SMB Product Management

Ability to communicate well - Someone told me early in my career: The single most important PM skill he looks for when hiring a PM is communication. Communication is really a proxy for building trust

My top soft skills: Storytelling: As PMs, we must communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely to a range of stakeholders, including developers, designers, executives, and customers. Personally, I

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

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 intu

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 / expectat

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 understandi

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

When you are the first PM, you are straddling several priorities: Finding product market fit Scaling the team Scaling the product The biggest failure mode is trying to do 2 and 3 before you do 1: As

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, t

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 2

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 bu

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 com

This is a great question about how to pave the way for two things: product strategy and product management execution. I can see this being applicable to not only first Product hires at start-ups, but

The product manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the right product is delivered to the market at the right time. In order to do this effectively, you will need to establish a framework f

Know your customer - Often this can just be the investor in the company/company owner. Meet their basic expectations from the product first, and win their confidence. Aim to build a functional protot

 Entry-level product managers for an enterprise product line tend to come in from two paths: technical background, and business background. Those with a stronger technical background might come from

Some key traits that would really help in a fresh PM interview situation: Passion for product, its inner workings, ability to interpret some of the best features and bad ones - Typically I ask the ca

As someone who moved from a CSM role into product management, I get asked this question frequently. While my answers are specific to my own experience, I've seen them work for others that have moved i

I typically suggest to try to pivot into product management by changing a few variables but not too many - so you have a few strengths to rely on. When you start a new PM role, you are exposing yours

I have two tips for breaking into Product Management but I'm sure there are many more.  The first is to work with Product Management in your current role and/or talk to current Product Managers. Prod

I start working as a product manager from one unexpected opportunity from a career of 35 years of project management. The role of a product manager is one of those less well-defined I have ever encou

My current product team has about 40 PMs (And we are hiring!). I would not dive into what each of the team does, but maybe talk about how we went about structuring it, which may be a more transferabl

Classic product management answer: it depends! If you are talking about structuring a team of product managers, I've led teams where PMs were part of a cross-functional team dedicated to a specific p

My current product team consists of four direct reports who are all senior product managers. My job as a director is to create distinct areas of responsibility (AoRs) for these PMs to deeply understan

I have PMs who work on both horizontal objectives across the organization (e.g., observability, security across all products) and responsible for certain product verticals (e.g., the product/feature w

Two constant challenges for me in any product role has been finding the right way to say no. This could be to your customers asking for a particular feature or your organization that has decided to pr

Without going into specifics, the biggest challenge has been cross-organization influencing. My time at both Microsoft and Google has exposed me to lots of intra-organization projects with varying lev

Obviously this looks different at varying levels of tenure and experience, but key themes are: Customer focus Business impact People / relationships Customer focus speaks to if this person is able t

This varies by organization. Regardless of the size of your product team, you should have the expectations for each level of product well defined and socialized throughout the organization (typically

The most important criterion for a promotion is:  Are you consistently performing at a level that would allow you to meet all expectations of your next level. This requires three things: A clear ar

Promotion readiness varies quite a bit between companies, but I think there are some common themes that most agree on: Performing at the next level. If you're meeting expecations for your role at you

For Product Management, my general advice is to experiment with it. Try to understand your customers and market, define the product vision and work through requirements for your features. You can also

Every company is different but I can tell you what I've been working on as a part of my transition: Impact - as a part of my transition, as an individual contributor I chose to take on high profile c

I think of product management skill sets in three major buckets: technical, business, and customer understanding. When I talk to aspiring product managers, I like to gauge the maturity of their skills

The most important thing for a PM is to bring at least some of the skills of the PM role into their first PM experience so they can lean on some of their strengths to add value immediately while they

Product management is a combination of a lot of different knowledge and skillsets but the core of the job in my opinion is three primary things: curiousity with a maniacle focus on the customer and ge