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The Top 75 Product Management Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2023
View the most recent year here: 2024
Overview
The way we acquire job knowledge has changed. We learn more from each other than we do at school. The Product Management Mentor List shows you the top 75 product management practitioners to learn from to develop your career. All of these leaders have contributed content that Sharebird users find helpful.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their product management - related content to be. We do not handpick people. To be considered for this list, mentors need to be current product management practitioners and in a leadership role. We look at the following factors with Sharebird content: views, saves, and followers. We then apply a proprietary algorithm to calculate content credibility and helpfulness. Views show us content relevancy, saves show us content quality, and followers show us content credibility.
Sharebird does not accept payment to be included on this list, which allows us to maintain objectivity and independence. We update this list every year. For any questions about this list, please contact [email protected].
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where leading executives answer your questions. Get easily digestible tips and insights from leaders at the fastest-growing companies, so that you can solve your hardest work challenges and reach your career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Veronica Hudson
ActiveCampaign Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Channel your inner three-year-old and ask, "Why?" (And then ask it one more time. And maybe a few more times after that.) "Why?" challenges the status quo, gets to the root of customer problems, and aids PMs in their never-ending quest for clarity. The best PMs I've worked with are driven by an insatiable and constant curiosity and, "Why?" is often one of the strongest tools in their kit.
Sriram Iyer
Adobe GM / Head of Strategy, Product & Partnerships
Career Path Tip: Think in frameworks: every problem that you tackle - be it a customer prioritization request, or budget allocation, or a personal situation - will most likely not have a black or white answer. There’ll always be a vast gray area. So, the best way to solve is not to think of perfect point solutions, but to think in big picture frameworks. What is the larger framework that defines where this problem exists? What are the factors that you are trying to solve for in that picture? What is the solution that’s consistent with your vision and values? What are you optimizing for, and what are you ok giving up as a compromise? These are attributes of framework thinking that’ll help you make a good decision probabilistically, rather than trying to land a bullseye that seldom is clear in the real business world.
Krishna Panicker
Airbase VP Product
Career Path Tip: An effective leadership team should be representiative of other voices too , like marketing, customer success, support etc. Make sure you reflect that voice back effectively.
Suhas Manangi
Airbnb Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: 5 years from now, likely there is going to be no difference between a Traditional PM and AI PM. AI is going to be used/present in all products. I see "Traditional PM role" as a foundational one to have, upon which one can grow to become a good AI PM.
Wade G. Morgan
Airtable Product Strategy & Operations
Career Path Tip: While it can feel like you have to have all the answers as a PM, there are often times where your job is just to facilitate the discussions that lead to collective alignment. Build the muscle to identify when you need to have the answers vs. when you need to help your team ask better questions of themselves.
Navin Ganeshan
Amazon Head of Driver Products, Amazon Relay
Career Path Tip: If you're contemplating whether being a PM is right for you, ask yourself what drives your curiosity, how you think about problems and solutions and what you're passionate about.
Rodrigo Davies
Asana Director of Product Management, AI
Career Path Tip: Treat every career move like an experiment. Have clear goals going in, don't be afraid to take risks, expect that you'll have a mix of wins and losses, and reflect regularly because your perspective is constantly in motion. The more you continue to learn, the better you can understand what factors enable you to thrive and make more confident decisions about your career.
DJ Chung
Atlassian Senior Product Manager
Career Path Tip: How you communicate what you know amplifies your impact. Seek to first understand how your audience, whether executives or team members, best connects with information and deliver your strategies, plans, and ideas accordingly. Doing this will also help clarify your own thinking as you figure out the best way to convey your message.
Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Agility
Career Path Tip: Learn to find joy in small moments and fine details; that will make you observant and help build a good taste, which will supercharge your career. Honor logic, but don't let it squash your curiosity. Be patient with others and yourself: great things take time. Help others discover their strengths, and be relentless in developing yours.
Paresh Vakhariya
Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence)
Career Path Tip: Always think of your future self 5 years down the road in your career. Work backwards from that point of view. Sometimes it might take 2 or 3 hops for you to get where you want.
