AMA: Google Group Product Manager, Patrick Davis on Building a Product Management Team

I'm lucky in that Google has a really rigorous interview process that I benefit from. Google is also known for taking a long time during that process but I promise you that is largely because of the rigor. Post that process though what I look for are three key signals Grit is my first. Big companies are notoriously slow, process heavy, and plodding. But the way I look at this is that with so much user trust, such a large business, and really a huge opportunity that we have to respect we want to ...Read More

This is a good one. I think there are two that often get missed and largely it is because they are hard to measure and expensive to move. Product excellence. How do you measure customer delight in an impactful way? CSAT and NPS have lots of opportunities to be gamed and are frankly easily ignored. Some of the best products I've used focus on finding the right critical user journeys and continuously measure the success rates of those quantitatively and qualitatively Product health. Cold boot, war ...Read More

Absolutely, welcome to the discipline, you're in for quite a ride and I'm super excited for you.  Optimize for learning and honing your craft. There's a balance to have the confidence to make decisions without all the data and put stakes in the ground even you actually have no clue while balancing always opting to listen and learn and never actually being the expert on anything in the room. Confidant enough to leader while humble enough to learn. Your career is a long ark. Think about when you s ...Read More

Here's how I'd think about it: Some planning cadence where strategy and roadmap can be reviewed at different levels of fidelity. (Annual, Quarterly etc.) Product review with key cross functional stakeholders that isn't viewed as a gate keeping exercise but a feedback process and of course has PMs giving each other feedback Experiment review where the focus is creating excellent hypothesis, treatment arms, and making sure you can measure what you need to Cross functional discipline review and the ...Read More

Let me give some guidance here on how I think about it.  It's critical to have a strong vision, strategy, roadmap, and success metrics for a team Your org structure should be organized to support the pillars of your strategy Beyond this there optionality to organize your team functionally the way that engineering teams are organized or strategically that maps more to your success metrics or some hybrid of both Most critically though you need to have as clean as possible swimlanes for PMs. Giving ...Read More

Oooohhhh, this is a good one and something I spend a lot of time balancing. Product owns the product and at the end of the day both gets unearned credit and unearned blame. It is your neck on the line for the end to end experience. Thinking through the experience that users get both in product and out of product (traditionally the domain of marketing) is well within Product's scope. That being said, as you expand your career and scope you'll find more and more that you don't scale. Not just in t ...Read More

I'm not sure it is the most effective because I've really only used one strategy, but it has been effective for me. Grow your own scope, take on more than you can handle, do a good job of pitching the problem space and opportunity and get broad consensus that this work is critical and required. Then make it clear and obvious that to succeed in this new problem space it will require you to drop a piece of your current scope that is critical Hire for that role In particular something I'll note is ...Read More

This is a good one; and I'll admit that I've never been the first PM hire in a company, but I have worked to establish a new PM team within an existing structure. Here are my tips: Be humble and go on a listening tour. Things have clearly been working (to an extent) and it's your job to go around and understand the lay of the land, folks expectations of you, and how you can help. Building trust often leads to the best outcomes The best quick value add you can likely achieve will likely come out ...Read More

I like this question although more specifics would help as the answer varies. It certainly is a tough skill to master though but worthwhile because this will always be the case. Even at the big companies that I've worked at in Microsoft and Google, who seemingly have all the money and resources in the world, we are always faced with this problem Here's how I'd think about it. Folks can forgive some changes to ownership over the short term but are much less forgiving of not getting critical tasks ...Read More

I'm a huge fan of all success metrics and OKRs (objectives and key results) being shared between the core cross functional working group. Of course there will always be some that don't match up; I'm thinking about some SLAs, uptime, latency type KPI's that your engineering team tracks. But by taking them as shared and getting your buy in on those you'll much better understand the deployment of the engineering resources and how best to support that team. All cross functional teams are critical, b ...Read More