Establishing Product Management

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

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 intu

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 / expectat

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 understandi

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

When you are the first PM, you are straddling several priorities: Finding product market fit Scaling the team Scaling the product The biggest failure mode is trying to do 2 and 3 before you do 1: As

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, t

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 2

Thank you for the question and I'm sure this is exactly not the answer you're looking for which is, "it depends" You're balancing building trust and relationships, understanding your users and the bu

The fundamentals of prioritization are not too different when you're the first at a company. But in the early stages of a company or product, it's even more important to focus.  At an early stage com

This is a great question about how to pave the way for two things: product strategy and product management execution. I can see this being applicable to not only first Product hires at start-ups, but

The product manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the right product is delivered to the market at the right time. In order to do this effectively, you will need to establish a framework f

Know your customer - Often this can just be the investor in the company/company owner. Meet their basic expectations from the product first, and win their confidence. Aim to build a functional protot

The candidate must “spike” (“8/10” or higher) in all of these areas, in order of importance:  1. Critical Thinking Given how many decisions and complex problems are thrown at PMs, this the #1 most im

I'm lucky in that Google has a really rigorous interview process that I benefit from. Google is also known for taking a long time during that process but I promise you that is largely because of the r

The product manager's job is to identify the most impactful problems to solve, enable their team to build and ship solutions that delight users, learn, and iterate. Product managers need a multitude o

There's a lot written about basic PM competencies (https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/), and for any PM on my team, they should be able to do all these things you'd ex

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

I'm a strong believer in "just enough" process, so my answer to questions like this is always some version of "it depends"! The one piece of process that every team must have is a way to reflect on,

When joining a small company with no or little structure or joining a small but growing product team, it is essential to understand the current state of the product management process before establish

Great question.  To create a powerful partnership between Product Marketing (PMM) and Product Management (PM) it's essential for you to have a common set of KPIs that help you understand whether your

Product teams that don't have strong collaboration and communication with the product marketing team fail to deliver a delightful customer experience. These siloed product and marketing departments th

There is no doubt that retaining top talent is critical to any organization not only because of the value top talent brings, but also because it takes time to find and ramp up a new hire. While establ

I’ve worked in Product across two very different contexts – a company that favored complete alignment versus a company where autonomy was part of their cultural DNA.  While there are a lot factors th

I’ll skip the obvious things - pay well, set a vision, growing company, skill building, career pathing - and highlight some under-rated ones:  Hire well and have high talent density. Most people who

One challenge I encountered as the product lead for a platform team was to identify the product management needs for some of the relatively technical product areas, such as Machine Learning and APIs.

The biggest challenge comes from cross-functional partners (engineering, sales, marketing) who may not have prior experience partnering with PMs and aren't bought in to introducing the function. The r

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

Common challenges are: Fear that the PM will slow the team down or add too much process Another function has stepped in to fill the PM shoes and is reluctant to give their role up There is a solution

The first product manager of a startup plays a crucial role as one of the foundational members. S/he not only needs to quickly lay the product strategy, create short and long term roadmaps, and build

My # goal is to provide leverage around the strategy: If we're having impact, accelerate and expand If we're not having impact, get into that mode ensure all work connects to top level outcomes anyt

The most important thing you can do as a new head of product is to align with the founder/s and/or your manager on what your role is. Most people assume they did this in the interview process. Yet, mi

One way to get Engineering excited about customer focus is to invite them to listen in on interviews. We post all customer interviews on a shared calendar and use webinar settings that ensure observer

I would start with minor tweaks to the existing process vs trying to completely re-do things - most changes that stick only tweak 1 variable at a time vs trying to change the whole system. So I would

The good news is that you have an engineering team that is excited about the product & generating ideas. That’s huge. Over the long term, this will make your product more successful....so long as

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 s

The product organization at WooCommerce is organized by merchant needs: Start: Merchant onboarding, from the moment they click the CTA on WooCommerce.com to when their store is ready to sell. Manage:

My China Platform team owns the China Airbnb product for community services/customer support, trust, compliance and application infrastructure, including ML and mobile. I have 1-2 product managers ove

Ideally, you have "vertical" product teams whose charter is shipping end-user-facing features around a particular problem / persona. You may also have "horizontal" product teams that own certain share

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 suit