Janet Brunckhorst
Aurora Solar Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: The one piece of process that every team must have is a way to reflect on, and incrementally improve, they way they work together. You can call this process whatever you like - "reflection", "retrospective", "after-action review", "post-mortem" - but it is imperative to building an effective team.
Marion Nammack
Braze Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: When working with other departments or teams, you want to ensure that there’s a common language in which to communicate. For example, are both departments aligned on the prioritization of high level business goals? Is there a clear ownership model? Once there's tentative alignment on these topics, it's much easier to have an objective discussion about the opportunities to influence a goal
Laura Oppenheimer
Bubble Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: As PMs we always are looking for ways to have impact and hit our metrics, but that's only part of the equation. Storytelling — why you're focused on something, what's important, how the thing you're working on will unlock future opportunities — is key to getting your cross functional counterparts to become your champions and align with you and your goals.
Brandon Green
Buffer Staff Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Keep asking why. If you ask it and think you know the answer, ask it again about the answer you found, and then ask it again. The true essence of the problem you’re trying to solve is rarely at the surface level, and going a few levels deeper forces you to get into the mindset and workflow of your customer and find a truly impactful problem to solve
Vasudha Mithal
Care Solace Chief Product Officer
Career Path Tip: Focus on problems vs products. Maximize your impact and minimize the management overhead you create as you grow in your career to build meaningful products and happy, high-performing product teams.
Anton Kravchenko
Carta Sr. Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Mastering the art of storytelling enables you to leverage your imagination at work. Imagination through storytelling is what helps Product leaders to define a winning product and rally the teams to build it.
D Matthew Landry
Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless
Career Path Tip: Product managers can set the patterns that define successful customer accounts, engage with key customers to form lasting business relationships, and amplify the key customer problems. This is why customers love to speak with PMs.
Savita Kini
Cisco Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI
Career Path Tip: For AI PMs who are straddling the "enterprise user" space, similar to any regular PM, user experience is critical. Is this improving and adding value to their day to day experience ? But the job does not stop there, how you might implement it with complex AI models requires additional dimensions on how these models are integrated into existing user or business workflows. The challenges of compute and latency are enormous as AI is not free. Further, PMs have to keep thinking of ethics, inclusion and diversity. Always think about biases that might be inherent in the data used for training, so validate with user testing and comprehensive subjective testing.
David Cutler
CookUnity VP Product & Design
Career Path Tip: For anyone working within the realm of product management, if you aren't thinking about the JTBD framework for your primary users, then you are missing out on building something special. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and ask yourself the tough questions of why, what and how your product is helping to enhance lives or solve needs. And don't be afraid to wear the Many hats of Product Managers (in Medium) while you do it, an invaluable method to grow yourself and your career.
Nico Rattazzi
DOZR VP of Products
Career Path Tip: Determining the key product bets that have the highest liklihood of driving impact to the company's bottom line will make you indispensable. Make sure your organization has the right foundation to accomplish that (metric alignment, data tracking, experimentation, etc).
Willie Tran
Dropbox Group Product Manager, DocSend Growth
Career Path Tip: Be upfront and transparent about your assumptions. In my experience, leaders feel more comfortable when you state your high-risk assumptions and contingencies rather than presenting your plan as if it has no holes. It takes a lot of confidence to be upfront about where your plan can fail, but this kind of communication is critical for the long-term success of your team. And remember, your job as a PM is not to come up with solutions, but rather to empower the right people to do so around a clearly defined and validated problem.
Virgilia Kaur Pruthi (she/her)
Expedia Group Senior Director of Product, Head of Trust and Safety
Career Path Tip: 1) Lead with empathy and understand how to build trust with your partners and teams beyond just work talk. Ensure that you are converting allies into sponsors for your career, and be honest about where you want to go. 2) Don't be afraid to showcase your unique background as opposed to overoptimizing for what you think a product managers should know.
Luca Beltrami
Faire Head of Product, Retailers
Career Path Tip: 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.
Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Learn to become a systems thinker. Good product management is knowing how to execute, but great product management is understanding the business, the go-to-market plan, and all the other things that don’t involve building products yet are crucial to making them successful.
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Always put people first. In your career you’ll have ups and downs, and some times it can be hard to recenter on what’s important. If you prioritize human connection and building strong relationships - you’ll see that pay off in the long run. People are the reason we offer products and services, so take plenty time understanding them!
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management
Career Path Tip: Ruthless prioritization is an essential skill for Product Managers to master. Don’t just apply this to your products but also to your career. Reflect on what’s valuable to you, aligned with your career goals, and maximize your time on those activities.
Mike Flouton
GitLab VP, Product
Career Path Tip: Never make the mistake of assuming your customers think the way you do. Speak to as as many of them as possible, deeply explore their problems and pain and then relentlessly pursue solutions to make their lives better.
Neel Joshi
Google Group Product Manager, Google Assistant
Career Path Tip: Be your customer as much as you can. Try everything you make multiple times in different scenarios. It opens your eyes to things that you might not have otherwise spotted.
Patrick Davis
Google Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Be generous with credit. Give Marketing unearned credit for things mostly driven by Product and what you'll get back is much more willingness to get your guidance and willingness to collaborate.
Puja Hait
Google Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Product Management is more art than science. This art includes hard and soft skills that need to become muscle memory over time. As you progress in your career, the soft skills become even more important, but don't take a shortcut on the hard skills since the cracks will continue to show.
Lean into your strengths, while building enough muscle that your weaknesses are not a deterrent. Find great people who you mutually respect, work on problems that energize you, stay curious and hungry, while prioritizing your well being and personal life. Remember your career is a marathon, not a sprint, so don't stop living while chasing those big product milestones.
Louisa Henry
Gusto Head of Product for Mid-Market Businesses
Career Path Tip: To be a stellar product manager, you need to truly believe in your product's mission. Spend time thinking about your values, and whether they align with the product you're building. If not, a shift might lead to both a more accomplished, and more rewarding career.
Clara Lee
Hootsuite VP, Product
Career Path Tip: Empower execution teams to operate flexibly. Continuous testing and iteration will benefit the product that ultimately lands with customers. At the same time, execution teams need a consistent focus and clear plans. As soon as you become aware of alternate product scenarios, take the time to articulate what those could be – and offer your collaboration to help them optimize the flexibility of their build, decision timeline, and organization accordingly.
Kie Watanabe
HubSpot Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: You did some heads down deep analysis. You spent a full day in an ideation session coming up with great ideas. So what? The most exceptional PMs think deeply about the last mile of what and how they communicate. In doing so, you can effectively mobilize a variety of stakeholders towards the greatest impact.
Zeeshan Qamruddin
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Management, Flywheel
Career Path Tip: 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 about weeks, months, or quarters ahead; however, that time allows you to gain knowledge of the product itself.
Marc Abraham
Intercom Senior Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Keep developing your product mindset, one day at a time. Focus on your customer, clarity, curiosity and creativity.
Jeff Chow
InVision CEO (former CPO)
Career Path Tip: Obsess over the problem you're solving: Product Managers and Product leaders no matter where they are in the org all do the same thing; they problem solve, set pace and communicate. You might not start your career out by getting the most meaningful project, or you might have something prescriptively given to you, but if you obsess over understanding the underlying problem and solve that problem in a way that delivers max impact, you will be realize you will be honing your problem solving, pace setting and communication muscles and over time, all that will lead to bigger problems to solve and lasting career.
Linh Lam
Lattice Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: If you're looking to get promoted, write your future promotion packet and what would need to be true. It can be used to ensure you and your manager are on the same page of what it'll take to get there, illuminate what you need to focus on, and makes it easier for your manager to then advocate for you because you've done all the work for them.
Preethy Vaidyanathan
Matterport VP of Product
Career Path Tip: Always have clarity on the value proposition and impact created. Apply this when you are creating product roadmap, pitching strategy to your c-suite, board or investors and marketing your offering to customers.
