AMA: Zendesk Director of Product Management, JJ Miclat on Product Management Career Path

Different types of PMs - Core Product Managers, Platform Product Managers, Infra/Internal Product Managers, Data Product Managers, Growth Product Managers, AI Product Managers Core Product Management Building products, features, enhancements directly for the company’s external target consumer/business Platform Product Management Building products, tooling, systems that are leveraged/shared by a handful of core product management teams to prevent service duplication - ie billing systems, authenti ...Read More

PMs are able to help engineers with: talking to all different types of customers and prospects, so that we constantly have informed/holistic insights into most impactful problems we should be solving for our target customer taking the set of problems we have to solve, strategically sequencing them (roadmap), and pitching this to leaders internally to ensure buy-in + resources to fund this work take the lead on solutioning - working with engineering, product design, content design, user research, ...Read More

the ability to ask questions and synthesize - customers often tell you what they want to see happen in the product, but that may not be the most scalable solution for all of your target customers in aggregate. In customers interviews, get to the root of the “why” behind feature requests - why are they asking for this? what problem is it looking to solve? how big of a problem is this? what workaround are they doing today to bypass this problem? how would solving this problem help your customers b ...Read More

Coaching my PMs takes priority, people management is a force-multiplier if done correctly/effectively.I make individual contributions only if truly needed - a PM backfill hasn't been placed or a PM is struggling in a product that absolutely cannot fail. It was hard to to give up IC contributions initially as a people manager, but coaching your reports to be self-sufficient + autonomous + make quick/correct decisions, pays off dividends. If you miss IC work, go back to being an IC, the pay and gl ...Read More

Focus on how you drove engagement/retention for your B2B product, and how it ultimately lead to improving renewals and/or increasing upsells to higher tiers, if you made contributions there.Focus on how you drove self-serve checkout/trial experiences for your B2B product, if you made contributions there. Focus on how you solved the "cold-start problem" to an extent, for your B2B product, if you made contributions there. This applies to when a product's success is partially determined by the amou ...Read More

in product reviews, when an exec/lead asks you something about your product decision, don’t table it and say “idk, we’ll assess and circle back with you in xx days”, rather just say what you think ought/should happen. You could state that these are assumptions and you could/should validate later. But as a PM, you’re paid to have an opinion on the spot, and oftentimes we don’t have all the data/research at our fingertips. At least the exec could course correct you on the spot in case you need mis ...Read More

get some quick wins under your belt: shepherd a small product/feature/enhancement that’s currently in development out to market launch jump into user research calls to understand customer pain jump into sales calls (prospects or existing customers) to understand pain work with user research (or do it yourself) to understand and document the nature of different customer personas/segments, if this hasn’t been done already write a PRD for small product/feature/enhancement, get feedback on it, and r ...Read More

File a request to get a PM intern (if there’s such a program at your company) for direct people management experience Sign up through your company’s mentorship program (if there is one) to glean coaching/mentorship experience Become another employee’s unofficial mentor (if you are doing great work, folks will notice, and will naturally ask you to help/guide them on things) Influence other product development teams’ roadmaps (outside of the product development teams under your PM purview) Ask to ...Read More