Anton Kravchenko

There are different paths that each product manager takes, but the common ones I've seen are: 1. Joining a tech company as an Associate PM or an intern straight from college. For college grads, I suggest starting by connecting with other product managers (e.g. via LinkedIn) to better understand what we do. There are great books available on this topic as well -- "Cracking PM Interview" is among my favorites. I also created a series of videos explaining tech jobs and what do I do in more detail - ...Read More

My favorite interview question was asked by a hiring manager ~8 years ago when I interviewed for an Associate PM position at MuleSoft. I was asked the following: "Imagine humans decided to take the moon and put it through a giant chopper/grinder. The mass that comes out of the chopper is being dumped on the surface of the earth. The question was - do you need an oxygen mask to climb on the top of this mass" This is a quantitative question that is typically asked in the PM interviews, but more fu ...Read More

The short answer is that I talk to customers a lot. Going one level deeper, I like to source customer feedback through the following channels: User Interviews (Weekly) - I ensure to schedule at least 2-3 interviews per week with internal or external customers. During these meetings, I take notes and record the conversations, then share the synthesis with my teams. Advisory Board (Monthly) - I find value in nurturing a customer advisory board with a diverse mix of engineering-based seniority, rep ...Read More

There are different paths that each product manager takes, but the common ones I've seen are: 1. Joining a tech company as an Associate PM or an intern straight from college. For college grads, I suggest starting by connecting with other product managers (e.g. via LinkedIn) to better understand what we do. There are great books available on this topic as well -- "Cracking PM Interview" is among my favorites. I also created a series of videos explaining tech jobs and what do I do in more detail - ...Read More

It's less about metrics and more about the outcomes you are creating for the business. For example, you might bring 10,000 new users or improve a UX for a specific feature -- but what matters at the end of the day is how you impacted the business. Has any of that made the business grow faster or made it more resilient among competitors? Depending on the company size and what you do, some outcomes might be more obvious than others -- for example, there was a time when I worked as a PM for a relat ...Read More

Build vs buy is a common PM dilemma. As for my own challenges, a couple of examples come to mind: Support & reliability - at Carta, we use Mandrill as our email service provider (ESP). The service was brought in a long time ago and, over the years, became an unsupported offering from Mailchimp. Problems included downtime, unresponsive support, and no major product updates. When we started to evaluate alternatives, we realized that the cost of change was too high, so we decided to add layers ...Read More

There are different ways you can think about it, but I like to think about PMs as those that build new products (0-->1) and PMs that come in to manage an existing product (1-->N). 0-->1: Product Managers who build a new product or service from scratch often need to innovate, which means building something that no one else has built before.  1-->N: Joining a company to own an existing product, also means that product-market fit has been already established. As a PM you will focus on s ...Read More

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 spend a good chunk of time creating artifacts that align multiple stakeholders on the direction of my area.  Natural curiosity: I never stop asking a why question. I don't assume others have asked this question or might have a better understanding of customer needs or architecture constraints. I'm a ...Read More

Different folks would enjoy different things e.g. if you are an introvert -- the IC track might be more suitable as you will be spending a good chunk of your time creating docs, prototypes, etc. It's fun -- just a different kind of fun. If your personality craves people interactions, the people leader track might be more appropriate.  Being a good people manager is hard, you need to lead by example and support your team whenever they need you. You also need to be comfortable with confronting peo ...Read More