What is the single most important activity you prioritize as a product leader? Why do you prioritize this activity above all else?

- How might this shift according to company maturity and the maturity of the product you're working on? - For IC PMs, what is the single most important activity that you'd recommend they prioritize? How might this shift according to company maturity and the maturity of the product you're working on?

Answer

4 Answers

Building a Product Management Team

Maxime Prades

Meta Director of Product Management | Formerly Algolia, Zendesk • 2y

As a product leader, the single most important activity I prioritize is attempting to build an amazing team. A players attract A players and building incredibly diverse, smart and committed teams is the single most important job of a product leader. People come and people go, as a product leader you're always hiring. One of my former boss said to me once that once you team reaches a certain size (~10/12 people) you're always hiring. Something always happens, (internal/external mobility, reorgs, ...Read More

2,529 Views
Paresh Vakhariya

Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence) | Formerly PayPal, eBay, Intel, Verizon • 2y

Setting a solid product vision, strategy and a clear roadmap for atleast 3-6-12 months is the top activity for a PM leader. Some benefits of having this in place are: Determine and solve customer problems Clearly articulate the impact you will have on company or product metrics Alignment across the entire organization on what you will deliver by and when Make sure resources are allocated to the right initiatives as outlined in the roadmap Inspire Engineering, Design, Marketing, Data Science and ...Read More

1,527 Views
Leo Sadeq

Lead Product Manager and GTM Specialist | Formerly Mailchimp - Caspian - Zeda.io • 1y

The short answer is deep customer understanding all day long. Because everything else, from product development, feature prioritization, market fit, strategy, etc stems directly from knowing your customer inside out.

This will bring the org and teams together and work in good pace while reducing silos and dependencies.

After all, your product is for users to try and adopt to solve their issues. And you solve that by making sure theres a problem for a user your product can solve.

177 Views
Amina Bouabdallah

Atlassian Principal Product Manager • 2y

Speaking with customers + reading customer feedback from the various sources it comes through: support channels, sales channels, in-product feedback. No week has gone by in the past 5 years that I did not talk to one customer or read feedback. Why? with every customer, you learn something new about what works and does not work in your product and its GTM (messaging, positioning, state of field enablement). Do that enough times and you build a complete picture over your business. When you speak w ...Read More

294 Views