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Building a Product Management Team
Building a Product Management Team
2 answers
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
As I mentioned in another answer, lean on those around you; there is a wealth of
knowledge to be amassed from stakeholders and peers that have likely interacted
with the product that you've been brought in to support for some time. Those
same team members likely led to you being brought on board to begin with, so
learning as much as you can will set you up well for the future.
If you can come up with a clear set of goals for yourself, it will be immensely
helpful to gauage your progress. For example:
1. 30 - 60 - 90 Day Plan; there are plenty of online templates that can give
you ...more
VP Product at CookUnity
Assuming this is an early stage company, the priority should be learning the
basics of the business and building relationships with as many colleagues as
possible. Use those learnings to construct a map of current products, problems
and opportunities. Considering you are the first PM, any foundational
product-related frameworks you put in place will be welcomed by most of your
colleagues, so don't be afraid to suggest new ways of working. I'd also suggest
reading some of the popular PM books which contain some really helpful tips and
tactics: The Lean Product Playbook, Inspired, Product Man...more
2 answers
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
Today, our org structure follows the ethos of "Small, autonomous teams". In this
structure, we generally have a PM paired with a Technical Lead (Eng), somewhere
between 3 - 5 Engineers, and a Business Systems Analyst to focus on operational
and analytical tasks. Some teams have a Design/UX representative as well, where
applicable.
Hierarchically, we have these teams organized into Pillars, with a shared
broader mission/remit. Pillars are led by a triad, with a Senior PM, Product
Lead, or Group Product Manager aligned with an Engineering Lead (above TL) and a
BSA Lead or Design Lead wher...more
VP Product at CookUnity
I've noticed a trend in the tech industry for product organizations to follow a
structure that Spotify helped craft over the years, in which a company is
organized into business sub-orgs that roll up into their own respective product
and engineering leads. And those leads oversee various squads that make up the
product areas within that sub-org. At CookUnity we call the product areas
"zones", in which a product lead exists to drive the product strategy and manage
the PM team. In smaller companies (<500), those product leads are likely the
direct leadership team for the Head of Product.
...more
2 answers
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
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 typically are for a new product launch or new
category of capabilities. These i...more
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
At the company level, there are a few different methods of communications to
keep everyone abreast of updates:
1. Product Notification emails (Ad Hoc) - These emails have a set template and
allow product teams from around the company to share updates to their areas
in a digestable format as major features go out of the door.
2. Product Newsletter emails (Weekly) - The weekly newsletter summarized major
product updates and initiatives to all product team members.
3. Quartery Business Review meetings (Quarterly) - These larger meetings gather
key parts of the business to...more
VP Product at CookUnity
The intent of your product management updates and information-sharing will
determine the best methods and tactics used. I notice a natural separation in
the type of updates in our practice: 'operational' and 'strategic'. Operational
updates are usually related to progress made on roadmap items, explicit
learnings that impact product decisions and smaller feature/functionality
announcements, etc. - events that occur more frequently such as bi-weekly. You
basically want to keep the company in the loop on the advancements you and the
team are making which is helpful for both stakeholders and y...more
4 answers
Staff Product Manager, Libraries and SDKs at Twilio
The partnership with Product Marketing is one of the most important functions
when it comes to rolling out a successful product. Don’t read too much into the
last part of that statement though, a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is a
crucial teammate to include from the start, not just at launch time. If I know
who I will be working with in advance, I tag them in Product Requirements
Documents or other important materials. Sharing context from the beginning is so
important!
As far as the KPIs go, we are really talking about how you measure the success
of a product, and Product Management a...more
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
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 that require deep partnership: Number of customer stories/references
for the c...more
Director of Product Management at Atlassian
* Just like Shared KPI's between Engineering and Product Management, a similar
shared KPI framework between Product Management and Marketing is a great way
to build high quality products that bring customer delight and high ROI. This
also builds camaraderie and encourages teamwork towards a common goal between
these teams.
* Generally PM's would own Company, Business, Acquisition, User Engagement and
User Satisfaction KPI's. Examples are: MRR, Churn rate, Number of users,
DAU/WAU/MAU, Number of sessions, Session duration, Churn rate, NPS or CSAT
etc.
* While Marketin...more
VP Product at CookUnity
I love this question because it's something I'm currently involved with at
CookUnity. At a B2C company the marketing team is a Product Manager's best
friend, especially in the early startup days. You can build the greatest product
in the world but there are only so many Field of Dreams "if you build it they
will come" success stories. You need someone out there telling your product's
story and building awareness, hence the PM's need for a great relationship with
the Marketing organization.
Launching a new product, a new major feature release, or even a rebrand requires
a collaborative d...more
4 answers
Principal PM & Product Coach at Microsoft | Formerly Amazon
Wonderful, congrats!
Get into a rhythm by understanding the business/company goals. Then understand how the tech works (look at the customer/user interface first and then make sure you understand how the system behind the UI works). Begin collecting data in a transparent way and share your learnings with your stakeholders and leadership.
