AMA: Hex Head of Product, Lexi Lowe on Product Management Skills

I believe being decisive is absolutely essential for product people. This is because it unblocks your counterparts and increases velocity if you're able to make game time decisions. Analysis paralysis is the antithesis of velocity. However, being a good product manager means that your decisions are based on a deep understanding of the business and the user and your own product sense that you've gained through releasing software. Decisiveness without that context will only waste engineering cycle ...Read More

From personal experience, I've made a couple mistakes that I can share: Not doing enough research or having answers to pushback readily available (this makes you look weak and degrades trust in your recommendation or ownership). Pushing an objective without understanding the other perspectives or priorities of stakeholders (this makes you look unprepared and degrades trust and collaboration). Ways to mitigate these: Spend your time to prepare your roadmap with lots of research (customer, prospec ...Read More

When you're first starting out in product, you're building your product tool belt and the focus is on execution, customer empathy, technical depth and collaboration to drive a (measurable) outcome. As you become more senior, being able to drive a strategy based on a deep understanding of users, the market and being able to effectively prioritize to drive the biggest business outcomes becomes critical. Being able to align with cross-functional stakeholders and leadership is a huge focus. This req ...Read More

Product management is different at every organization and there are many organizations where it is more of a project management function. If your manager is assigning project management work - talk directly to them about it to understand their expectations of the role and share what you're interested in focusing on. Usually you can find a path forward that will allow you to do the higher impact work. If you can't, leave! There are other organizations that really value folks who can set a vision ...Read More

There are different opinions on having an engineering background and the ability to write code for Product people. My perspective is that its easier to come together with your engineering partners when they are empowered to drive the code level details and you are empowered to define the requirements so you can make technical tradeoffs together but each have your respective ownership. I've seen collisions when product managers also are engineers and they get too deep into the technical details a ...Read More

I took the Product Management course from General Assembly and I thought it was a helpful foundation. I recommend reading Inspired by Marty Cagan to any new product manager. However, product management is such a broad set of skills and expectations and is practiced differently at different companies so the best teacher is learning by doing and collaborating closely with your manager to ensure that you're up-skilling on the most impactful dimension for your role. If your manager isn't proactively ...Read More

Every product leader is different but I'd say there are generally two primary flavors: 1) amazing executors who work with strong visionaries or 2) strong visionaries who work with amazing executors. Having awareness about your superpower and finding a company to complement your strengths is critical to being successful. No matter what your superpower is, there are some basic hard skills that are important: an understanding of your market and market dynamics user research & customer interacti ...Read More

I think most great PMs come from a different field first. I have not worked with anyone who hasn't but I know they're out there. This is because the context that you gain from whatever your field is will help you have a superpower as a PM to build on. For me that was coming from analytics, so data is a core superpower. For a software engineer, understanding the architecture and being able to translate requirements really effectively could be your superpower to build from. My recommendation to he ...Read More

This isn't easy and many companies, including Hex, are looking for domain expertise to maintain a super high velocity in driving value for users. Learning a domain takes a lot of time. However, there are things you can do to be a more effective interviewee when you don't domain experience: Demonstrate strong fundamental product skills (focus on the why and the outcome that you drove). Practice your interviews and come with strong preparation and communication. Focus on the effectiveness of your ...Read More

This is a hard situation. My recommendation would be to do two things: to spend time deeply understanding and reflecting on the feedback. Identify what pieces feel resonant and what pieces feel like you don't want to action on. to ask for feedback from others - peers or leaders who you've worked with - and understand if there are patterns in the feedback from your manager. Sometimes we have blindspots and its helpful to get other perspectives to understand if you have those. To provide an exampl ...Read More

Your organization may have resources to build a baseline on data analysis and engineering acumen and you should seek those out first and engage with them. I try to read everything in the internal wiki and the public facing docs when I start a job. Next, find a mentor who does their own analytics or works in engineering who can walk you through a deeper level. Specifically, get mentorship around these skills as a baseline: running a query to answer a data question that you have building a dashboa ...Read More

I'm so excited that you're teaching PM skills to non-PM people. I think everything can benefit from a product approach. The most important thing that you could educate on is building user empathy and research to deeply understand the problem and relative priority that you're trying to solve in the context of your larger business strategy. This helps to understand the value of solving the problem to the user and the business and informs the solution you create. Steps to apply product process to a ...Read More