AMA: Chainguard Sr. Director of Product Management and Design, Julian Dunn on Building a Product Management Team

There is not one, uniform KPI that I think product teams completely miss. What I see sometimes is the lack of a value thesis: product managers wave around metrics they want to collect, but they don't have a hypothesis about the target for that metric and on what timeline after feature delivery they expect to see that target achieved. Now, being mindful of Goodhart's Law, I usually tell PMs that I'm unlikely to hold them accountable to these targets if they have a good explanation for why they we ...Read More

Rare is the engineering leader today who has never worked with product managers. The issue is that sometimes they misunderstand what modern product management looks like: it's not (primarily) about project management, it's not about prioritizing every single thing that engineering is working on, and it certainly isn't about being accountable for engineering's own delivery accuracy. These values and beliefs may be a surprise to some engineering leaders, and it's natural for them to push back if t ...Read More

In these situations, I hope you've aligned with leadership on the reasons for them to hire a PM (sometimes their first PM) before you join the team, whether that's as an internal transfer or an external hire. If you aren't on the same page about the problems they are trying to solve by hiring you, and also how much autonomy/decision-making they are going to let you have once you get there, it's going to be a bad time: leadership is going to be frustrated when you start asking a lot of questions ...Read More

To me, this is less a question of literally number of PM bodies to engineering bodies; that depends on the company, its context, the complexity of its products, and many other factors. Instead, the way I think about this problem is mapping PMs to the number of logical domains within a company's product. A senior+ PM should be able to own a single domain, with its own KPIs, goals, and product strategy. Typically, this aligns a PM with an engineering manager over that domain, and underneath that E ...Read More

Just as the art of product management involves ruthlessness in making strategic choices or answering requests from customers, so it goes when there is too much surface area to cover with the PM headcount on hand. If you can't do everything, focus on the areas that are the most promising. Your rubric for deciding what needs to be covered can vary, but I use factors like: how much is the product area evolving vs. just dealing with incremental requests from customers what is its current revenue and ...Read More