Bhaskar Krishnan
Meta Product Leadership - Ads, Commerce & AI
Career Path Tip: Focus on solving problems for your customers rather than building features.
Guy Levit
Meta Sr. Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Generally, I am thinking of success in 3 dimensions: Vision, People and Execution. All three need to work well for a team to succeed over time
Poorvi Shrivastav
Meta Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: When deciding to invest in a new product area, think about three foundational questions - why this product, why us, and why now and then compare the opportunity cost for next 3-5 year with your existing products. This simple analysis helps build products with defensible advantages that lasts a longer duration of time.
Vasanth Arunachalam
Meta Director, Technical Program Management
Career Path Tip: Prioritization is key. I don’t believe in dividing ‘all’ available work across my team. I believe in ensuring my team focuses on the top business priorities and are having the most impact. I typically encourage my team to do a few things but do those really well and not ‘peanut butter’ themselves across many different areas.
Mckenzie Lock
Netflix Director of Product
Career Path Tip: The most important thing you can do as a new head of product is to align with the founder/s and/or your manager on what your role is. Most people assume they did this in the interview process. Yet, misalignment on this question are the most common reasons heads of product fail.
Tom Alterman
Notable Head of Product
Career Path Tip: It's great to have a clear career plan but not essential. Often just focussing on the next most interesting thing yields opportunities you never even knew existed. You may be blind to them if you're too set on a single path.
Rupali Jain
Optimizely Chief Product Officer
Career Path Tip: Career tip Magic happens when product outcomes are deeply connected with business outcomes. It's easy to get busy with day to day tasks, but the best product managers differentiate themselves by focusing their tasks towards the right outcomes and saying no to everything else.
Devika Nair
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Identifying and addressing your customer needs effectively is key to success as a product manager. This includes understanding market trends to anticipate their needs, listening to customers with an open mind rather than an intention to sell what you build, and above all proactively saying no to requests that aren’t aligned with your product strategy. Learning, listening and prioritizing will help you succeed in any product role.
Clare Hawthorne
Oscar Health Senior Director, Product Operations
Career Path Tip: Spend time reflecting on your “corporate superpowers” — what skills come naturally to you that other people find hard? what activities do you enjoy doing that other people avoid? These superpowers will help differentiate you and allow you to deliver a unique value proposition to your team.
Sandeep Rajan
Patreon Product Lead, Member Experience
Career Path Tip: The more differentiated & sticky your core value proposition is, the less you'll need to worry about market trends, as you'll have more and more of a market all to yourself. Make this your goal.
Yasmin Kothari
Peloton Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Don't run away from what you don't want, run towards what you do. People often stay in sub-par situations so long that their next step is taken out of desperation. Be proactive in your career choices. Run intentionally towards opportunities that fit your development goals.
Casey Flinn
realtor.com Sr. Director, Product Operations
Career Path Tip: Your career path doesn't have to be linear. It's often so hard to break into Product roles that we feel compelled to stay in that job family forever (e.g., spend your whole career as a Product Manager). Going and doing something adjacent can help recharge your engine (new / different problems to solve) and expose you more holistically to the market and customers you serve (new perspectives, more empathy). Essentially, take your love for Product and your Product mindset and follow your interests, not just the career ladders companies have.
Deepak Mukunthu
Salesforce Senior Director of Product, Generative AI Platform (Einstein GPT)
Career Path Tip: 1. Start with “Why," 2. Focus on “What," and 3. Work with others on “How." Great product managers always start by defining the purpose/goals/problems (the Why); Then focus on what product/features to build (the What); And collaborate with Engineering and other cross-functional teams to deliver (the How). Using deep insights from customers and market to learn and evolve throughout the product lifecycle is their superpower.
Ingo Wiegand
Samsara Vice President of Product Management - Safety
Career Path Tip: Prioritization comes back to thinking about the ‘return on an engineering investment’. PMs provide the ‘return’ (i.e., user value), engineers help size the necessary investment. No feature can ever be properly prioritized without both sides of this equation.
