AMA: Uber Director of Product, Sirisha m on Product Development Process

Prioritization is a key PM competency. When there are constraints you need to deal with, “ruthless prioritization” becomes even more important. Some guiding principles to keep in mind when balancing with limited resources: For any investment you are making, articulating “the why” and “why now” is an important exercise to drive confidence in your investments & timelines around them. This will help select the right priorities at the right time.  Always have a stack ranked list of OKRs and proj ...Read More

Engineering should be part of your planning journey and not be brought in only when scoping. Couple of ways to driving the understanding to your engineering team: Throughout the year, create a forum to discuss new opportunities with your engineering as you discover them. This will make sure nothing is a surprise when planning comes by. This also helps engineering start the thinking around engineering requirements sooner than later.  When planning activities begin, I would strongly suggest at the ...Read More

“Managing up” is core to being a successful PM given how front and centre product development is for a business to grow.  “Communication with the right level of detail” is key to making these communications meaningful. When communicating, expectations need to be set both in terms of projects in flight as well as new opportunity areas as they surface up.  For projects in execution:  1. A progress check in in how the committed projects are progressing - this can be a monthly discussion forum so th ...Read More

Success metrics should be front and center of every conversation from the get go. Success metric is what I would refer to as ‘impact number’ or key results in an OKR. When defining the "why" behind every opportunity, a PM should identify the impact first. This impact helps not only drive prioritization but should also be used by development teams to understand the impact that their work has on the business and users. So my recommendation is that there is not a good time to talk about these metri ...Read More

“Data depth” is a core competency for any PM and unlocks “data informed’ strategy.  However, how much data analysis a PM will need to do will depend on the maturity of the organization & available resourcing. At the core, every PM must know where the data is logged and in what format. In organizations, where there is an organization wide data platform that democratizes data access & there are analysts on the teams, every PM should still be trained on using this platform and run lightweig ...Read More

Let’s break this down into 2 workstreams - 1) how to create the complete opportunity space & 2) the process to select the right opportunities to go after.  Creating the opportunity space - Assessing problems always starts with customers/users. As a PM, always factor time week over week to shadow/talk to your customers. If you have a user researcher on your team, they are your partner to start with. Also, problem identification can come from anywhere in the organization - as a PM, you should ...Read More

QA should always be an ongoing effort and be treated as a team effort. There might be spikes in QA efforts based on the complexity of the project but it should never be treated as 1 person responsibility.  Engineering is the first line of defense with unit testing.  Having a test environment where integrated end-to-end testing can be done is crucial for any development team.  PM + Design + EM should periodically be in the test environment testing an integrated experience. For complex products, t ...Read More