AMA: Realtor.com Sr. Director, Product Operations, Casey Flinn on Product Management Skills

Creating new opportunities. This is really what will differentiate yourself as a Product Manager and really expand your own career opportunities. Its also the hardest thing to achieve because it requires high levels of proficiency, a strong "product sense," and being in a company that creates the conditions for you to do this. Imagine two PMs both focusing on driving a KR of improving NPS by 30pts... PM 1 achieves that goal by revising pricing and packaging, addressing feature gaps with the near ...Read More

I get the gist of the question, yet want to call out that "impressing" team mates is not the path I would take. Rather its all about how one can show up authentically and build a collaborative working relationship. It also set ups a paradigm where one party gets to define what is valued and the other just has to respond / adapt. So I would recommend something like this (note: this applies not just to your engineering partners but also everyone in your Trio+ sphere). Essentially I want to consist ...Read More

Not Understanding and/or Aligning OKRs If you are operating against different and even competing OKRs then your roadmap will never get buy in. This issue creates the conditions where no matter what you have on there, there will not be alignment because everyone is chasing a different outcome. This is why OKR creation with stakeholders is critical - everyone needs to be bought into the direction before you can cuss and discuss the details and the how to get there Not Framing the Story with Data Y ...Read More

Great question. I would frame this as more "Product skills and mindsets" vs. just Product Management as I see these skills and mindsets across the community of Product roles. Also, I'm going to do what a good Product Person would do and prioritize for what I think would have an outsized impact on the whole company. Accountability to Outcomes over Outputs A product trio cannot survive long if they don't deliver outcomes and they just keep touting "look what we shipped." A sales person cannot surv ...Read More

Ah yes, I remember this article :) I think the key point Marty makes is "Things go wrong when these two roles are not clearly defined." There are two aspects of "defined" to work out here. From a management and org structure perspective, there needs to be definition of who is accountable for what and how these roles should work with each other written down somewhere to serve as a starting point. The next level of definition occurs between the matrixed individuals when you look at these managemen ...Read More