Advice to a new PM in this function? What are some common mistakes new PMs make?

Seek to understand and clarify first before assuming you have learnt everything that is to know and propose solutions. 

I see there are lot of online courses, documentation, articles -- you can do a lot of reading online to educate yourself about the complexities of model development, data gathering, data labeling, training and testing. 

One of the big challenges for AI/ML PMs is understanding whether we have enough data for training the model, is it diverse enough to cover for the specific use-case, model deployment, and corner cases where the model might fail. 

There is this notion that a few buzz words will help you to convince engineering, please refrain from doing that. If something looks too easy, remember it is not. 

Ask lot of questions in the early learning phase, no question is dumb. Make sure you have looked at the problem from all different angles, have understood the customer problem, sought out peer perspectives through industry analysts and experts, competitive plays -- so you can define the scope of the solution. 

With AI/ML and with any other product, perfect is the enemy of the good, but at the sametime, if you have biases in your dataset, the "good enough" might be a disaster as soon as it lands in the hands of your users and customers. 

Everyone is going to make new mistakes coming into a PM role depending on where they are starting from. For me, my biggest mistake was letting my own imposter syndrome take over. I had worked so hard to move from a CSM role into product and once it finally happened, I couldn't get rid of the voice in my head saying, "Wow you are so lucky they *let* you move into product, don't screw it up, because you definitely have no idea what you are doing!" While this was kind of true (I really didn't know what I was doing at the beginning), I should have trusted the fact that I would not have been giving this opportunity if my managers and peers didn't believe in me. I was unable to focus on the skills that got me here, like my deep understanding of our customers and their problems, and instead focused on the skills I needed to improve, like my technical understanding.

Give yourself the patience and grace to know you aren't going to be good at all of it from the get-go, but be hungry and eager to learn. Which leads me to my next piece of advice; ask for help! There is nothing wrong with saying, "I don't know" or, "I don't understand." No one is going to expect to you know everything right away and asking for help ends up saving a lot of time and energy vs you trying to figure it out on your own.

It can be hard to ask for help, for fear of looking "dumb" or at least feeling that way. It helped me to identify a few allies early on that were happy to walk me through things (slooooowly sometimes), because they understood the faster I learned, the better our team would be for it. The first engineering manager I worked with was a great example of this. He became the person I knew I could always ping to say, "Heyyyy can you explain this to me in more detail. I'm not quite getting it." It was such a relief to always know there was a friendly face to walk me through tough problems.

Lastly, decision fatigue is a very real thing in product management, especially for new PMs. Never in my career had I been the end-all be-all for making decisions and now all of the sudden, I had engineers and designers and asking me for answers left and right! It took me a bit to realize it was ok to be wrong, as long as we had a direction to move in. Not every decision has to be the right one, but the longer you take to make it, the more the team slows down. So just do your best, measure the results and be ok with pivoting if you are wrong.

I think the most common mistake that I see is jumping to solutions quickly. This is definitely my biggest mistake as I started as a product manager. For me, it was/is really easy to think I know the answer and to move quickly from the unknown/undefined to the known/defined stage and ultimately check something off the list by delivering it into the hands of customers. However, the role of the product manager is to stay in curiousity and research and the unknown for long enough in order to get enough information from customers and then from your crossfunctional partners to define to the best solution to solve the customer's pain while balancing that with the goals of the organization and your core product principles. And all this while driving urgency around achieving results. A tall order!

Here's a few common mistakes I see in no particular order (many I've made myself):

• Not talking to enough customers

  • IMO you should be talking to at least a couple of customers a week, and listening to more customer calls e.g. with Gong, #ShamelessPlug. But seriously, listen and talk to more customers, it's a gold mine you're sitting on and almost certainly not utilizing enough.

• Focusing on user personas vs. jobs to be done.

  • This almost always results in a biased, solution-centric view of reality vs. why customers actually come to your product to solve their pain points.

• Not focusing enough on workflows

  • Features don't get adopted or fail to retain users when the PM lacks a deep understanding of their users' existing workflows vs. new workflow that your feature/product would create.

  • Most PMs focus too much on features/functionality at the high level, and not enough on the tactical workflows i.e. how will this literally fit into the user's day-to-day habits. It's not sexy, but great PMs obsess about workflows, not just the theory of the features.

• Not thinking like a mini-CEO / having low business acumen

  • Great PMs think like mini-CEOs: they tie their objectives to clear, measurable product and business metrics that move the needle for the company. They're mindful of the timelines and inputs required to get there. And they know how to steer and align the teams toward those goals.

  • In such an uncertain market, this is arguably one of the few levers that PMs can control to quantify the value of their contributions to their company and make themselves hard to replace.

• Poor stakeholder management

  • One of the hard parts of being a PM is being able to ruthlessly prioritize, say no (especially to someone you want to say yes to), and steer the team in the right direction to achieve clear business and product goals the team is aligned on.

  • PMs need to balance demands from customers, sales, CS, engineering, leadership etc.

  • It's not easy, sometimes it'll feel like too much "politics", but it is an absolutely critical skill and will serve you in whatever you do next.

The biggest misconception about PM is that it's a tactical, inward facing role. It should be a strategic, outside in role. Writing stories, running scrum ceremonies and crashing standups are some of the least important things on your plate, yet it's where most new PMs spend their time. You need to get out of the office (virtually these days), spend time with customers and prospects, and develop a deep understing their pain and the problem. 

Engineers are really good at running scrum ceremonies, finding solutions to problems and micromanaging JIRA. The best value you can give them is helping them understand your customer and their pain.