ...Read More

Two ways. First sweet spot is to pick a mid-size startup (round B or C) that is growing. They need folks all the time, and they need folks who can roll up their sleeves and do things. The roles you join in does not matter as much - if you prove yourself as a doer, you can later transition into a different role, such as PM.  Second is to look at established product orgs that have an APM program (we do have one at Atlassian!) This path is more suitable for recent grads that are embarking on a care ...Read More

First, like to work on problems that I am passionate about. I love to learn and make impact in areas that I think, pardon high brow speak, will make the world a better place. One such area of passion for me is helping people and teams achieve more through working together. I never even considered opportunities that I personally don't feel passionate about, as I know that would not make me happy at work. This is a privileged position to be in, and if you have to pick something in a different fram ...Read More

There is a fork in the PM career path road: one is becoming a people manager, the other becoming an expert in a deep thinking product area sans managing a team.  My recommendation is to figure out which one is right for you. Many folks want to jump into management simply because they think this is the only way to grow, make more $$$ and so on. That is not true. Big and small orgs I have been a part of value senior individual contributors that are passionate about their individual craft. Speak wi ...Read More

Ultimately, prioritization comes down to a chain of decisions. Regardless of the framework that you use, the question I see folks overlooking a lot is "who is the right person to make this decision". Is that you, the PM? Is that your manager? Or maybe, if the work relates to security vulnerabilities, is that your VP of Engineering? At Atlassian, we use the framework named DACI for all decision making documentation: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/daci The great thing about DACI is ...Read More

Startups are all about speed. To move fast, you need to know where you are going (aka what to be ruthlessly focused on) and allocate the most of your time/energy to that. Easier said than done, right? One thing that helped a lot in my early startup days was my framework of "One thing I am going to fail today".  Once you establish together with your team what you are focused on this week, month, quarter - write that down and look at it every day when planning out your work. Then, notice things th ...Read More

See my answer above on breaking into tech as a PM for one of the options. Another option, if you are a mid-to-senior career professional is to build ties with your product team internally. Product leaders need good folks all the time; I have facilitated multiple secondments of folks from other departments into product, that resulted in a successful full-time career switch for those PMs.  Chat with folks in product leadership in your company, and ask them what would it take to have a secondment o ...Read More

First thing I'd recommend is asking your team if there is a formal description of levels and skills associated with each level. More and more companies, whether large orgs or startups, actually have written descriptions of product manager levels and what those entail; the earlier you get to learn about them, the better. If there is no formal description available, I would recommend to: 1) Interview your manager of what the next level may look like, and draft a document outlining that 2) Review t ...Read More

There are three aspects to selling this well:  1. Empathy. You have to start with acknowledging the validity of a need or ask. Folks often skip that step and go straight to rebuttal. Don't do that - you need to empathize with the stakeholder, understand where they are coming from and really ponder a possibility that their ask may be a good thing to do. This is how you build trust.  2. Narrative of why not. Built upon the understanding of the stakeholder need above, you need to develop a crisp an ...Read More

At Atlassian, we look at multiple pillars of value PMs bring to the organization: delivering outcomes (think - moving business KRs and goals), leadership (inspiring others), communication, helping others grow product craft and so on.  I really love this framework. My recommendation is to first approach promotions and pay raise from a perspective of summarizing what types of value PMs in your org bring. It is not just in the "metrics", there may be other valueable things that advance the org/busi ...Read More

The biggest struggle I have observed is related to transition from an individual level product craft growth to growing that of a group. Andy Grove in High Output Management said "Managers are responsible for increasing the output of their organizations and neighboring organizations they influence". Read this sentence again and again. The learning curve is in learning how to optimize for the outputs of your team vs. your own. This means that you need to make trade-offs across your teammates and t ...Read More

1. Storytelling. You need to be able to tie many disparate pieces of product work - user needs, business goals, technical limitaitons, competitive landscape, innovation opportunities - into a coherent, compelling narrative. A director can fill in the blanks in the following sentences with ease: "This year, my team is trying to achieve _____ because our comany needs to _____. In order to reach our goal, we need resources of ______ , focus on ______ and ______ and support from ______." 2. System t ...Read More

First thing to do is to check with your manager how they think about your growth. They may be thinking that they are helping you, and it is just your perspectives that are misaligned. Ask them about their definition next level of growth for you (see answer above about growing skills for details), and then ask them how are they planning to invest in your growth - have they considered additional opportunities, challenges, projects to give to you to help you grow?  If the result of the above effort ...Read More