AMA: Momentive (SurveyMonkey) Vice President Product Management, Aleks Bass on Product Management Skills

Data should be used to inform product management decisions rather than drive them. A product manager should lead with intuition and use data to support their assumptions. Data should be used to inform decisions, but it should not be the only factor in making decisions. It is important for product managers to use their experience to make informed decisions, and then to use data to validate those decisions. Data can provide insight into: * customer needs * market trends * and product performance It can also be useful in identifying opportunities and risks. Data alone, however, cannot provide the full picture. Data needs to be interpreted by product managers using their experience and expertise in order to make decisions that are in the company's and product's best interest. These decisions can be validated and supported with data. For example, your key customers' needs cannot be understood by data alone, you need empathy, context, interpretation, and intuition to make a decision. In your role as a product manager, you should be deeply engaged in the product, market, business, and customer pains/experiences which should help drive the intuition you feel for the product strategy.

This is a fascinating one to investigate! The first thing I can say is that I understand your plight since I've been there before (probably on both sides) and I know it's not an enjoyable or enriching place to be. In spite of this, receiving feedback from team members, cross-functional partners, and leaders is inevitable. When you change your perception of feedback and how you use it, it can become your superpower. If someone has positive intentions, they are giving you a gift by giving you feedback. Distinguishing intent is the tricky part. There is a misunderstanding around feedback that I often encounter when I speak with people. There seems to be a widespread perception that a growth mindset requires you to accept all feedback and act on it without question. In reality, just as in human relationships, there is often much more complexity. Sometimes feedback is just the symptom you need to diagnose the real problem, and it might not even be related to the symptom at all. Within an organization, people have a limited perspective. Our view of the world is colored by the tasks we are responsible for, the people we collaborate with, the subsets of company strategy we encounter, and many other factors. Feedback disconnects most often occur because of misunderstandings related to different perspectives or experiences within an organization. As an example, your manager might tell you that you aren't detail-oriented enough when in reality your project was much earlier in its progression and at this stage, you wouldn't expect to have all of the answers. As this example illustrates, there is a disconnect between a manager's expectations and how work is actually being undertaken by the team. This kind of feedback does not necessarily indicate that someone is doing something wrong, but it does indicate a misalignment somewhere. Either a misalignment of values and working styles, processes, information, altitude visibility, or something else. What feedback that you don't agree with can give you is the opportunity to dig deeper. Get curious, and take a step back (this may require stepping away from the issue for a few days). Then, when you're ready, have a conversation with your manager and ask them the following: * What makes them believe what they believe? (You should ask for examples and data points.) * Can they give you an example of how they think things should be done? (Find out what they would have done differently.) * Don't hesitate to ask for clarification if something they say doesn't make sense to you. It's uncomfortable, but a decent leader will lean in and help you close the understanding gap. It's important to keep a positive mindset here, being genuinely curious to understand will go a long way. As you ask questions, provide context as well. Talk to your leader if you have tried a suggestion and it didn't work out because of something your leader isn't aware of. Get their help and leverage their experience. Their job is to help you set priorities, remove roadblocks, and help you perform at your best. Be brave and ask for what you need/want. Not all of these scenarios end well. Sometimes it's a sign that you and your manager do not share the same philosophy on getting work done. You won't be the first or last to experience this. This is a great way to evaluate the fit between yourself, your team, your organization, and your reporting structure.

Every new job I've taken has had a pretty specific challenge I was hired to solve, and I was fortunate to have that clarity (at least at a high level). When I start in the new role, I focus on the following elements: * Build relationships with my team and cross-functional partners * Learn about the industry * Study competitors * Explore the product in detail * Collect as much customer feedback and usage data as I can get my hands on * And last but not least, find all the skeletons (or as many as I can). - What does the sales team wish they had that the product team just won't prioritize? - What does customer success wish the product team did so they would get fewer repetitive requests? - What does the team struggle with when trying to ship high-quality products with velocity? - And I dig into these topics with each cross-functional partner. While I'm doing this, I'm also looking for things that have been tried and didn't work before. Once I have all that perspective, I pull together some data on the market, industry, competitors, and any other stimuli I think might be helpful for the team to have. I then schedule a brainstorming session. In this session, I guide the team through a series of exercises to uncover common themes we can align our initiatives around. In addition, I make meaningful progress based on the pain points they have all been voicing in my discovery sessions. Once I'm satisfied that I've pulled every last idea out of this group, I go off and start to create the skeleton of the vision. I ask key members of the team to do the same and schedule a follow-up where we can discuss it. From my point of view, we work together until the vision is complete. This usually means that it addresses many of the pain points and the broader team feels like they have been heard. I make any changes that are requested and then the socialization tour begins because, without alignment, your vision isn't getting very far. This recipe has worked consistently with slight modifications for each role. Hope it helps!