Conduct user research (both qualitative and quantitative) to help illustrate what product areas (epics/themes) you want to focus on and how these connect back to the business/company goals.
VP of Product at Zumper
Congrats on your new role! Joining as the first PM at a company can be both a
blessing and a curse. The first thing to acknowledge is that you are going to be
strapped on your time so you need to ruthlessly prioritize your time and focus
to ensure you're driving value and impact to the organization. First, you should
understand whether the roadmap is clear and that it is the most impactful items
the company needs for the road ahead.
Is the roadmap clear and is there alignment amongst the leadership team? Work
with executives to understand the companies priorities and why these items are
pr...more
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
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 this quickly so you can get aligned.
This is a necessary prerequisite to some of ...more
VP Product at CookUnity
All Product Managers need to be a sales person at different times in their
career. As someone establishing a PM function for the first time, you'll be
selling the vision of how an effective product manager will help the business
and company achieve their goals. There's obviously at least one champion
considering you got hired by somebody! But don't be surprised if some colleagues
don't understand the need or value of a product manager, so this is the time to
set expectations and build trusted relationships. The first step is learning as
much as you can from the people around you. Try and be...more
7 answers
Principal Product Manager at Trello
AS A FIRST PM, YOU WILL NEED TO BE VERY JUDICIOUS WITH HOW YOU ALLOCATE YOUR
TIME AND RESOURCES. IN FACT, I THINK THAT’S TRUE FOR LARGER COMPANIES AS WELL.
THERE ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE MORE IDEAS THAN RESOURCES AVAILABLE.
AS A PRODUCT MANAGER, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSLATING THE COMPANY’S VISION
INTO A ROADMAP SO YOUR FIRST PRIORITY SHOULD BE INTERNALIZING THE COMPANY’S
GOALS. IS IT TO DRIVE SIGN-UPS? INCREASE RETENTION? INCREASE MRR? OR SOMETHING
ELSE ALTOGETHER? NARROWING IN ON THAT TOP GOAL HELPS TO WEED OUT WORK THAT MAY
BE LESS RELEVANT.
Once you’ve identified the top goal (there...more
VP Product Management, Networking and Security at Cisco
Honestly, the first product manager for a company is probably not ready to
establish a prioritization framework. The first PM probably needs to focus on
customer discovery, market discovery, MVP intuition, and experimentation. Until
you have established product-market fit with enthusiastic customer demand,
rigorous prioritization is probably bikeshedding.
Once you have that fit, that's when you'll start to get inbound
requests/ideas/complaints from current customers, potential customers, new
market segments you hadn't considered, and sales teams eager to displace
competition. Then you can ...more
VP, Product & Operations (WooCommerce) at Automattic
There are many great approaches to this question – and to some extent, it will
depend on what the company values. If you're a first Product Manager, it is most
important that customer needs / expectations are at the forefront of any
framework.
With my teams, I sometimes like to use a graph, where one of the axes represents
customer impact (how much does this product or feature postively improve their
lives?) and the other maps effort or investment. That will give you an easy 2x2
where there is a clear set of high impact, low effort/investment things that
represent quick wins. You'll als...more
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
The great thing about being the first hire is something that is also great about
Product Management: there is room for interpretation. My philosophy has always
been more heavily focused on understanding how things operate current state,
finding out pain points as well as the more successful parts of a product, and
leaning on those insights to form your next steps.
In certain scenarios, what a team may need is for someone to roll up their
sleeves and do the work to keep the lights on for a product. It may be months
before you can get the product to a comfortable enough place to think abou...more
Group Product Manager at Airbnb
First PM in a company! I have not done it, nor have anyone in close network to have a good understanding. My guess is that they have to establish right roles/responsibilities on what to carve out from the CEO. Perhaps focused on scaling up product for next million users (or take on next set of enteprise clients), or execution focsed. Do take this with a grain of salt as I am guessing based on when should a CEO hire their first PM.
Head of Product, Retailers at Faire
When you are the first PM, you are straddling several priorities:
1. Finding product market fit
2. Scaling the team
3. Scaling the product
The biggest failure mode is trying to do 2 and 3 before you do 1: As the first
PM, your foremost priority should be to establish product market fit.
Distibuting that effort across more people dilutes the effectiveness because
information gets lost along the way.
Once you enter scaling, things become more complicated. Here the biggest failure
mode is becoming your own bottleneck and entering what I call the doom loop of
hiring: The less time you s...more
VP Product at CookUnity
In my experience a prioritization framework is foundational to establishing a
great working relationship within your own team and stakeholders. I'd also argue
that if executed well in the beginning, the framework may not change much
regardless if you are the first or 10th PM at a company. In fact, it may be a
bit more straightforward as a solo PM since the prioritized list of needs and
deliverables is a direct negotiation between you, stakeholders and your delivery
team(s). As the product organization grows you'll notice that blockers,
dependencies and enablers exist within your own product...more
5 answers
Principal Product Manager at Trello
I have been a part of small teams, large teams, a PM consultant and an
entrepreneur. I have yet to scale a PM team beyond the first PM but here are the
things I would consider:
* Structure your team based on where the company will be in a few
months/years—hiring should reflect the company’s vision and serve as a
blueprint for where the business is headed.
