Amina Bouabdallah

I joined Microsoft as a PM right out of the college. If I could phone my former self, I would tell her: 1. be patient, be patient, be patient. You know nothing, and it's normal. 2. becomes the expert of the product, functionally and technically. You should be able to demo the product and draw the architecture diagram of the entire software within 4 weeks. 3. network with everyone. Don't think you are not worthy of speaking with people because you are new, young and ignorant of what's going on. Your colleagues will value fresh blood, energy, humility and hard work. 4. be reliable. Never commit to doing something because you want to score points. If you commit to doing something, then make sure to do it. 5. be insatiably curious and ask questions: this will be the fastest way to learn and as a result the fastest path towards impact. 6. be close to your manager: don't try to impress, do good work, check in often, ask for feedback often, take on the hard / annoying assignments, be vulnerable about how you feel Good luck! we've gone through it, no reason why you cannot! :)

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? 1. 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. 2. When you speak with senior leaders that challenge you with things they think they know, having a counter-example from a customer (preferably from the top paying ones / renowned brands) is gold. It gives depth and weight to your arguments like nothing else. 3. Lastly it gives me energy in my job, because I feel the pain better, and confidence as a PM to bring a point forth. How do you choose customers to speak with? * Choose those part of the segments that have power over the metrics you are trying to optimize for. E.g. trying to improve conversion rate along your onboarding flow? Reach out to the customers who just signed up. * No matter which metric you want to move, revenue is the top one in B2B SaaS so always be in touch with the top 25 paying and top 25 using customers. I speak with them often and help them as much as I can to then have a direct line with them in the future. * If sales/CSMs are you in your way, frame the need for the conversation as an opportunity for the customer to influence your roadmap. I book 15 min the first time so it feels low-effort and high ROI for the customer to chat. Then they realize they like it, if you are polite, sharp, curious, and express gratitude for them giving time. * Some reps/CSMs might say no to speaking with the customer because hard renewals/conversations are happening. I would respect that, and move to the next customer on the list.

My non-negociable PM interview question is "Tell me about a product you love, and why. Now no product is perfect so how would you improve it?". Here is why it is a must-ask question for any PM candidate I have interviewed: * it tests storytelling: when PMs love something, they should be able to describe its value in ways that make the audience wanna go try it. If I didn't feel energy after the PMs describe what they love about a product, they were discarded. And to be clear: it's not about presentation style, it's about articulating value clearly, crisply so that I understand how my world would be so much better as a result of using a product. * it tests attention to detail: the PM role requires both high-altitude thinking for doing strategy and vision work, and detail-oriented crafting to offer delightful user experiences. PMs who can't articulate the in-product workflows that make a product great or not so great don't "feel" the product and I discarded them as a result. * it tests creativity: the how-to-improve part allowed me to test the ability for PMs to develop product solutions to problems in ways that are either pragmatic or innovative. Both ways are creative: there is a problem, PMs have to be able to create solutions. I cannot remember the best answer precisely because I interviewed 100s of candidates. That said, the one that stood out was improvements to Netflix to solve the can't-find-what-to-watch problem that did not involve recommendations based on usage but some kind of random-play of a movie/TV show that could have been recommended!

I would strongly recommend the below approach: * Proactive: * in their product requirements document, PMs need to clearly lay out the success metrics and hypotheses to test, and work with engineering to implement product tagging that will allow them to compute these metrics and in/validate the hypotheses * Reactive: * first, start by leveraging central data teams: ask them clear questions and have them get back to you with reasonable SLAs * If there is no central data team or if the SLAs are too long, invest in product analytics software paid with your PM leadership's credit card to answer simple questions. I would recommend Pendo because PMs can do tagging on their own and then answer easy questions about who and what. The experience for conversion funnels and retention analysis is being improved and not there yet compared to an Amplitude or a Mixpanel. So for these complex queries, get the data teams onboard ASAP in the product development process. With Pendo, make sure to keep in the loop a frontend engineering leader so they ensure that having Pendo tagging does not interfere with their synthetic tests.

First things first: work with your team to create processes. Much like a building a product, a product leader should interview their team to understand their pain points in the way the team is being run. Processes should be solutions to your team’s problems, much like your product is a solution to your customers’ problems. The ones I have established and found most useful in the past for my PM team and myself are the below: * PM team meeting: solves the problem of not feeling part of a team. Agenda-based for outstanding topics (eg « our annual conference is soon, are we all set?) + learnings from customer conversations about the entire portfolio + updates on everyone’s work streams/product areas. This helps with connectedness because PMs get to chime in on each other’s product areas and help each other with feedback and suggestions on next steps. Also it incentives customer conversations for each PM every week, and on the entire portfolio as opposed to on their area of accountability. * Product experience review meeting: the agenda is a walkthrough of new experiences that are being built for customers, internal or external. Presenters are PM + their engineering and design counterparts. The meeting is ran by the PM manager with their eng and design managers attending and other stakeholders present. Wireframes, low-fidelity or high-fidelity prototypes are presented, discussed with leadership for feedback, information or decisions on options. This solves the problem of leaders not being able to attend every team meeting when the portfolio gets big. It also solves the frustration of PMs asked to backtrack late in the process when coding is ongoing. * Quarterly planning meetings: a batch of 3 meetings over 3 weeks timeframe, weekly. First meeting is to discuss opportunities prioritized. Second meeting is to review a long-list of prioritized solutions, the last meeting is the exact list of solutions to be built during the quarter. This solves the pain of the team feeling lost on the path towards clear OKRs and it releases the pressure on the team because they are collaborating with leadership from the beginning.