Amina Bouabdallah

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? 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. When you speak w ...Read More

I joined Microsoft as a PM right out of the college. If I could phone my former self, I would tell her: be patient, be patient, be patient. You know nothing, and it's normal. 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. 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 colle ...Read More

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 presenta ...Read More

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, inv ...Read More

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. Agend ...Read More