AMA: LaunchDarkly Head of Product, Karishma Irani on Product Management Career Path

This is somehow the simplest and toughest question on here 🙂 Your typical PM career path can look like: * PM: Responsible for a KPI or set of features * Senior PM: Responsible for a product area end-to-end * Staff/Group PM: Responsible for a product end-to-end * Principal/Director PM: Responsible for a business unit * VP PM: Responsible for multiple business units * CPO: Responsible for the entire Product org ...but I personally don't find that framing helpful because it varies so much from company-to-company and there are many factors that would make me hire a Senior PM at company <x> over a Director at company <y>. So, here's an alternative approach to thinking about a PM career where each stage could span across multiple titles depending on the maturity of the org: * Deliver at a high velocity: Ship! Ship! Ship! Build the muscle to take things from idea to product and do this at an insanely fast pace. * Learn to love the craft: Now that you've built the delivery muscle, master the details of your craft. Assess other products through a keen eye and try to discern what differentiates a good product from a great one. Learn to care about the details, since it's as important as the high velocity. * Be a driver for your product: Go beyond your feature or product area and think about the entire product. Familiarize yourself with the P&L, revenue drivers, GTM motion, and try and identify opportunities to improve customer value and ARR for your product line. * Be a driver for the business: Do ^ but across products for the entire business. This also involves identifying opportunities for new P&L lines through product innovation.

For early career IC product managers, success is measured consistently with how you manage the product lifecycle, pace of delivery, the value of features you deliver to users, and how they contribute to growing the overall business. For me, I added 2 unique criteria to evaluating my success as a PM: GSD-ness and Catalyst. * GSD-ness is your 'getting sh*t done' meter. When executives have a complex project that needs to be done on an aggressive timeline, do they think of you as the person who can get it done despite the difficulty? Being the person who can consistently deliver things, no matter how complex, across the finish line in a high-quality way, was what helped me a lot early in my career. * Catalyst is another qualitative measure for whether you're someone who people want to work with because the work you do accelerates their professional and career growth. The way I like to think about this is whether engineers and designers go out of their way to request to be on your project/team. For clarity, this is not a measure of likability, but more a measure of leading things to success which attracts and inspires others around you. Basically, take on complex projects and deliver them at a high-velocity while having fun through the process! As the scope of my role has grown, the success criteria have shifted from tactical delivery towards business impact. More specifically: * Product Innovation: Constantly re-assessing our market and thinking about new product opportunities for expanding our TAM and increasing value for users. What new things can we launch to extend the platform? * Strategic Alignment: This involves aligning with cross-functional leaders from Marketing and Revenue to make sure that we're all working towards the same company goals and that they're aware of the work my team's doing to contribute towards them. Specifically, the tradeoffs we're making and why. * Organizational Health: Evaluating the heartbeat across teams to understand the biggest points of friction that decelerate development, getting a sense of the morale of the team, and soliciting feedback to identify opportunities for improvement. I do an introspective exercise with my manager every 6 months by asking the question - "What if I vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow? Would the business/company be ok?". If the answer is "yes", you need to expand the scope of your responsibilities or find a role where you can have more impact.

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but the top first thing that comes to mind is grit. To me, the ability for someone to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals despite hardship is extremely impressive and way more valuable than any prior work experience on a resumé. So when hiring, I look for PMs who: * were part of a team at a tough time in the company's trajectory and learning how/if they overcame it * successfully launched new initiatives or products because that's full of obstacles * convinced their team to invest in an area that other folks were skeptical about and championed it through An alternative answer would be a "driver" mindset. We look for product managers who take full ownership of their product areas and do whatever is necessary to drive success, even if it's pushing back on stakeholders or taking risks. We value PMs who want to be part of the difficult journey as much as they want to be part of the success.

This assumes that you have the ability to choose what you work on in your first PM role, which is great if true, but rare since businesses already have a specific idea for "what needs to be worked on" before they make a PM hire. But let's assume that you've just landed your first PM role and you're looking to get some quick wins under your belt in the first 60 days. I would suggest pursuing one or more of these paths: * Interview engineering, product, and design leaders across the organization and ask them "What's the one thing you'd like to see magically get built and why?" to draw inspiration and ideas from. Maybe even talk to the Sales team. * Look at the data and (assuming funnel analyses is too complex for a PM at this stage) find your top users and try to set up calls with them. In these calls, have them walk you through how they use the product and observe where they run into friction that causes them to wince or leave the product * Dig through the backlog and prioritize it to find: * 1 big project that drives up user engagement or adoption * 1 small UX improvement to increase customer delight * Review the last 3-6 months of customer support tickets (you can dump them into GPT for a summary) to identify opportunities to reduce customer friction through improved product experiences * Finally, look at competitors' products and do an unbiased competitive teardown of your product vs/ theirs. The last PM who did this on our team got promoted faster than their peers.

Managing products in a new space provides the perfect balance of applying existing expertise you have about your craft (product management, in this case) and acquiring a new set of skills by overcoming challenges that test the limits of what you thought you knew about the product and business. Personally, I love breaking out into new domain areas and think every PM should find an opportunity to do this (preferably at their existing company) every 2-3 years. It also helps build your portfolio to advance your career and gives you more conviction around the type of products you want to PM v/s not. At LaunchDarkly, I've been focused on launching our new AI product offering which is a new muscle for me and the company, so here are some positive learnings from that experience: 1. Customers on speed dial: This can be part of your process to discover product-market fit (PMF), but in the early stages I'd lean heavily on existing or potential customers for discovery and to help you deepen your knowledge about the space. Try to understand the need for the technology, how it fits into their daily workflows, what the rest of the ecosystem is, and what's needed to improve it. Talking to customers will increase your knowledge about the space over time before you even know it. 2. Become user 0: Reading and talking about the domain will only get you so far, so if possible, become a power user of the product. This will strengthen your domain expertise by applying all the knowledge you're gaining and over time user empathy will become a superpower that bolsters your roadmap. 3. Tap into the community: The PM community is amazingly helpful, so I'd reach out to other PMs in the domain. Is it mobile? Reach out to PMs at a mobile-first product company. Is it AR/VR? Reach out to PMs at Google and Meta. Lean into this and expand your network to supplement the knowledge you can get with online resources. 4. Be flexible: While we all have our "frameworks" and "KPI processes", they may need adaptation when it comes to products in different domains. So, be flexible and open-minded about evolving your existing processes where needed. Most importantly, I'd say - be curious. While entering a new domain might seem scary at first, it's a growth opportunity which is harder to come by as you get later in your career. So, be excited to learn, be humble, ask questions when you don't know, and be genuinely curious to learn.

I love this question because as an interviewer who's looking at 100s of resumés each week, I'm also trying to figure out what makes candidate x stand out over candidate y. I'd suggest doing two things: 1. Modify the standard resumé template to include a section for "The kind of PM I am" v/s "The kind of PM I'm not", and be really honest about what you enjoy doing day-to-day in your ideal role v/s what would demotivate you and bring you down. For example, "I love talking to customers every day as an inspiration for product ideas" and "I'm not the biggest fan of spending hours making high-polish slides for internal presentations". 2. Include a cover letter. This is something I've changed my mind on over time because most cover letters I've seen are unhelpful and vague. I'd suggest writing a cover letter that specifies what made you fall in love with their product, why you're excited to work on it, and some ideas you have for it. This level of personalization shows a ton of initiative and help differentiate you from the candidate pool. Good Luck 😊