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Omar Eduardo Fernández

AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Fulfillment, Omar Eduardo Fernández on Building a Product Management Team

August 15 @ 10:00AM PST
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GitLab Director of Product Management, Fulfillment, Omar Eduardo Fernández on Building a Product Management Team
Top Questions
I’m the first PM hire in my company. What advice would you give to someone tasked with establishing this function in an existing business structure?
Omar Eduardo Fernández
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management • August 15
The first thing that you want to do is to establish the credibility of the PM organization and earn the trust of your peers, otherwise, you risk becoming irrelevant and ignored. PMs need to lead by influence. To do this well, I'd set up a 30-60-90 day plan in which you meet a lot of leaders ac......Read More
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What is your advice for creating and/or improving the product management process when joining a small but growing team? Particularly for a small company with no or little structure?
Omar Eduardo Fernández
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management • August 15
You can spend too much time setting up "product management processes" and covering a lot of ground. Instead of focusing on creating a product management process, focus on diagnosing what's going well and what isn't in your current team and product output. 1. Do teams have confidence that they a......Read More
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What are the key processes you'd set up when expanding the PM team from 1 to multiple people?
Omar Eduardo Fernández
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management • August 15
I'd first focus on setting up a robust planning process so that no matter which PM other teams are working with, they know how to make requests and how they'll be handled. This includes: 1. A clear milestone planning process where each PM summarizes and communicates what their teams will be......Read More
379 Views
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Question about org structures - what does your PM team org structure look like?
Omar Eduardo Fernández
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management • August 15
GitLab is quite transparent, so you can find our structure defined pretty publicly here. We have the overall product that we divide into sections, stages, groups and categories. This is how it makes sense for us to organize our work since GitLab is a product that supports many different fea......Read More
457 Views
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As a product manager, what are the make-or-break things for you when interviewing a potential next product manager for your team?
Omar Eduardo Fernández
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management • August 15
Make or break things when I'm interviewing a PM candidate: 1. Clear and concise answers to my questions. If I need to ask the same question again because the candidate didn't address my question, that's a big problem. PMs need to communicate constantly with many teams, so they shoul......Read More
443 Views
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