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

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

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

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

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

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