Lizzy Masotta
Shopify Senior Product Lead
Career Path Tip: A lot of product managers focus on developing influence, this is often misguided. Influence is not about talking the loudest, winning arguments or having the highest title in the room. Influence is the curiosity to get to the best solution. The best product managers are infinitely and boundlessly curious on behalf of their customers. What sucks? What’s problematic? How does it work today? How can this be better? Chase this curiosity and measure your success by the success of your customers.
Mamuna Oyofo, MBA
Shopify VP of Product
Career Path Tip: To break into product management, 1. Understand what about product management is interesting to you, 2. Research roles and opportunities that speak to what you find interesting, 3. Identify the gaps in your skills or experience, 4. Fill those gaps: Take a course, read, volunteer to build something, 5. Network and build a group of people who can help advocate on your behalf when roles come up in their companies, 6. Start the application process, 7. Develop relationships with recruiters or hiring managers
Mani Fazeli
Shopify Director of Product
Career Path Tip: Mastery must come before autonomy. Remember that leaders will always be the editors of your work, all the way up to the CEO. They can never truly delegate responsibility, only share it with you. Too many PMs start their careers with this idea they've heard about autonomy being the path to doing truly great work. This is false. They should lean into the hands-on partnership of their leads to help them learn what excellence looks like with both aiming and executing. That's how they can become true masters of the PM craft. This wins trust, which then gradually brings the autonomy they seek. It can take years, but it builds the best PMs.
Becky Trevino
Snow Software Executive Vice President Products
Career Path Tip: Build agendas for your weekly 1X1s with your manager. I ask each of my direct reports to build an agenda for our 1X1. We use the 3P framework (Progress, Plan, Problem) to structure how our 1X1 should work. This has been a game changer in productivity. It forces my team to think about 1X1 time and how they want to prioritize our time together. I'm a particular fan of the 3P framework because it's an easy way to highlight problem areas you're facing without it being awkward. I find that the 1x1's where agendas are provided are significantly more useful than the 1x1's that are not planned ahead. In fact, I use this structure weekly with my own manager and our CEO.
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability
Career Path Tip: If you want to be a product manager in B2B software, figure out how sales teams are incentivized and compensated and make sure you understand how your product helps them do their job better. Customer feedback is king, competitive landscape understanding is important, but neither is enough - understand the sales process and become their best friend in a deal.
Marvin Green
Splunk Director, Product Management
Career Path Tip: Evaluate your career goals and aspirations periodically (every 1-2 years) to course correct and readjust your goals because you don’t want to spend most/all of your life “climbing the ladder” only to realize it was leaning against the wrong building.
Abhiroop Basu
Square Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Being a product manager typically means juggling multiple stakeholders and priorities. You will inevitably have to make a choice between competing opinions, sometimes without any data - what do you do? Whilst all perspectives are valid, it's important to remember the customer you're building for. Focusing on your customer's needs will ensure you build the best possible experience.
Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead
Career Path Tip: If you want to transition into product management, it's a good idea to try internal transfer. Learning the craft of a new discipline is not easy. You are more likely to set yourself up for success if you minimize other variables like new company, new product, new team.
Ashka Vakil
strongDM Sr. Director, Product Management
Career Path Tip: 1. Know your target customer in and out: In order to be successful in product management, it is critical to have a deep understanding of your target customers and their needs. If you don't know the customer base you are building a product for and what their pain points are, you are almost guaranteed to fail. You and your team should be spending at least 30-40% of your time on user research, talking to customers, and gathering feedback on your products.
2. Develop strong collaboration skills: Product managers have to work closely with stakeholders from across the company and it requires strong communication and collaboration skills to succeed. Knowing what each stakeholder is responsible for, and what their goals are and catering communication accordingly will help build trust and partnership. This solid relationship is essential for product managers to operate and succeed in their roles.
Tamar Hadar
The Knot Worldwide Senior Director of Product
Career Path Tip: I am not a big believer in “quick wins”. Take the time to learn before executing and think of “winning” as the result of iterative experimentation.
