AMA: InVision Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Chow on Consumer Product Management

In general, all PMs are responsible for impact and pace of execution for their area. As you grow in career, the size of impact and area of focus expands, but the same goals are true. The difference being as your remit grows, you are now expanding to running multiple teams and working with broader stakeholders. For those going up for director, that means a couple things: People leadership: Is your team executing well through good product prioritization and impactful delivery. This is displayed th ...Read More

As I mentioned in the past question, B2B PM's are very good at the nuances of product priortiization given the additional dimensions coming from larger more influential customers. The healthy tension of near term revenue vs. overall growth truly helps a PM be stronger at prioritization. Related, many B2B PMs are very well versed at listening to the customer. This may be sitting in on a sales or customer success call or just hearing from account teams specific feature requests from customers. Oft ...Read More

As B2B products have evolved to be much more customer centric and "consumer grade" the expectations of product management are largely the same and infact, a lot of consumer PMs are finding great success in B2B by bringing their techniques and experience and applying them to B2B. You may have heard the term "product led growth" in many SaaS businesses. In reality this just translates to a consumer principle of product/market fit and validation through organic growth vs. a traditional enterprise t ...Read More

One key skill gap that is quickly closing but still exists is the ability to creatively solve holistic problems for customers. The challenge is B2B PMs often times work so closely with customers that its hard to resist just building exactly what the customer is asking for. The challenge is products become unweidly w/o having a POV on how to syntesize multiple asks into thematic areas and then creatively solve those problems so the product can scale.    What I've found is the breakdown is not on ...Read More

The great news is Product is still a growing and evolving function and there are tons of opportunities and an appetite to look at non traditional career paths into product. In fact in most organizations that I've been part of, there are many people wearing the 'product hat' who dont have the PM title.   What I look for Have worked with a product team: This isn't a necessity, but whether you're in QA, Support, Marketing, if you actually work with product you have a realistic view of what a PM's d ...Read More

From a career ladder perspective, the typical career path is PM/Senior PM working within a specific team and demonstrating ability to execute, deliver and prioritize Group PM managing multiple Product Managers and their respective teams usually driven by an expansion of remit / impact area Director/Sr. Director Representing product stragegy and roadmap and influencing decisions at the peer and executive level VP+ owning full product or business lines, accountable for key metrics Generally your c ...Read More

In the past, many successful consumer products could be successful by executing off of a single approach. You may have been an SEO driven org that was ok with an inferior UX but converted really well. You could be a high UX driven org where word of mouth spread based on the quality of the product, but the growth funnels may have been less optimized.   Now the consumer expectations are so high and the competition of mindshare is so intense that you do have to stick the landing and adopt the full ...Read More

There are really 3 types of consumer companies The bigs: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, Spotify etc - these are mega corporations that have achieved product market fit and are now monetizing at an incredible scale. In general their orgs are huge, processes are locked in, and PMs have very thin surface areas to work on and usually there is limited innovation vs optimization opportunities. But you are also working on products that literally touch hundreds of millions of users daily. Hype ...Read More