AMA: Zynga Senior Director of Product, Central Technology, Rosa Villegas on Establishing Product Management

There are a few different vectors to consider here. There is the effort/impact matrix, which is pretty good at helping identify low hanging fruit - essentially mapping out potential workstreams on a 2x2 matrix (High effort/high impact, low effort/low impact, etc). This can help cut through the noise as a good first step, but isn't the only thing you should be considering. Other lens I apply are things like: Customer - how many customers does this serve? VIP customers? Is this a want or a need? T ...Read More

Be adaptable to change - don't be afraid to try different things or change a process that is no longer working for the team. For a team that is growing quickly oftentimes process gets ignored because the team is so focused on delivering/executing that they feel process may slow them down. In some cases little to no process can be a good thing, but for a team that is scaling it can be detrimental. What I try to do is understand how they are using product management processes today and then try to ...Read More

I touched on this a bit in previous questions, but some common challenges are: Perception that Product may slow the team down. Some teams are very execution-focused, which can be good, but it's easy for team members to not be able to see the forest through the trees, and potentially get into a situation where they may be doing too many things, or not being focused on the right things.  Unclear or misalignment of goals or priorities - Product can add a lot of value but without a clear idea of the ...Read More

This is a really interesting question! I think one really great way of doing this is to engage design in understanding the problem you are trying to solve, not just the solution. Oftentimes, we jump straight to execution without always understanding the full customer journey or the vision for the future. In doing this it's easy to treat design as just a step in the process rather than as a thought partner who can help inject customer empathy throughout the product lifecycle.  A few things you ca ...Read More

It takes a solid 6 months for any new leader to make an impact on an organization. My first goal is usually to build trust and gain as much context as possible before making any big decisions or changes.    30 Days - My first objective is to listen and understand the organization, its customers, its goals and challenges. Identify key points of contact, stakeholders/customers, and colleagues. In the past I have done "listening tours" where I sit down with as many people as possible that represent ...Read More

Within Central Technology we are organized into Product verticals: Game Services, Developer Services, and Infrastructure Services. Each of these verticals are comprised of 3-6 teams that manage a suite of products. I have a Product Lead for each of the verticals, and the product leads typically manage the PMs for each of the teams. Depending on the needs of the team a PM may be fully or partly dedicated to a team (for example our Payments team has a fully dedicated PM, whereas our Cloud and Kube ...Read More