Ashka Vakil

Given platform product managers are not directly building an application or a tool or a solution for a single use case, the most challenging aspect of being a platform product manager is multiple stakeholder management. This multiple-stakeholder management requires platform PMs to have certain skills to be successful. * Platform PM has to juggle individual stakeholders' product needs with platform-level goals. Platform PMs need to maintain a delicate balance between enabling individual product success and ensuring their roadmaps contribute to the overall platform strategy. * Platform PMs need to have strong communication skills, empathy, and the ability to build consensus. More often than not, platform PMs have to deal with competing priorities. This requires platform PMs to be skilled at negotiation and decision-making. * Platform PMs need to consider technical feasibility, business impact, and downstream consequences to make the right calls.

The product manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the right product is delivered to the market at the right time. In order to do this effectively, you will need to establish a framework for prioritizing needs and deliverables. This framework should take into account the company's overall goals and objectives, as well as the needs and wants of your customers and stakeholders. There are a number of prioritization frameworks available with RICE, Value versus Effort, and Kano Model being the most popular ones. You can pick any of the popular prioritization frameworks or even create your own. What matters is using a systematic and structured approach to prioritize your needs and deliverables, so that you can deliver the right product to market at the right time. Another thing when picking a technique to keep in mind is to pick one that is easy to use and will fit with your company's culture and can eventually scale as the product team grows. 

The first and most critical step in developing a 0-1 product is to identify a customer problem that is pervasive and unmet. This requires conducting research and gathering insights into the target market, understanding their pain points, and identifying gaps in existing solutions. The goal is to identify a problem that is significant enough to justify the investment in developing a new product, and that presents an opportunity for differentiation and competitive advantage.

Building a 0 to 1 product is challenging even for experienced product managers. Here are a few things that can make it challenging to successfully build a 0 to 1 product. * Ignoring market research: It's important to conduct market research to understand the needs and preferences of your target audience. Ignoring this research can lead to building a product that doesn't meet the needs of your target audience. * Focusing on features, and not customer problems: Product managers can get caught up in building the product capabilities and forget to focus on the needs of the customer. It's important to stay focused on the customer problems throughout the development process. * Overcomplicating the product: In an effort to build a product that is differentiated and innovative, product managers can make the mistake of adding too many features making the product too complex. This can lead to confusion and make it difficult for users to understand and adopt the product. * Underestimating the time and resources required: Building a new product from scratch takes time, resources, and a lot of hard work. Product managers and engineers can make the mistake of underestimating the time and resources required, which can lead to delays and cutting core capabilities to meet the business team's needs and demands. * Failing to prioritize features: When building a 0 to 1 product, it's important to prioritize features based on their importance to the customer and the business. Failing to prioritize features can lead to a product that doesn't meet the needs of your target audience. * Not testing the product early and often: Testing the product early and often is critical to ensuring that it meets the needs of your target audience. Failing to test the product can lead to building a product that doesn't work as intended or doesn't meet the needs of your target audience. * Not partnering with product marketing: Building a great 0-1 product is not enough for it to be successful. The product needs to be marketed to the target audience to generate interest and usage. It is critical for product managers to work closely with their product marketing team to build a solid launch plan. Overall, building a 0 to 1 product requires a lot of hard work, attention to detail, and a focus on the needs of the customer.

When joining a small company with no or little structure or joining a small but growing product team, it is essential to understand the current state of the product management process before establishing new processes. Rushing to make changes and establish processes that have worked for you in the past is not ideal. What worked in one company may not work here due to differences in the culture and how teams have been set up. In your first few days, you should set up a meet and greet meeting with stakeholders from product, engineering, customer success, sales, and marketing. Use this time to introduce yourself, understand their working style, and get a clear understanding of what is working, what is not working, and what are their expectations from your product management. Once you have collected all the information, synthesize it to form an opinion on the operating procedures you want to put in place that will help meet the objectives. Share your plans, collect feedback, and iterate and formalize the process. By using this shared way to drive change, you are bringing everyone along instead of dictating how things should be done. Keep in mind more is less and there is no shame in iterating if a certain process does not work the way you expected or you have outgrown the process. Processes are there to help establish structure and make things painless and repeatable for everyone. Based on my experience working at a small company with little to no structure, here are some areas where you will need to establish operating principles. 1. Define clear roles and responsibilities - Having clear ownership defined within the team prevents duplicated effort and stepping on each other's toes. Every product manager on the team knows what their charter is and has the needed space to operate. 2. Articulate clear product vision and strategy - This is extremely important to align and rally the team towards common goals and objectives. 3. Create product roadmap - A roadmap is important to drive the team towards common outcomes and provide a reference point for decision-making. Without a roadmap, no one knows where we are headed and everyone makes their own assumptions. 4. Outline the product development process - This is critical to ensure the team is working efficiently and effectively and has a common understanding of what it takes to take a product from inception to launch. 5. Establish effective collaboration and communication - The product team works with stakeholders across the company and setting up collaboration and communication processes and tools in place will allow keeping engineering, marketing, customer success, sales, and support on the same page.

