AMA: Fivetran Senior Director of Product Management, Core Experience, Alexa Maturana-Lowe on SMB Product Management

Every company is different but I can tell you what I've been working on as a part of my transition to product leadership: Impact - as an individual contributor I proactively drove high profile company wide initiatives that helped me to show that I could make a huge impact for the business in addition to evolving the product experience and functionality. This forced me to understand what mattered to the business and how product changes impact business outcomes and helped me to get a seat at the t ...Read More

I think the most common mistake that I see is jumping to solutions quickly. This is definitely my biggest mistake as I started as a product manager. For me, it was/is really easy to think I know the answer and to move quickly from the unknown/undefined to the known/defined stage and ultimately check something off the list by delivering it into the hands of customers. However, the role of the product manager is to stay in curiosity and research and the unknown for long enough in order to get enou ...Read More

Based on my experience working at both smaller startups (25-50 people) and larger companies (1000+) as a product manager, there is merit to both. I really appreciated starting my product career at a larger company because there were established processes / best practices and resources like design and dedicated engineering teams and other practitioners to learn from. This allowed for me to understand the mindset and process of doing product at scale which I then took with me when I moved into wor ...Read More

I have two tips for breaking into Product Management but I'm sure there are many more.  The first is to work with Product Management in your current role and/or talk to current Product Managers. Product Management can be seen as a very appealing job but many don't understand the day to day and trade offs of the role. By working with or informationally interviewing folks who are currently doing the job, you'll get more information on whether the job is actually for you and what appeals to you abo ...Read More

Product management is a combination of a lot of different knowledge and skillsets but the core of the job in my opinion is three primary things: 1) curiosity with a 2) maniacal focus on the customer and 3) driving outcomes. I'm looking for folks who have demonstrated they can do that. I want an example of finding a user or business problem, diving deep to understand it with a lot of customer empathy, and then working collaboratively to solve that problem elegantly and efficiently. Most important ...Read More