AMA: Mezmo Sr. Director, Product Management, Ashka Vakil on Building a Product Management Team

The product manager's job is to identify the most impactful problems to solve, enable their team to build and ship solutions that delight users, learn, and iterate. Product managers need a multitude of skills to be successful. The two most important skills that I view as must-haves no matter the seniority or product they will work on are owner mentality and leadership and influence. The reason for these two things being make-or-break things for me is because one has it or does not have it. It is ...Read More

The product manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the right product is delivered to the market at the right time. In order to do this effectively, you will need to establish a framework for prioritizing needs and deliverables. This framework should take into account the company's overall goals and objectives, as well as the needs and wants of your customers and stakeholders.  There are a number of prioritization frameworks available with RICE, Value versus Effort, and Kano Model bei ...Read More

This is a great question. In my opinion, a lot of product teams especially ones that are focussed on customer-facing products completely miss tracking product health KPIs like bugs in the product, product uptime, and product reliability to name a few. Most product teams miss them as this product health metric is not tied directly to any business objective and is considered an engineering vanity metric. The reality however is this KPI is really critical and can inform customer experience that can ...Read More

If you are a junior PM who is the first product management hire, it would be fair to assume you are working at an early-stage startup where likely the founder is acting as the product leader. You were hired to support the founder and your focus will be more on execution versus defining strategy and vision. This would be a great opportunity to learn the ropes and over time if you can showcase strategic thinking there may be additional opportunities that can open up. Your focus should be learning ...Read More

Adding every new member to the team adds friction and operation overhead increases. You will need to set up processes that allow the team to operate independently and work with each other effectively and efficiently. Your main job will be driving alignment within the team and across the organization, along with coaching and mentoring the team.  You will need to make sure every team member has a clear area of ownership, can articulate product vision and strategy effectively, and understands produ ...Read More

What product management updates get shared with the rest of the company and how they get shared will vary based on the size of the company and the function of the company. The goal for communication, however, remains the same and that is to keep everyone aware of what is happening with the product and how it fits into the overall goals of the company.  Here are a few activities that I think help drive better alignment and transparency across the organization. I am a big fan of maintaining and ma ...Read More

When joining a small company with no or little structure or joining a small but growing product team, it is essential to understand the current state of the product management process before establishing new processes. Rushing to make changes and establish processes that have worked for you in the past is not ideal. What worked in one company may not work here due to differences in the culture and how teams have been set up.   In your first few days, you should set up a meet and greet meeting wi ...Read More

If your PM team only has one or two people responsible for covering multiple products with complex features, I would recommend building a prioritized list of deliverables that are necessary to achieve your objectives. Make sure the list is as small as possible and is the one that would move the needle the most. Once you have a list of the most important items to focus on, divvy it up among the team of 1-2 product managers and define exactly what needs to get done. This ruthless prioritization an ...Read More

Product teams that don't have strong collaboration and communication with the product marketing team fail to deliver a delightful customer experience. These siloed product and marketing departments that do not work together result in failed customer expectations. Marketing teams without having proper knowledge of actual product capabilities will end up building messaging and running campaigns that either overpromise or underpromise products to the customers resulting in mismatched customer expec ...Read More

Building a well-rounded product team requires a combination of planning, recruiting, and development. By taking the time to identify the skills and expertise that will be needed, building a team around those needs, and then providing the necessary resources and support, you can build a high-performing team. Instead of focusing on numbers and putting out a generic product management requisition to kick-start hiring, spend time strategically thinking and planning about the needs and composition of ...Read More