AMA: GitLab Group Manager, Product, Derek Ferguson on Product Development Process

As I’ve moved into managing Product Managers, I personally don’t interact with the EMs, Designers, and Engineers that much any more. My direct counterparts are Senior EMs, Directors, and Design Managers. So, I’ll answer this based on how I worked when I was an individual contributor (IC) PM. The way I see it, when working internally with engineering and design, a PM’s job is to create the conditions where great engineering and design work can happen. Of course, that’s only part of the Product Ma ...Read More

That’s a great question. I’ve seen a lot of people and companies building AI features simply to have AI features and say they are “AI powered”. That’s a losing strategy. It’s expensive, doesn’t provide any meaningful value over traditional features, and shows that the company cares more about chasing trends than delivering real value. So, for me, when I’m evaluating whether AI is an appropriate tool, I start by ignoring the “AI” part entirely. The first question is always: Does this solve a real ...Read More

Personally, I don’t measure PM performance by individual feature delivery. That’s not the PM’s job. Tying a PM’s performance and value to delivery creates all the wrong incentives. It encourages short-term thinking, feature chasing, and pressure that encourages teams to ship quickly instead of shipping well. In most examples that I’ve seen, when a company is dealing with a massive backlog of bugs and refactors, but the team seems to always only spend time pushing forward short-term projects, it’ ...Read More

In my experience, the shape of the team is more or less the same as a traditional product team. All of the same functions need to be accounted for. There are a few additional functions within the engineering team that should be accounted for, like an ML/AI engineer or data scientist, but you still need product, design, quality, engineering, tech writing, and product marketing. The differences come in the speed of decision making, who has the final say in those decisions, and how the dynamics wit ...Read More

In my experience, estimating effort is less about getting to a magically precise number and more about creating a shared understanding of what we’re actually building and where the uncertainty lives. At least with the teams that I’ve worked with, most bad estimates come from hidden assumptions and unclear requirements, not lack of skill. It's a PMs job is to make the unknowns visible early and reduce ambiguity before engineering starts sizing. With engineering managers, the conversation usually ...Read More

As a leader, my scope stretches further up and further out than the scope of the PMs on my team. They own the customer problems and product outcomes within their domains. I own the strategy that connects their domains to each other and to the business model that funds the whole thing. When it comes to monetization, PMs are responsible for understanding user value: where the pain is, what people would pay for, what drives engagement, and what experiences provide value. My job is aligning those si ...Read More