AMA: Quizlet Principal Product Manager, Laura Oppenheimer on Building 0-1 Products

Part of the fun of building something 0-1 is that you have a green field in front of you — you can build anything! (Or that's what we wish as PMS....) As much fun as it would be to the world is your product oyster, constraints help provide focus and a direction. I see the first step is making sure that you and stakeholders are aligned on what a goal or success looks like. And usually, that comes in the form of a metric that you're trying to move.  If you work for an ecommerce company, you'll mak ...Read More

Great question that goes beyond product strategy and into larger company strategy. Every product serves a given user job or jobs. When you have product market fit and things are going well, you then have a choice:  Continue investing in serving the original job to gain a larger piece of the total addressable market for that job or: Think about a new product offering that could either serve your existing customer in new ways or create a new adjacent customer segement to your original one.  I don' ...Read More

I might even abstract this out further to answer "What are the top mistakes product managers make when building a product period?" The best advice I've been given — and what I try to follow in my own work — is to be obsessed with the problem and not the solution. It can be really easy to think you know what the answer is based on what a user tells you in research, what a PMM counterpart reports back or what sales is saying the customer wants. Solutions are sexy and it's fun to build! And yet, be ...Read More

It's never going to be "as ready" as you want it to be. Because we don't work in a vacuum, the product is never built to 100% (I've never worked on anything where we had P2 requirements built into the product on launch day - it doesn't happen). There are three components that come together to ID when a product is ready to be shipped:  1) Business needs: If you run an ecommerce product, then your product needs to be out for Black Friday and the holiday rush. Similarly if you work in fitness, Janu ...Read More

After 2.5 years into working remotely, the two areas that have been the most challenging for me are 1) cross functional exploration and ideation and 2) user research outside of video interviews.  First, I've found it really challenging to replicate is the ability to get in a room with design, engineering and PMM partners and think through problems and solutions to those problems. Whiteboarding and brainstorming are frequently thought of as startup cliches, but there's something really powerful a ...Read More

So much about product management is about stakeholder management — getting everyone from engineers to exec team aligned on 1) what you are building and 2) what the goal is. With goals, we're very good at getting folks excited about the metrics-based goals ("we'll move conversion rate by 2 percent" or "sessions per month will increase by 10%") but I've found that it can be super helpful to align on what the goal is of launching something as well.  At Quizlet, we've been very deliberate about defi ...Read More