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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Back-end and admin tasks including product catalog, order management, and settings. * Grow: Spreading the word about their products and business via sales and marketing channels like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Pinterest. We have native channel integrations that merchants can attach to their stores that help facilitate pushing products and offers. * Email: This is wher...more

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 overseeing each product area. I also have dedicated engineering, data science, design, content and operation teams, if it applies, to work closely with the product manager for each area. I prefer to have each product manager own a well defined product area to not only have true ownership but also to continue growing their product expertise in the area. For any newly identified areas that need prod...more

A product management role varies from company to company, and size of the company is subjective. I will share my point of view, assuming a small company has less than 50 employees and a large company has more than 500 employees, in several dimensions. Ownership and Scope In large companies, product managers often own established areas, like a feature or feature sets. Large collaborations are required with other product managers for alignment and dependencies. It is unlikely to have opportunities to build something from 0 to 1 but more so to enhance or redefine the goals for features. T...more

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. I had to justify these needs as many leaders and stakeholders felt that an eng manager or technical program manager were more suitable given their technical knowledge and depth. Realizing the fact that many platform areas are abstract and complicated to understand compared to some user facing features, I saw it was a great opportunity to bring awareness of the impact of platform product managem...more

Resource constraints are a very common challenge for any team and company that I’ve worked for. I tend to focus on business priorities and how the identified product area can make an impact on those priorities in my framework rather than letting resource constraints limit my thought process. Once everyone, including leadership, stakeholders andt the team, are all agreed on the business priorities, I will then look into several solutions and how these solutions can move the needle. Another important step is to compare the identified business priorities to other priorities and do a thoroug...more

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 development processes, but also potentially extend responsibilities wherever help is needed, including user research, marketing or even as a QA engineer. Here are initial 30/60/90 day goals to achieve this as the first product manager: 30 days: Be open minded to listen, observe and learn 1. Understand the company and its business model in depth, including history, challenges, overar...more

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 establishing a new team, hiring the right person who is a good fit for the team and the company contributes greatly to talent retention. What I offer to my talented people to retain them are: understanding, recognition and growth opportunities, which are all built on a trusted foundation. I strongly believe trust is the foundation for any form of relationship, including leadership, partnership, ment...more

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 observers hopping on / off are not disruptive to the participant or moderator. We also run an internal back-channel where observers can discuss responses or suggest follow-up questions. Often, I see that hearing directly from individual customers drives a level of engagement for Engineers that is much higher than if they were merely reading a written summary of aggregate responses at the end of a study...more

To me, the first 90 days are all about communication with your new team and cross-functional partners – even more so if you're setting up the Product Management function for the first time. Treat your communications a bit like internal marketing for PM (and yourself), meaning they should be tailored to your audiences, showcase how your PM skills create value for the team, and address potential concerns head-on. The first 30 days are your time to listen and learn. Spend time with Engineering and Design to observe team dynamics and collaboration styles. Also talk with Marketing, Sales, Dat...more

The biggest surprise was how hard it was to convince others that Product Leads / Product Managers would be an asset to the team. This sentiment was more common among those who had been at Automattic and WooCommerce for several years, and perhaps not worked with a Product Lead / Product Manager before. The questions I heard included: * Would this role add an extra administrative layer? A: It's actually a new type of work that would help us ensure what we build meets users' needs.  * Shouldn't Engineering and Design do this work? A: They are certainly capable, but it can sometimes...more