Era Johal
TikTok Product Leader, Search @TikTok
Career Path Tip: As you progress from PM to senior PM, competencies in these three areas should grow: Autonomy, Scope, and Leadership. There are a few clear indications that someone is ready for the senior level, like increased scope, being a reliable partner and being results driven.
Katie Cubillas
Twilio Sr. Dir, Product - Technology Partners
Career Path Tip: Every product needs buy-in across the entire village to make it successful- GTM, support, customer success, legal, partners, product / engineering, etc. Being great at communicating with and influencing engineers, for example, is a wonderful trait, but success comes out of one's ability to translate goals & requirements + drive consensus across departments.
Tasha Alfano
Twilio Staff Product Manager, SDKs and Libraries
Career Path Tip: When you work on developer tools, you already have an amazing pilot group - the engineering team building the product! The teams I work with come to customer meetings, drive discussions with our users, write documents, and pitch new ideas. They are your biggest untapped resource if you’re working on developer focused tooling.
Aleks Bass
Typeform Vice President Product Management
Career Path Tip: At the heart of developing products are people: customers, shareholders, and internal stakeholders. Understanding people and their motivations, honing strong collaboration skills, and communications expertise are 3 elements of the Product focused professions that are critical to success. Negotiating your way through the opposing motivations (at times) of these various groups is the true test of product leadership.
Ravneet Uberoi
Uber B2B Products
Career Path Tip: As a PM your job is to constantly triangulate across: 1. The company’s strategy and broader market dynamics, 2. The customer’s unmet needs, 3. The operational lift to deliver a solution (time, cost, dev effort, labor). A stellar PM keeps all three in their consideration set at all times.
Sreenath Kizhakkedath
Uber Uber Head of Growth Programs, Riders
Career Path Tip: A product manager's job doesn't stop at creating great product experiences. It extends into understanding the conversion funnel and building a rapid iterative process to make incremental feature/UX/creative/copy changes that positively improve the conversion.
Ajay Waghray
Udemy Director of Product Management, Consumer Marketplace
Career Path Tip: With regards to career opportunities, I think it's super important to identify and ride waves. Riding the mobile technology wave changed my whole career, and riding business waves in travel, education and technology were transformative for me and many others in product management. Find your wave and ride it!
Jackson Hsieh
Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork
Career Path Tip: Avoid artificial growth! A good growth PM or a good PM, in general, will only look for sustainable growth opportunities.
Roshni Jain
Volley Head of Product/VP
Career Path Tip: I'd encourage (first PM-hires) to spend time studying consumer products - analyze them, tear them down and try to back into why certain things are being built. Spend time thinking about your own product choices and how you'd like to see the products improve.
Milena Krasteva
Walmart Sr Director II, Product Management - Marketing Technology
Career Path Tip: Always ask yourself the extent to which you are adding unique and significant value. As product managers we spend an inordinate amount of time getting this right for our products. What if we also thought of ourselves as a product?
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: As PMs we are in the business of finding business and customer problems and then solving them. Make sure you are moving up the complexity ladder for the problems you are solving. As you go through it, its important to communicate the “why is this problem important to your organization” or if your team has already solved it, “how has it helped your business or customers”.
Andrew Clark
VP of Product
Career Path Tip: Listening to your customer is paramount, but don't underestimate the value of input from your internal stakeholders. I make sure my PM teams frequently hold roundtable discussions with their cross-functional peers. Even the best process for gathering asynchronous input is no match for live discussions that provide context and opportunities for better collaboration.
Deepti Srivastava
Head of Product, VP
Career Path Tip: The key to being a successful Product Manager is to build and ship products that add value to your users’ day to day lives. You should have answers to three questions before you build anything – WHO are you building for (target user/market), WHAT will you build (product/service/feature) and WHY do you want to build that (value proposition). I see a lot of PMs focusing on secondary metrics or arbitrary product goals that are often unrelated to the users they are trying to serve. It always starts with the user.