AMA: GitLab Principal Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Product Management 30/60/90 Day Plan

When I search the internet for "Product management prioritization frameworks" I get back 3.2M results so the options are nearly limitless of what to choose. MoSCoW, RICE, Value vs. Effort, Kano, etc. find a method that makes sense to you and the data is mostly available to apply to the framework. Now comes the hard part, sharing that list. Start with some friendly faces, share the context of what you knew for sure, what you had a good idea about and what you totally made up to find out where you ...Read More

For an organization at this stage a product manager was probably brought in to help manage the vision, ensure the variety of customer requests and ideas are being reviewed and prioritized and the development teams are working on the right things. To do that there are a couple of key things you need to get to know quick: Who is your target user and what are the pain points your product solves? Who are the key players in your company who will help you get things done? This goes beyond engineers, t ...Read More

In the first 30 days get to know the user you are building for, the problems that they have and how your product or feature solves that. Get to know your team and how they deliver solutions for that problem and what is getting in their way. Ask a lot of questions and take a lot of notes. Use the next 30 days to get to know your product, you should be able to demo it and do so often. Help out by testing any new functionality, write bugs when you find them and keep asking questions. Get in front o ...Read More

It can be tempting when joining a new organization to find something small to ship but you should remember that shipping does not mean a "win", you want to drive a successful outcome. So instead of focusing on finding something to ship, focus on finding a way to improve an outcome. That might be making it easier for the sales team to know what just shipped, giving the support team visibility into the bugs that are being worked on by the team or some other process improvement that makes life bett ...Read More

There is a lot to learn from your new team when starting and it can be tempting to jump right into what they can help you build first or what their problems are and you will get to that soon enough. Before that I like to start building processes and systems so all of those groups can self-serve information as much as possible without you becoming a blocker to them doing their jobs. So asking what kind of information they need/expect/want from Product Management and how they want to get that info ...Read More