Establishing Product Management

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 understand where product can add the most impact short term and demonstrate early wins to help b...

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, and incrementally improve, they way they work together. You can call this process whatever you like - "reflection", "retrospective", "after-action review", "post-mortem" - but it is imperative to building an effective team.  This practice will inform the way you introduce and evolve processes as your team grows. Here's the lightest-weight retro format I've ever used, which is a great wa...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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? This gets to the "impact" part of the 2x2. * Urgency/timeline - how flexible is the schedu...

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 business, and likely an evolving company strategy. So the question you need to ask yourself is what are you optimizing for? The runway of your company is critical to consider, but I always lean towards how might we prioritize learnings and building trust to build out a strong product roadmap

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 company, or a new product at an existing company, chances are you're finding product-market fit. When thinking about prioritizing work in that context, you need to be crystal clear on the metrics that matter, and laser focused on moving them.  In my experience, developing and testing hypotheses is a great framework for this stage. You simply can't afford waste, so understanding what you're tr...

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 work is generating the intended results.  Warning: For this to work best, it's great for these KPIs to be established as early as you can in the product lifecycle. PMs who wait until the last-minute (think 1-2 sprints before a feature/product will be released) risk not getting the most from this partnership.  Here's a process I would follow: 1. Provide the PMM sufficient strategic c...

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 important attribute I screen for. They don’t need to be a rocket scientist (top 0.5% of population) but they should be exceptional at this (top 5%). Good looks like: * Take large ambiguous problems and break them down into smaller pieces * Uses logic to convince others * Gets to the root of the issue: Think about things from multiple angles but then focuses on what matters (this is key ...

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 rigor. Post that process though what I look for are three key signals 1. Grit is my first. Big companies are notoriously slow, process heavy, and plodding. But the way I look at this is that with so much user trust, such a large business, and really a huge opportunity that we have to respect we want to get it right. I tell my team all the time that if you want to go fast go ...

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...

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 that contribute to retention (industry trends, opportunities for career progression, compensation), the factors in my daily focus are derived from this definition of psychological safety: * Meaning – company vision, team purpose, individual contribution, and belonging. * Mastery – goals and accountability, periodic feedback, recognition, and opportunities to teach/mentor others. * Tru...

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 choose a career in Product Management are motivated by self improvement - being around other talented PMs who they admire and who push their thinking is motivating. *  Stay lean. This may seem counterintuitive - isn’t it good to have enough PMs? Honestly, no. If you hire well you want to give people room to grow and stretch. The worst thing you can do is to staff up ...

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...

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 real value of a PM is to have a dedicated resource thinking about what the highest-leverage activities fro the team are in service of the broader business goals and user problems, but in many orgs that role has been played piecemeal by various folks and solidifying into a formal function can feel premature / overkill / threatening. Additionally, when introducing PMs into a company that hasn't...

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 outcomes we are trying to achieve and the relative importance of variou...

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 solutions-first (vs. problem-first) mindset * Founders have trouble letting go of product decisions as the company grows * Talent mismatch - PMs were reporting into other functions which did not know what to look for in PMs

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...

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 * anything that derives from the above (alignment on strategy, hiring PMs, initiating / killing product bets, etc)

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, misalignment on this question are the most common reasons heads of product fail. You want to know:  1. How will I be evaluated? “In 1 year, what evidence will tell you I’ve been successful?” Make sure they are specific. For example, if they say something like, “customers are happier,” follow up with: “what’s an example of something that would give you confidence customers are happy”...

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...

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 certainly not come in and try to redefine how ideation, scoping, planning, commits, shipping, reviews, etc work on Day 1. But if the team already ideates then I'd try to introduce customer conversations / user research as another avenue to generate ideas, then connect the dots to show that ideas that were grounded in external learning (vs internal opinions) had higher value over time.

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 you can channel that excitement towards features that are also exciting to customers. Your goal is to help your team fall in love with problems, not solutions. I’ve seen over and over again how this simple mindset shift can be a game changer for more user focused decision making. Here are some approaches to consider: 1. Expose your team to users - have engineers shadow user research session...

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 can do to get Design more involved upfront is in the ideation, discovery and exploration phase w...

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...

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...

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 shared services / infrastructure / components that multiple vertical teams leverage. These teams will usually have some combination of a engineering / product / design (EPD) functions, and may also include user research, data science, and/or quality assurance.

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 Kubernetes teams share a single PM. In addition to their normal day to day team management, some PMs ...