The awareness and impact UX plays on the success of a product is probably the most underrated and underdeveloped skill set in the product management function today. UX plays a critical role in product management. It helps product managers understand the needs of their users and how to design a product that meets those needs. UX also helps product managers understand how to create a product that is intuitive, attractive, engaging, easy to use, and accessible to all users. A product manager that has invested in their understanding of UX has many advantages as I see them: 1. They tend to have a much better relationship with their design counterparts and they work well together in thoughtfully considering the kind of experience they are trying to create. 2. On average they are much more creative when solving their customers' experience challenges and often see opportunities that are less linear and more outcome focused. 3. Typically empathy and realism are strengths they embody. PMs that understand UX rarely release a feature that cannot be found. They have their fair share of opportunities to optimize customer experiences, but they are less likely to underestimate the importance of a clear CTA for instance. 4. They can unlock hidden growth reserves. Many product managers focus on features, and the story is always supported by the thousands of requests for specific features from key customers or opportunities, but PMs that understand UX know that half of their growth (a very rough %), is driven by the delightfulness of the experience and how well it exceeds the expectations of their customers. As a result, they intentionally invest in it. 5. PMs that understand UX know that even a slight color change, wording shift, or movement of a button can have an outsized effect on the outcomes they are trying to drive. This understanding helps them limit the disruption to their customers by validating experiences before a "full launch" to make sure there are no negative unintended consequences. 6. + many more examples Many contrarians to this opinion will say: "It's the design team's responsibility to drive the UX." While this may be true to a point, it is much more effective for a designer to work with someone that has a basic understanding of UX principles and their importance to the outcome, than not for many of the reasons mentioned above.

The most underrated soft skill of a high-performing PM is the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with stakeholders. This includes the following: * Ability to listen to and understand the needs of stakeholders * Ability to effectively negotiate and resolve conflicts The reason these skills seem to be the most elusive is most likely because of the confirmation bias that permeates us as humans. Once we've invested a significant amount of time into an idea or a point of view, we assume that we have thoroughly thought this through. Therefore, other people's questions, concerns, or counterpoints are incorrect and distracting rather than insightful and valuable. Instead of seeing those questions and points of view as valuable questions to validate so that we can determine the veracity of our beliefs, we dismiss them. The problem is that sometimes we see a conflict that isn't there because we expect it to be. The number of times I've been in a team meeting where two individuals were saying very similar things in slightly different ways, but they couldn't see it as anything other than a conflict is higher than I would have imagined. At that point, those neutral in the conversation start to shift into a translating and clarifying role until the individuals in question realize that they are in fact saying essentially the same thing. Listening to understand is a skill PMs need more than the average person, and the skill to build relationships and trust with stakeholders is key. It is possible that your team members are lacking in this underrated skill if they are anchored on power and control over communication and collaboration.

There are very few hills from a professional perspective that I would be willing to die on, but this is definitely one of them. I absolutely believe that fully remote product teams can work in the long term. I currently lead a fully remote team and I've seen some of the best product management work of my career being produced by this team. The challenges I've seen with remote work for product management have been when the structures of the team are not consistent (i.e. some people work in an office together consistently while others are working remotely and visit the office on an intermittent basis). Even in these scenarios, the challenges are all driven by the challenges of managing interpersonal relationships. In order for a product delivery organization to work efficiently and effectively together there are a few* elements that need to exist: * A strategy the team believes in * A realistic understanding of the product and market status quo relative to competitors and customer needs * Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for R&D functions as well as cross-functional partners * An agreed-upon process for how new products or capabilities are explored, initiated, built, released and communicated/sold * Aligned artifacts for information sharing, documentation, and to facilitate discussion * Ceremonies to ideate, share, review, iterate, and make meaningful progress on the initiatives at hand * Honest and collaborative culture with assumptions of positive intent sprinkled in * Team-level empowerment and accountability * Opportunity for failure, growth, and learning * Goals are oriented around metrics * Alignment between product management, design, and engineering functions from the leadership level to the team level. I touched on external factors that aren't specific to the skill set each functional team member embodies. However, it goes without saying that if team members don't have the skills to execute their roles, it will be challenging for the team to succeed. Very few teams and organizations can say they have every element on that list throttled to 100%. And regardless of whether teams are working together in a co-located office space or fully remote, without those components, some elements of efficiency and/or effectiveness are diminished. Spending time together as a team is important and I'm sure there is a mathematical equation that can help us figure out how much is the right amount, but the pieces listed above are more important to the outcomes of product management teams than being in an office together most of the time.