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Poorvi Shrivastav

AMA: Meta Senior Director of Product Management, Poorvi Shrivastav on Product Development Process


November 5, 2025 @ 9:00AM PT

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  1. What is your end-to-end product development process?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    My product development process centers on the Understand, Identify, and Execute framework, supercharged by AI to maximize speed and strategic focus a method I honed at places like Meta and Microsoft. I start with Understand, where I personally drive human-led strategy and customer interviews to deeply grasp the why, the user's pain points, and our competitive advantages. This stage is heavily AI-augmented by models that instantly process vast amounts of market data and customer feedback, pinpoin ...Read More

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  2. We have a small product and eng team, and are too early to have QA. Do you recommend we have eng test their own features? Is this the job of the product? Also should we have QA as part of our sprint, or the subsequent sprint?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    With AI products, Product Managers need to step up their involvement in testing. Specifically, Evals (evaluations)must become a mandatory part of every PM’s toolkit to ensure model performance, safety, and alignment with customer needs. PMs can also directly support integration testing by defining and validating end-to-end user workflows. More foundational tests like unit testing, stress testing, and scalability testing remain the core responsibility of Engineering, with PMs providing necessary ...Read More

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  3. How do you ensure that the engineering team understands all the scopes of the project?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    To prevent scope drift, Early, Continuous Alignment is critical. I always ensure project kick-offs begin with the Voice of the Customer a real-world example or customer story to build empathy and context, even for teams not observing users directly. Furthermore, eliminating ambiguity through precise writing and use cases is essential. Instead of vague mandates, we use specific examples, such as "The feature must handle 10,000 concurrent users with <200ms latency," to ensure Engineering unders ...Read More

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  4. What activities do you do to help set expectations between development and upper leadership?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    I have relied on three primary types of tools to maintain alignment across leadership and teams: Dashboards that everyone has access to (providing visibility into product, customer, and business know-how), structured OKR reviews, and frequent product showcases/demos. Utilizing these methods ensures that leadership remains fully aligned at all levels throughout the year.

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  5. How do you prevent rogue engineers from slipping in features that are good but not prioritized?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    That is an intriguing scenario. While it's generally rare in well-governed teams—as a connected PM, you should be deeply integrated with both your team and customers the core principle is managing technical autonomy without sacrificing product strategy and customer impact, a balance critical at scale. Bug fixes have more leniency but any significant feature addition must adhere to the standard review process to maintain product integrity and resource prioritization. If the team has no PM and is ...Read More

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  6. At what point do you talk about success metrics with your development team?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    Success metrics are key to implementing the strategy. As soon as we decide what we are building, we align on success criteria, instrumentation/data collection, and how we will use the data to course correct or decide the future course of action. For example, with experimentation at Meta, we locked in metrics with Engineering and Data Science early on in the cycle during the strategic planning process.

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  7. How have you empowered your PMs to be their own analyst? Any tips for getting PMs up to speed on running their own queries?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    Most PMs at companies like Meta, startups and Microsoft had access to Jupyter notebooks to run their own queries. Unless they play with data and know how customers are using the product and business is performing, they wouldn't be able to take optimal decisions. I have encouraged PMs to build their own reporting using data and share updates. We used PM meetings to discuss these reports in different areas.

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  8. For API products, how do you push back against engineers who believe they know what to build because they "are" the target user?

    Poorvi Shrivastav
    Poorvi Shrivastav

    Meta Senior Director of Product Management • 7mo

    That's a nuanced challenge unique to API and developer products, where your builders are often your primary consumers. My approach, refined at companies like Microsoft while building developer platforms, isn't to "push back," but to shift the discussion from personal preference to validated, market-level customer needs. I agree that if our engineers are the precise Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), their firsthand experience is a high-fidelity data point we must capture as the customer truly knows b ...Read More

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