How would you recommend a PMM influence the product team to think more about longer term value rather than just always building products geared towards low hanging fruit/quick money?

Assuming product(s) are being built to grow and last the test of time, there should always be a balance of building for short-term vs. long-term impact. The exact balance between those two can vary depending on the vision and goals of the business.  In my experience, we spend the most time discussing and aligning on short- vs. long-term investments during the Annual Planning cycles, which at Square happen once a year. During this time we take a step back to restate our Vision for the solutions w ...Read More

Who doesn't love low hanging fruit...but sometimes it can feel like we're not delivering on the bigger picture and innovating to take a bite of a big, juicy opportunity. My favorite framework to overcome this is an investment portfolio approach where a mix of resourcing is spread across different risk/return investments. From core, incremental improvements to low risk experiments and ultimately higher risk big bets. For an established product, that might look something like 70/20/10.To put more ...Read More

This is a really important topic, and for me, what's worked well is setting up what I call the product maturity model. Sometimes, the product team just gets too much into the weeds of the product, and the day to day problems our users are facing. Its important for teams to step back and look at what are we really trying to acheive with our product, what should the product look like in 5 years, what is the "perfect" scenario. I always joke, how do we build a product to the point that we don't hav ...Read More

This is when strategic planning – either annually, semi annually or even quarterly – would be valuable. When product teams can think about their north star, big picture vision, they can dedicate resources and commitment on those longer-term value features than those with low hanging fruit/quick money. I would recommend that PMMs bring in data to help support their position – do you have customer feedback, sales or customer success data, market analysis or competitive insights on the longer-term ...Read More