The product manager's job is to identify the most impactful problems to solve, enable their team to build and ship solutions that delight users, learn, and iterate. Product managers need a multitude of skills to be successful. The two most important skills that I view as must-haves no matter the seniority or product they will work on are owner mentality and leadership and influence. The reason for these two things being make-or-break things for me is because one has it or does not have it. It is extremely difficult to teach someone these two skills. Let me share a little bit about what having an owner mentality and leadership and influence translate to. * Owner Mentality - Owner mentality means thinking holistically and taking initiatives that may not be directly tied to the area of ownership to drive positive impact and achievement of business goals. A lot of times, PMs put themselves in a box where they just focus on building a new feature or shipping an enhancement without considering the entire experience that customers may experience. Great product managers work with stakeholders and define an end-to-end delightful customer experience by thinking about how new and existing customers discover the capability, what the monetization approach is, understand and influence how sales will sell and how customer success will support. PMs with an owner mentality wake up every morning thinking about what can be done better to delight customers. They don't operate in silos and hold themselves accountable for the success or failure of the product. * Leadership and Influence - PMs need to work with multiple teams to drive outcomes without having any direct organizational authority. To be successful, PM needs to know how to work with different teams, and inspire and motivate them to march on the path they have laid down the vision for to meet business goals and objectives. PMs need to act as leaders for their teams by establishing trust, being persuasive and reliable, focusing the team toward shared goals, and removing distractions by saying no to anything that is unimportant.

Getting feedback is a great way to validate the problem and make sure you are tackling a pervasive problem. Make sure you have a clear and concise articulation of the problem and who your target audience is. There are many different ways to get feedback; listing a few here. 1. Conduct a survey - This is a great way to get feedback quickly from a large group of your target persona. It is very easy to create a survey using google forms, survey monkey, and Intercom to validate the problem. When creating a survey, make sure it is easy and quick for someone to respond to the survey. You can add incentives like gift cards or raffle drawn to get more folks to respond. While surveys can help you reach your target persona with minimum effort, employing surveys by themselves is not very effective at validating problems. You should combine surveys with 1-1 interviews. 2. Conduct interviews - Interviews are a great way to get personalized feedback from your target audience. You can conduct interviews online or in person; depending on who your target audience is. Some of the scrappy ways I have reached out to my target audience to get interviews is via LinkedIn inMail, DMs on Twitter and even setting up a table at a cafeteria. 3. Prototype Testing - Create a prototype of the solution and use that to validate the problem and solution with the target audience. Platforms like UserTesting and sagetap can be used to conduct testing. 4. Social Media - You can gather feedback on problems by running polls or posting questions on social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, and relevant Facebook groups, public Slack, Discord to name a few. You can also publish a blog on Medium with the thought leadership to get feedback. 5. Competitive Research - Reviewing competitive product's collateral - data sheet, solution brief, case studies 6. Current Customers - If you have a product already that has customers and a set of target personas, you can leverage existing customer relationships to get feedback about the problem. 7. For Enterprise products, you can get validation at relevant tech conferences as well as by reading analyst reports. You can also pay for analyst time and get a conversation with them to get validation for your problem, market size, etc. Using a multi-pronged approach to gather feedback is important to get a good understanding of your target persona's pain points and needs.

Aligning roadmaps for product managers on individual products with the broader platform requires a collaborative approach. It is critical to establish overarching strategy and platform goals that are aligned with the company's business objectives and extremely important to understand clearly each product's goals and asks from the platform. Once the platform goals and asks from individual products are established, use a prioritization framework to define the priority. Use shared prioritization frameworks and use collaborative roadmap planning approach to align all the stakeholders and make sure they understand the rationale for why certain work is prioritized over others. Establish KPIs and dependencies, set up regular sync and feedback loops to update on not only progress but also communicate any changes.

Prioritizing validated problems ensures you are focusing on the most pressing problem that will have the largest impact. It is finding out what will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Prioritization requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. Here are some ways to prioritize various validated problems: 1. Assess the impact: Evaluate the impact of each problem on the user and the business. This can include factors such as how many users are affected, how much time or money is lost due to the problem, and how much revenue is at stake. 2. Evaluate feasibility: Assess the feasibility of potential solutions to each problem. This can include factors such as technical feasibility, resource availability, and the level of effort required to implement a solution. 3. Consider urgency: Evaluate the urgency of each problem. Some problems may be more urgent than others, such as those that impact user safety or result in significant financial losses. 4. Consider strategic alignment: Evaluate how each problem aligns with your overall product strategy and business objectives. Some problems may be more closely aligned with your strategic goals than others and therefore may be a higher priority. 5. Involve stakeholders: Involve stakeholders in the prioritization process. This can include designers, engineers, go-to-market team members, as well as users and other external stakeholders. Getting input from a variety of perspectives can help ensure that priorities are aligned with user needs and business objectives. 6. Use a prioritization framework: Consider using a prioritization framework to help guide the prioritization process. There are many frameworks out there; my favorites and ones that I use frequently are Value vs Effort and RICE.

To ensure that you are investing your resources wisely, it is critical to have a high degree of confidence in the problem you are going after. You do not want to spend engineering resources on a problem that may not be large enough or is technically not possible to solve. Here are some key indicators that can signal you are ready to allocate engineering resources to building out the product. However, it's important to continue validating, testing, and iterating on the product as you move forward to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of your target audience. * Market opportunity: You have conducted market research and have a clear understanding of the market opportunity for your product. * Understanding of the customer problem: You have a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, the target audience, and the key pain points that need to be addressed. * Validation from potential customers: You have received validation from potential customers that the problem you are solving is important to them and that they are willing to pay for a solution. * Clear product vision: You have a clear product vision that is aligned with the problem you are solving and the needs of your target audience. This includes a clear understanding of the features and functionality required to solve the problem. * Defined product roadmap: You have a defined product roadmap that outlines the key features and milestones required to bring the product to market. * Resources and budget: You have the necessary resources and budget to support the development and launch of the product. * Competition: You have a clear understanding of the competitive landscape and have identified how your product will differentiate itself from the competition.