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

Execution is key, and achieving the balance is the reason PMs are successful.

Dedicate some time towards each of it.

• Have a clear product strategy

• Identify whats the must-have

• Balance the tactical and strategic

• Spend dedicated time for connecting with customers, partners and engineering.

This will help you ensure you remain focused on the business goals. Always dedicate a percentage of your time for customer calls, whether its for discoveries, or tactical issues.

Technical product managers are overseeing products from a technical perspective. The product is a technology, which drives the need for you to be technical.

• Though primary focus remains why you are building, where is more emphasis on how its being built

• Works closely with engineering teams

• Often, your customers are also technical.

• Usually has technical skillset including a computer engineering background

The biggest mistake would be to solution things before listening. Listening is key to success.

• Listen to your customers to identify what they want.

• Share your requirements with team members, engineering partners, leadership. Listen to them and identify what needs to be done clearly.

Once that is clear, map to your strategy and goals to see whether its the right investment for your product

Thats always a tricky one.

Its important to ensure your top customers remain happy, but you still spend some bandwidth on others. The long tail can often grow into your top customers at some point, but you dont want to lose your current ones.

At times, your different stakeholders might also have completely different areas of the product they need. Use tools to rank your requests based on criteria thats most relevant in your situation.

Data is key and its very important that the PM can derive the right insights from data. The actual level of competency of analytics tools depends on your support system (whether we are talking about BAs, Business Intelligence Engineers). With AI tools at your disposal now, the lack of competencies can be compensates easily.

With AI, product managers are at the forefront of innovation. In addition to identifying requirements, PMs are now able to easy prototype and validate their ideas. Technical product managers in particular are well positioned to own leading their organizations by leveraging the advances in Generative AI and LLM models.

Product discovery is one of the easiest areas to leverage AI. Its very easy to prompt LLMs to get all the wisdom on the internet consolidated for you.

Once you are through product discovery, you can leverage AI for prioritization as well. Personally, I use AI to rank features based on different criteria, and modify ranks and easily rank various criteria in ways it wasnt previously possible.