AMA: HubSpot Group Product Manager, Payments & Commerce, Kie Watanabe on Product Strategy

This is a two-part question. Let me first articulate how I like coming up with ideas for new opportunities, followed by how I like to make decisions about what to build. Hopefully, you don’t mind that I’m thinking about “opportunities” because it might not always be a feature that’s the right solution. I should start by saying that there isn’t one right approach to coming up with ideas. In my experience, I’ve had success ensuring that there are: Insights from the four lenses: Customer, Business, ...Read More

Going from an IC PM to a manager role was one of the most gratifying transitions in my career. Having been a manager before in a different context prior to becoming a Group Product Manager at HubSpot, I had some prior experience leading teams and operating in an environment with broader scope and complexity that helped ease the transition. That said, I do recall a couple of things: Saying no to your pet rock: As an IC PM, you’re the biggest fan of your own product ideas first and foremost. Given ...Read More

In my previous answer, re: finding the right opportunities + making decisions - I mentioned four lenses (Customer, Business, Market, and Technology) as key components of coming up with ideas and making decisions. The best advice I have to offer is to be intentional about spending time developing your muscles in those areas. It can be as simple as picking a product or service in your day-to-day life and thinking through what inputs might have contributed to the experience you’re having as a user. ...Read More

Success metrics and voice of the customer. Ideally, at the time of defining a product strategy, you’ve also invested time in thinking about specific Goals that are important to measure progress against it. The goals should be time bound and specific and may include product usage, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. Several product organizations (including HubSpot, Google, Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Airbnb) like using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework. Metrics are ...Read More

Lots of balancing! Balancing effectively summarizes the job of a PM. Jokes aside... Balancing user requests v. optimal design I pay much closer attention to the user's pain (vs. the user's request). Abstracting the problems we’re trying to solve creates room for the team to take in further context (per the four lenses mentioned above) and come up with creative, innovative solutions that can also be validated and iterated on along the way. I also know I am not a design expert. I have been so fort ...Read More