AMA: Aurora Solar Director of Product Management, Janet Brunckhorst on Building a Product Management Team

The fundamentals of prioritization are not too different when you're the first at a company. But in the early stages of a company or product, it's even more important to focus.  At an early stage company, or a new product at an existing company, chances are you're finding product-market fit. When thinking about prioritizing work in that context, you need to be crystal clear on the metrics that matter, and laser focused on moving them.  In my experience, developing and testing hypotheses is a gre ...Read More

The most important process you can set up is a retrospective of some kind. I talk about this in more detail in another answer, but as you add people, ensuring that you have ways of sharing and improving your processes is fundamentally important. Any process you introduce should have a strong reason for existing. While company breakpoints might point to the need for specific processes at an organizational level, within a small product team it's less prescriptive. But since you're product people, ...Read More

There's no single right way to structure any team. Some essential ingredients to creating an effective org are to create a structure that: Supports cross-functional work Aligns teams to customer problems Encourages knowledge sharing Provides for growth Your org structure will need to change as the company grows. And you will always need to account for silos, especially once the company grows beyond about 20 people. No matter what your org structure looks like, there will be silos, and you'll nee ...Read More

I generally think in terms of OKRs rather than KPIs, so here let's agree that we are talking about some shared measure of success! On our teams, Product Marketing is responsible for all communication about the product or feature to people outside the Product-Eng-Design org. They're our liaison to the outside world! That includes: Creating campaigns and collateral for customers Developing positioning documents Developing and rolling out enablement materials for go-to-market teams Implementing cam ...Read More

Great question, and it doesn't have a single answer. One thing that is important is having a consistent, accessible, forum/location for people to see: What's been released; What's coming up; Metrics; Issues/outages/major bugs. The details of how you do this will depend on a few factors: Size of your company Whether you're distributed, in-person, or hybrid The type of space/collaboration tools you use The team culture For example, a very small, in-person team might rely on a weekly Iteration Plan ...Read More

I'm a strong believer in "just enough" process, so my answer to questions like this is always some version of "it depends"! The one piece of process that every team must have is a way to reflect on, and incrementally improve, they way they work together. You can call this process whatever you like - "reflection", "retrospective", "after-action review", "post-mortem" - but it is imperative to building an effective team.  This practice will inform the way you introduce and evolve processes as your ...Read More