AMA: WorkBoard Chief Product Officer, Rupali Jain on Building a Product Management Team

I'm going to suggest a few processes, but please do scale each process to the size of the organization. Treat your processes like you treat your product - establish 2-3 internal customer problems that are actually worth solving, and solve them with an MVP of a process and iterate as you learn - don't try to introduce everything at once. Quarterly priorities: Getting into the habit early of writing down the plan for the quarter is a good muscle to build early in establishing the PM discipline eve ...Read More

While there are different specific metrics that marketing and product teams track for product launches, what's critical is the alignment between the two and agreement on the metrics to track prior to the launch. Some examples of metrics tracked by each team: Product team: Satisfaction, usage by users and individual accounts, full funnel from a user trying the feature to actually using it Marketing team: % of reps enabled on the new product, leads generated, competitive win rate changes Metrics t ...Read More

There are different types of updates that need to be communicated to the rest of the company and how those get communicated is different Vision/Roadmap: At least annually, live at the annual kickoff to the company.  A recording should be available at all times, as well as part of the sales enablement and onboarding materials.  A vision is high level and helps internal teams get excited about our direction and share that excitement with prospects and customers Major launches: Major launches typic ...Read More

The simple answer is to hire PMs :) .  That said, I'm assuming you are asking more of how to structure the team to scale to the needs of the organization as you hire Define the discipline: Hire PMs that align with your definition of product management. You'll also need to setup the discipline (see my answer on establishing the function) Enable each PM to own their area of the product or business end to end as you set up the team.  This is crucial.  Often this means aligning PMs to specific perso ...Read More

Whether you are the first hire or an early leadership hire that is trying to establish the product management function, the most important aspect is to show value.  Beyond that, there are a few critical aspects of setting up the function Align with the CEO/Leadership team: You hopefully established with the leadership team/CEO  how they define the role and what they wanted from you as the first PM hire before you took the job. If you didn’t, its still not too late. Do have a conversation around ...Read More