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

Make or break things when I'm interviewing a PM candidate: 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 should always hone their ability to listen to questions, write them down, and answer those questions without being confusing or too verbose. I often ask a candidate to pick a hobby, project or anything else and explain it to ...Read More

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: A clear milestone planning process where each PM summarizes and communicates what their teams will be working on for each milestone. A lightweight intake process for bugs and feature requests, so that requests are captured in the same place and with the same high-level information. A consistent quarterly priorit ...Read More

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 feature areas across the software-development lifecycle, which we use as the foundation to set up the org structure. We have section leaders (typically Director/Senior Directors), stage leaders (often a group PM ...Read More

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. Do teams have confidence that they are building the right thing? If not, focus on sensing mechanisms and processes to gather more input during problem and solution validation. Are teams effectively collaborating with UX and Engineering to come ...Read More

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 across the company, understand their pain points, talk to customers and understand their needs and pain points too, and then put together a proposal for how the PM organization will help solve these pain poin ...Read More