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Product Management Career Path
1 answer
Sr Director II, Product Management at Walmart
This reminds me of an interview question I got a very long time ago: "Is it
better to have a bad team or a bad manager". In both cases, you'd rather not
find yourself in either extreme. In both cases, there is no right or wrong
answer and a lot depends on additional circumstances and assumptions. The answer
will also depend on your value system and the experiences which have shaped your
core beliefs about human aptitude and potential.
For the sake of argument, if I had to pick, I would first apply the same
framework: which suboptimal option is more mitigatable.
I believe that most p...more
7 answers
Principal Product Manager at Trello
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
VP Product Management, Networking and Security at Cisco
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
VP, Product & Operations (WooCommerce) at Automattic
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
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
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
Group Product Manager at Airbnb
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.
Head of Product, Retailers at Faire
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
VP Product at CookUnity
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
5 answers
Principal Product Manager at Trello
I have been a part of small teams, large teams, a PM consultant and an
entrepreneur. I have yet to scale a PM team beyond the first PM but here are the
things I would consider:
* Structure your team based on where the company will be in a few
months/years—hiring should reflect the company’s vision and serve as a
blueprint for where the business is headed.
* Ideally, each one of the identified goals above would have a subject matter
expert (e.g. a retention PM, a growth PM, a localization PM, an Enterprise
PM, etc). As the team scales, you'll be able to move away from hiring
...more
Chief Product Officer at WorkBoard
The simple answer is to hire PMs :) . That said, I'm assuming you are asking
more of how to structure the team to scale to the needs of the organization as
you hire
* Define the discipline: Hire PMs that align with your definition of product
management. You'll also need to setup the discipline (see my answer on
establishing the function)
* Enable each PM to own their area of the product or business end to end as you
set up the team. This is crucial. Often this means aligning PMs to specific
personas or specific products that your company has. I personally tend to
avoid...more
Director of Product Management, Fintech at Hubspot | Formerly Segment, WeWork, Airbnb
This is a situation that our team went through last year, scaling from 2 PMs to
10 over 12 months. Before hiring any additional PMs, we first took the time to
survey the teams that existed in our current state. We reviewed the tools they
owned, their missions, their place in the lifecyle of the motion that we support
(Quote to Cash), and made our decisions from there. Certain teams needed to be
consolidated, others needed to be created, and some simply needed more
structure.
With a plan in hand, we outlined our most critical hires; we focused on Senior
Product Managers that could take ou...more
Head of Technical Program Management at Meta
Building with intent is key. As a first PM or TPM, you are often running a
one-person show. You wear multiple hats and you tend to be scrappy, flexing to
what the business needs you to do. That approach works wonders up to a certain
scale but soon exposes its flaws. When you think about scaling out from there,
here are a few things to consider -
* Understand your business (replace with org or product team) needs deeply,
ideally the 1 to 2 year trajectory of where it is going. That’ll tell you
what type of product person you need to hire next. Someone with augmenting
skills (Growt...more
VP Product at CookUnity
The first PM hired into a company, or in a division of a company, will usually
be an individual who can wear different hats on any given day. (see one of my
favorite product management graphics:
https://medium.com/@productboard/the-many-hats-of-product-managers-4692aab2fff)
The decision to grow and scale the PM team beyond your first product hire is
made after discussing needs and opportunities with stakeholders, but also by
gaining important insight from the existing PM that's been working in the
trenches.
When deciding who the next hires should be, I've found it helpful to first
valid...more
1 answer
Director of Product at MikMak | Formerly Discover, IRI
The best part of Product Management is that many of the skills are transferable
and while domain knowledge can be important, even that can be learned on the
job. Key skills can differ based on which level you are at in your PM career, so
am focusing on some that I think are most relevant for a middle management PM
role.
* Strategic and critical thinking: Thinking long term, big picture is important
you ahve to drive the vision for your product and make decisions quickly by
cutting through the noise. You should be able to analyze information and
provide actionalble insights to the...more
2 answers
Product Lead, Align Area at Asana
Customer feedback is critical to how we build, and we incorporate it at every
step of the product development process. We get customer feedback from a variety
of places.
When building new products we proactively reach out to customers to learn about
their needs and make sure we’re creating the right solutions for them. We have a
User Research team that regularly speaks to customers via a variety of methods -
everything from interviews and surveys to card sorting and field studies. Along
our product development process, we have specific touchpoints where we make sure
to utilize user resea...more
Director of Product at MikMak | Formerly Discover, IRI
Customer feedback is a key driving factor in shaping the product roadmap. A good
way of looking at a roadmap is categorizing intitatives into different buckets -
eg. Strategic/ Innovative, Maintenance/Keeping lights on, Platform Enhancements,
etc. Customer feedback can be incorporated in almost every bucket depending on
how well the team has done user research and gone through the discovery process.
