AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Building a Product Management Team

I am a firm believer that what you need to grow and what you need to scale are two different things - including leadership, team processes, and strategy. This means that I have found it easier to start with a small seed group to build your framework for operating. This has a couple of advantages, including reducing biases for certain processes and ensuring multiple perspectives are included from the beginning.

Communicating as a product manager is probably 90% of the job. I would say you need to make sure you establish clear chains of communication, both internally and externally, especially as a pertains to product roadmap delivery updates. My favorite method of doing this is to create a safe, publicly available, published version that you can distribute internally and externally so that everybody’s on the same page regarding the major milestones that you’re hoping to accomplish. This can also be coordinated with marketing to help create marketing launch activities around it. As a product manager, I hope that you’re working iteratively working with engineering in a way that requires you to pivot and think about problems strategically. As a result, you may completely scrappy roadmap next quarter from what you originally published, but all you need to do is update to publish version and make sure you have a disclaimer that says these are not commitments, and they are subject to change. As far as distributing this published version, I have had success distributing it on social media, newsletters to customers, or having just a subscription to the page so people get updates, whenever the pages are updated.

Gitlab, my current company, the product organization is kind of unique. We have several product directors over each major products section which roles up to a VP of Product Management. Under each of those product directors, there can be a staff product manager, the highest level product manager when it comes right individual contributors, as well as several group managers, which are the managers of a particular product stage that owns a specific domain within the GitLab product. Individual contributors at Gitlab look like intermediate project managers all the way to principal product managers and most rarely the Senior principal product manager, which is the highest level you can reach in project management individual contributor, and there’s not going to be very many of those inside organization, but they still exist. Each product manager will own 4 to 5 categories which roll up to a stage under a group manager. Altogether the product management organization, GitLab is very focused on domain and being able to successfully execute on a market domain of the DevOps platform lifecycle. And other companies we didn’t have a platform-based way of looking at product organization, so it was not domain-focused, and more business unit-focused. In this case, there was a chief product officer, and then under the chief project officer was a Director over each of the business units. Each of the directors would have two or three group managers based on the number of product managers that rolls up into their business unit and often times they were also program managers that would roll into this director's role.

I think this is one of my favorite ways of categorizing different kinds of product managers - based off of the KPI’s that they are being optimized for. Product managers who are focused on building products, fast, and shipping them to market are going to be measured a little bit differently than product managers who are about getting sales, reaching a particular enterprise market or even a product lead growth. For example, when you think about KPIs of one who is focused on marketing activities versus focusing on product management activities, I would split the PIs down the middle from the business metrics which are revenue versus leads. The product managers, who are focused on marketing activities should be responsible for what are the opportunities that are generated from the product whether that’s product lead people coming from the website, conferences, or just customer interviews. Product managers who are focused on shipping products fast and getting things to market, should be measured on that exact thing. So I typically look at the cycle time of features. How long does it take a product feature from ideation all the way through product delivery and then of course product usage at the end of it all. Both product managers are going to be held accountable for the product usage of their portfolio. These PIs are typically the secondary indicators to be focused on how well they’re accomplishing those monthly active users targets whether it’s by generating to have new usage or focusing on enhancing the product suite.

This is a great question about how to pave the way for two things: product strategy and product management execution. I can see this being applicable to not only first Product hires at start-ups, but new product areas a company has never pursued before. There are a few mechanisms/processes I would establish as a first priority: 1. Establish a feedback loop with the top customers, internal users, and market analysts (product mgt execution) 2. Identify the top 1 or 2 business metrics you are looking to influence (product strategy) 3. Create a cadence for a roadmap to release notes that can be published publicly for internal and external audiences (product mgt execution) 4. Review the existing competitive landscape and understand your product market fit (product strategy) 

A well-rounded product team requires three main features: * Diverse composition * Top talent in the domain * Rigorous product management processes Diverse talent can be accomplished by hiring with a specific schedule of product manager you want to hire. This can mean location diversity gender diversity, and racial diversity, but the bottom line is you want to have a population in your team that is representative of your customers. If you don’t have a product team that reflects your customers, you’re likely not going to be building a product that will be used and loved by your end users. Top talent in the domain is usually accomplished by looking at your competitors looking at your aspiration products and recruiting from those specific companies. It can also mean finding thought leaders in the area people who are producing contact on YouTube for Twitter, and our respected in the domain. Lastly, the processes. A product team can be completely rock stars when it comes to all of their domain knowledge, their ability to think about problems specifically, but if they don’t have a way to work together, then all of those skills are wasted. An example would be how do you release product? How do you update your customers and how do you think about the market? All of those questions need to have an answer so that your product managers are producing the way it is that you want to deliver product in the same way.