AMA: Atlassian Head of Product Management, Narmada Jayasankar on Product Management Skills

Very relevant question for the times we live in. I'm going to focus on how PMs at Atlassian are using AI to augment their workflow, since that has been a huge focus for us. Refining your writing - Atlassian has a very strong written culture, especially within the PM team. This how we communicate ideas, strategies and influence stakeholders. It's no surprise that we leverage Confluence very heavily and the AI features help PMs go from rough draft to a polished document pretty quickly. Consuming w ...Read More

It's prevalant myth that PMs make all the decisions. They make some of the decisions but not all of the decisions. But, a PM is definitely responsible for making sure their team can make high quality decisions at a fast pace. They do this by making sure their teams have access to the right information at the right time. Some examples of how successful PMs do this are Helping the team understand the company / department strategy - This is typically presented to the team as the business context dr ...Read More

In my opinion, building influence with your engineering team boils down to these 3 things Understanding engineering complexity even if don't quite grasp all the details eg. do you understand the cost (experience implications, impact to future team velocity etc.) of having tech debt when you ask your engineering team take short cuts? Being able to represent the engineering considerations in forums where your engineering team is not present eg. discussions with the sales team where they ask for sp ...Read More

Here are some of the common mistakes I've seen (and done!) PMs make that results in not getting buy-in for your roadmap Not aligning on the outcome explicitly - What is the outcome (Revenue?, better customer experience?, Faster time to market?) your are driving with your roadmap and is that clear to your stakeholder? Is your stakeholder aligned on this outcome? If they are not, then the buy-in for your roadmap means nothing because there will be misalignments on many decisions you will need to m ...Read More

While project management and product management require similar soft skills (communication, negotiation, structured approach etc.) there are some fundamental differences. For instance, project managers need to be risk averse because their job is to make sure projects are delivered as promised. Whereas, product managers must have a higher risk appetite as their job is to maximize outcome for the business and must explore unconventional paths get to the outcome. So it's important to recognize that ...Read More

At every level, the core PM competencies of driving clarity and alignment through clear communication, delivering measurable outcomes for the business and influencing without authority remain the same. But the ambiguity within you are required to clarity, the impact of the outcomes you drive and the seniority of the stakeholders you influence increase as you become more senior. If your are a people manager, the size of the PM team, and the diversity of PM roles within the team, increases as you ...Read More

It's hard form be to give specific advice to you without more context about your situation such as who is assigning these tasks to. Is this your manager? If yes, my first thought is, does your team / organization understand the value product managers bring? Is there a strong focus on product management craft? If the answer is no, then you have 2 options Try to build an understanding of the product management craft within your organization. This only works if you are sufficiently senior in the or ...Read More

I have a strong bias towards data-informed approach over a data-driven approach as I believe that data is just one of the many inputs that product manager needs to consider for decision making. There will also be many situations where you will need to make decisions when data isn't available or it's imperfect. In some of these situations, you may not have the choice to wait for data to become available. So, you need to be able to leverage your intuition to make decisions and keep making progress ...Read More