We use tools such as Salesforce, Product Board and Zendesk where feedback
gathered from the CS teams can be directly tied to a feature/epic or even story
which can further help determine the ...more
2 answers
Product Lead, Flow Area at Asana
* One common misconception about b2b product teams is that they should spend
most of their time thinking about the buyer (e.g. an executive, IT decision
maker) rather than the individuals using the product every day. This
misconception arises because in business settings, everyday users sometimes
don’t have much choice in the tools they use. However, product teams who
focus too much attention on the buyer and not enough on everyday users often
end up building products that may get some initial traction, but ultimately
become the products teams love to complain about, a...more
Director of Product at MikMak | Formerly Discover, IRI
Misconception: B2B is about selling to businesses and so the end UI/UX is not as important.
In reality, the end user is always a person and there are people that are looking at easy products to use and making the decision to buy from you. The easier your product makes their job, the more inclined they will be to get your products. This applies for products as well as product operations - easy on-boarding, solid customer support and focus on data and reporting as possible.
2 answers
VP of Product at Shopify
I'm a fan of pairing. Often times Engineering works so closely with product, it is easy enough to sit more closely with your product partner and work through problems together. Ask questions and learn while on the job. If and when you get comfortable enough, start to volunteer to take on different tasks. I've worked with engineers who pair with me in writing requirements, buidling out tickets, reviewing designs, conducting user research. With this, you can now speak to first hand experiences and learnings within your existing company or any new ones you may be looking to move into.
Sr Director II, Product Management at Walmart
Fairly easily potentially, compared to transitioning from other less-related
fields. Product Management is as much art as it is discipline or science.
Leveraging technical expertise related to the same or adjacent PM area helps.
Some job descriptions will even require engineering experience or area of study.
One major pitfall to avoid however, is remaining in "engineering mode" as a PM.
As PMs, our focus should be on the WHAT, WHO, and the WHY, whereas Eng/Data
Science's focus is more on the HOW. While some may disagree, for me all these
still fall in the category of Hard skills for PMs. As...more
2 answers
VP of Product at Shopify
I am very much a systems thinker and like to understand the whole. I started my
product career focusing on product management but quickly was exposed to the
different facets of product management incl product design, engineering and
product marketing. I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive in each of these areas so
I could better understand how to use them in my craft. So I worked in those
spaces, built out teams and best practices around how to do them well.
Ultimately, I did that in service of making myself a stronger product/technology
leader. I feel that as a product manager, you should be...more
Sr Director II, Product Management at Walmart
The two disciplines are very different, despite some intersections on go-to-market, outbound communications, and occasional blurred lines between the roles in some companies regarding strategy and customer requirements. Early on in my career I had the opportunity to simultaneously work in both functions and experience them. Product Management has very broad scope and deals directly with technology. Ultimately, for me, building (or fixing) products felt most rewarding. :)
2 answers
VP of Product at Shopify
The biggest mistake I will mention here is not getting stakeholder buy-in. A lot of times we make assumptions about what people want and do not take the time ahead of to understand needs. Speak to those needs and share any constraints. Work to bring alignment across stakeholders. In the end, stakeholders lose trust in the product manager because they do not feel seen or heard. It is important that pre-work is done ahead of time so that when roadmaps are being presented, nothing comes as a surprise.
Sr Director II, Product Management at Walmart
It seems all too easy to NOT get roadmap buy-in. Sometimes, it can feel like the
default answer is always "No" at first, and despite all the work you have done,
you are getting sent back to the drawing board.
Some things that help, not in any particular order:
* Go as wide as possible early on as pre-work to understand stakeholders'
motivations and identify any possible opposition
* Dig deep to identify the true source of the opposition. Listen a lot, ask
questions. Treat this exercise as part of requirements gathering.
* Identify dependencies early
* Tie roadmap item to finan...more
2 answers
VP of Product at Shopify
I personally believe this to be communication. Often times, we as PMs dive heads
down into a problem with understanding that we need to have a time with us to do
the work. It is important to develop a communication style that resonates
meaningfully with your audience. As a PM, you will need to communicate with:
1. Stakeholders
2. Peers
3. Direct reports
4. External partners
Each of these groups will require their own set of nuance that you will need to
determine based on the relationship you are working to develop OR need to
maintain. Often times when you see friction in organization,...more
Sr Director II, Product Management at Walmart
I'd love to answer this in a slightly different way: The single most important skill, that cannot be rated highly enough is Communication. Many other soft skills are fundamentally still rooted in or are dependent on communication.
Nuanced aspects of communication also matter:
- adapting communication to the audience and situation
- timing the communication
- communication in all forms: written, verbal, non-verbal/body language.