* Ideally, each one of the identified goals above would have a subject matter
expert (e.g. a retention PM, a growth PM, a localization PM, an Enterprise
PM, etc). As the team scales, you'll be able to move away from hiring
...more
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
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
personas or specific products that your company has. I personally tend to
avoid...more
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
This is a situation that our team went through last year, scaling from 2 PMs to
10 over 12 months. Before hiring any additional PMs, we first took the time to
survey the teams that existed in our current state. We reviewed the tools they
owned, their missions, their place in the lifecyle of the motion that we support
(Quote to Cash), and made our decisions from there. Certain teams needed to be
consolidated, others needed to be created, and some simply needed more
structure.
With a plan in hand, we outlined our most critical hires; we focused on Senior
Product Managers that could take ou...more
Head of Technical Program Management at Meta
Building with intent is key. As a first PM or TPM, you are often running a
one-person show. You wear multiple hats and you tend to be scrappy, flexing to
what the business needs you to do. That approach works wonders up to a certain
scale but soon exposes its flaws. When you think about scaling out from there,
here are a few things to consider -
* Understand your business (replace with org or product team) needs deeply,
ideally the 1 to 2 year trajectory of where it is going. That’ll tell you
what type of product person you need to hire next. Someone with augmenting
skills (Growt...more
VP Product at CookUnity
The first PM hired into a company, or in a division of a company, will usually
be an individual who can wear different hats on any given day. (see one of my
favorite product management graphics:
https://medium.com/@productboard/the-many-hats-of-product-managers-4692aab2fff)
The decision to grow and scale the PM team beyond your first product hire is
made after discussing needs and opportunities with stakeholders, but also by
gaining important insight from the existing PM that's been working in the
trenches.
When deciding who the next hires should be, I've found it helpful to first
valid...more
2 answers
Principal PM & Product Coach at Microsoft | Formerly Amazon
Interestingly enough I see two trends in the types of KPIs product teams miss.
1) Aligning with the larger's organization or business goals - Ensuring that your product roadmap is actually impacting the success metrics (OKRs, KPIs) of the business itself is critical to knowing if you are investing in and prioritizing the right work.
2) Capturing "technical or engineering" metrics - Any work that your team spends time on should be impacting some metric. Even metrics that are technical (the most common one being latency) should be captured, reported on, and measured over time.
Director of Product Management at Atlassian
- In terms of KPI's shared between product and engineering, I would say "Effective Resource Utilization" can be missed primarily because it can be hard to track and measure across projects/teams.
- "Internal team satisfaction" is another one that PM's may not include but this is an extremely important metric that provides a good idea of the health of the team and organization. This should not be missed.
3 answers
Principal PM & Product Coach at Microsoft | Formerly Amazon
Product teams in my opinion consist of product, engineering, and design (at a minimum). With that said, product KPIs should always be shared with engineering since what they are building essentially impacts the KPIs of the product in question. All the work that product teams do should always build up back to the overall company/business unit objectives (even if those metrics are more technical).
VP of Product at Zumper
Product, Engineering (and even design!) should ensure the majority of the user's
experience is measured (engagement, conversion), the platform is functional
(speed, etc), and that the company's key metrics are preserved.
A big miss that comes up between product and engineering is when there is
confusion around a product experience.
Product Perspective: "This is not working as expected. This is a bug"
Engineering: "This is what I was asked to build. It's working as specified"
This will happen from time to time based on how mocks, specifications, or flows
are interpreted. The best KPI her...more
Director of Product Management at Atlassian
* Shared KPI's between engineering and Product Management is a great way to
build high quality, scalable products that are delivered on-time that bring
customer delight. This also builds camaraderie and encourages teamwork
towards a common goal.
* There are different ways of achieving this. e.g. PM's and Engineering can own
certain KPI's. While both teams can also individually own their own KPI's.
Not all have to be shared
* Generally PM's would own Company, Business, Acquisition, User Engagement and
User Satisfaction KPI's. Examples are: MRR, Churn rate, Number of user...more
2 answers
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
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 even with only a handful of PMs. Focus on articulating the big
bets for that quarter a...more
Head of Technical Program Management at Meta
Expanding the team from 1 to multiple people comes with a set of pitfalls that
I’ve learned the hard way. And many other factors such as Org culture, line of
business, product lifecycle etc, have a telling effect on the type of pitfalls
you’ll encounter, so take this with a grain of salt. Here are a few things worth
considering -
* N degrees of separation: The larger your org grows, more layered your teams
are (typically). Ensuring that you and everyone on the team feel connected to
each other in a meaningful way is super critical. Here are a few tactical
things you could do -
...more