AMA: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Director of Product Management, Devika Nair on Technical Product Management

Two constant challenges for me in any product role has been finding the right way to say no. This could be to your customers asking for a particular feature or your organization that has decided to prioritize certain aspects differently. 

The best way to overcome this challenge is by having your facts and data clear. For example, it is easy to convince leadership about your prioritization rationale if you have data to back up your claims, whether it is potential revenue or customer impact.

To me, the best part of being a Product Manager is that there is no typical day. There is a mix of working with your engineering partners, talking to customers, partnering with other organizations, and sharing info with executives or dealing with escalations. A day to day also differs greatly depending on the phase of your product.

For Product Management, my general advice is to experiment with it. Try to understand your customers and market, define the product vision and work through requirements for your features. You can also go through exercises with side projects.

For Project Management, I don't have personal experience, but I would say try getting hands on experience alongside your current role is the best path.

The biggest challenge for any tech product manager (or program manager) will remain your ability to influence. You need to influence members at all levels of the organization on whom you have little authority. 

The way to overcome this is ensuring your have a clear understanding of why your work/request is important. You would also need to ensure that the recipient finds these important and it is aligned with some goal of their own.

It is rare to have a technical product manager and another product manager working on the same product. When this happens, it is usually in organizations where one of the product managers work in a more inbound or engineering facing role and the other in a more outbound and customer facing role. 

In general, technical product managers work on technical products with tech customers while non-technical PMs might have products whose primary target customer isn't technical.

This depends on the goals of your product. In general, you want your key metrics to be aligned with what you and the organization considers the top goals of the product. 

For example, this might be revenue from your product, or number of other products customers use alongside your product. There would also be secondary goals like your adoption, retention and growth.

My approach is usually to have a initial wireframe to convey your ideas. The UX team needs to have sufficient understanding of the customer journeys and need to be involved early in the product definition/creation phase. Start with your vision document and a wireframe and spend some time discussing the details. Involve them throughout the product definition and execution phases to ensure you remain on the same page. 

PMs in most technical organizations work with technical teams, so the difference really stems from the customers of your product. Technical PMs typically work on technical products. Typically, your customers are a technical audience (e.g., developers) and you need to have the tech skills to communicate with them.

If your question was about Tech Product Management, it is a solid understanding of the product vision and direction. A tech PM is able to be the voice of the customer in front of engineering or the voice of engineering in front of marketing. 

They are able to represent the best interest for the product in front of any audience.

I don't think I've had a single surprise across my various tech product management roles. 

In general, I would say my most surprising aspects when I moved to a product role has been the amount of work that goes into non-engineering aspects. For example, how much influence marketing or finance can bring into the success of a product. Partnering with these organizations taught me a lot since I came from an engineering background.

Yes. If you are willing to transition, its simplest if there is a role in your organization. I am assuming this question was about TPM = Program Managers rather than product managers. 

If the question was about tech product managers, the focus should be on understanding the product and customers rather than execution.

The best tech product managers I know have a very good understanding of their product. This includes understanding the customer needs and market. They use this knowledge to make quick, but data backed decisions about the product direction. 

They are also able to influence and bring along a wide range of stakeholders in order to successfully execute.

In general, you need technical product managers when the PMs need a deep technical understanding. In most cases, this is because the customers of your product are technical. 

PMs who aren't technical will be unable to effectively manage a product whose customers are technical folks like developers. There can be situations where your direct customer might not be tech folks, but the product is sufficiently complex and the PM needs to understand enough of the product to be effective. 

That depends on the organization. I've found that it differs based on the organization, and the impact you make on the projects. Certain organizations and leaders give more authority and control to TPMs vs EMs. 

That said, EMs usually have authority over the people on their team while Program and Product managers are influencing without authority. Respect doesn't come with authority, but it can help get a start if that's your way of working.