Chris Omland

Stakeholder management is crucial in Product Management. Start by identifying your stakeholders and understanding their concerns, motivations, and what matters to them. Once you have a clear picture of your stakeholders, you can prioritize them based on your product's life cycle stage, the outcomes you're aiming for, and where you'll need support and alignment. For instance, if launching a new product, focus more on Product Marketing and Customer Support teams. Their support will be essential in raising customer awareness and ensuring success. On the other hand, if you're looking to scale a product that has achieved product-market fit and requires additional resources or investment, you might spend more time with executive stakeholders, discussing the business impact and future effects on crucial business metrics.

Oh, this is a tough one! Since the AMA is about Technical Product Management, I'll answer from that perspective. It's common for a successful company and product to face tech challenges after they've achieved significant growth. When you're a startup moving fast to find product-market fit, you might not prioritize the technical hygiene of your product. Then, as you scale up, you may need more time to go back and clean up or improve your technology. Eventually, this issue needs to be addressed, as outdated tech could limit future success, pose security risks, or even hinder expansion into new markets. I've been asked to lead product and R&D teams through situations like this, which can be extensive, multi-year efforts. My biggest takeaway is that more than focusing solely on technology is needed. It's easy to say, "Our tech stack has reached its end of life, and we need to adopt this new one." But stakeholders, like executives, customers, partners, and investors, care about business results. So, always frame your work regarding the outcomes you'll create, such as faster scaling, improved product experiences, or reduced operational costs. By emphasizing these outcomes instead of just the technology, you'll gain support from key stakeholders, which will help you secure the necessary time and resources for success.

The biggest challenge if you are not careful is you can fall into a trap of just making incremental enhancements and not staying focused on the outcomes you want to create for customers. Its always important a Product Manager is looking for new problems, defining outcomes, thinking how the world and technology changes will change consumer behavior and using all of that to have a vision for how their product will evolve over the next 12-24 months.

Awesome question! First off, take some time to understand your audience. Who are they? What challenges do they face? What matters to them? The answers to these questions will help you tailor your communication for different stakeholders. One tip I often give to Product Managers on my team is that the real meeting often happens before the actual meeting. I encourage them to connect with key stakeholders before a larger meeting, walk them through their updates, and ask for feedback. This approach gets their support and makes them feel involved in the process, and helps you refine your updates before the stakeholder meeting. You can also use this opportunity to ask them about other stakeholders, like, "What do you think is missing from my update that our Client Success leadership team might need?"

It's fantastic that you're planning to grow your skills. You probably already have solid technical skills and knowledge, so I'd suggest focusing on learning more about the discipline of Product Management (and hey, reading this is a great start!). A fundamental resource I always recommend is Marty Cagan's books: Inspired, Empowered, and Loved. Start with these to establish a strong foundation in Product Management.

I'm excited to see a question about metrics – being data-driven is super important! First, keep in mind that there are various types of product metrics. I think of them as Usage, Business, and Performance. * Usage metrics might include daily active users, feature usage frequency, and time spent on the product. * Business metrics can cover churn rate, revenue per customer, cost per customer, and monthly recurring revenue. * Performance metrics focus on availability, response time, and defect rate. Of course, these are just a few examples – you could track many more metrics. The key to deciding which ones to measure is to focus on the outcomes you want to achieve. For instance, if your CSAT score is low and you think it's due to performance, define performance metrics that will impact CSAT, like UX latency or uptime. Measure your baseline, design experiments to improve performance, run those experiments, evaluate the changes in your metrics, and then see if that boosts your CSAT.

I would define a mature product as one that has reached product market fit, is feature rich and integrated with an ecosystem and is stable, secure, performant in terms of its development and has broad market adoption and recognition. * Product Market Fit - A lot has been written about this but I’d look at how much market share the product has within its target market. Does it have a strong and referenceable customer base, is the value proposition well understood and is it viewed as the leading product in that space. * Software development - Generally speaking, mature products have gone through multiple iterations, the product team is highly confident in the ability to maintain, evolve and scale the product. It is also regarded as secure and likely faced a number of security reviews and penetration tests. * Feature-Rich: Typically the product will have a broad set of features that address the key jobs to be done by the target users. * Ecosystem Integration: A mature product often has an established ecosystem around it. This may include a thriving marketplace of third-party integrations, APIs, and developer resources, allowing customers to extend and customize the product to suit their unique needs. Overall, a mature product represents the culmination of extensive development efforts, market validation, and customer success. It demonstrates a strong position within its target market, it’s stable, secure, feature rich, has a high degree of customer satisfaction and is recognized as a clear leader in the marketplace.

The thing to keep in mind with mature products is work does not stop. If you are doing a good job as a Product Manager you will continue to find new customer problems, enhancements to your existing product and ways to create more differentiation. In order to do this work you have to make sure your technology stack is in a good spot. I always say there are three aspects of good software: 1. It does what its suppose to do 2. We can maintain it 3. We can evolve it So when I am working on a mature product I am constantly asking my engineering team where is our tech debt building, what are the implications of that, what benefits do we get if we solve it. I always want to make sure I can maintain and evolve the technology that powers our products.

If you are an outcome driven product team (which I hope you are), I think this should be defined as the change in behavior you expect to see/create for users of your new feature or product. Outputs are easy, outcomes are hard. Before you ever start working on the output (e.g. building) you should clearly be able to articulate: * What is the problem we are trying to solve * What will be the change in user behavior if we solve the problem * How will we know we created that change * What are the measures we need in place to ensure we can track the change in behavior

Key success metrics for a mature product can vary depending on the specific industry, product, and business objectives. However, here are some common metrics that can be valuable indicators of success: * Revenue and profitability: I often see Product Managers focus just on revenue. It’s important to also consider the cost to serve, which will give you insight into if the product is profitable and viable for the business. * Customer Retention and Churn Rate: This is critical for SaaS business but also to consider a product mature I’d expect to see very high retention rates / low churn rate. I’d also expect the Product Manager to understand what is driving churn. Some churn is unavoidable, for example a customer could go out of business. As a Product Manager you just want to make sure you know if your products churn is truly unavoidable. * Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS: Here I look to use surveys and feedback from your customers. If buyers are different from your users make sure you are checking in with the users. If you have different types of users (e.g. high frequency users and low frequency users) it can be important to track CSAT and NPS for these different user segments. * Adoption and Usage Metrics: I think people can confuse mature with dying products. Mature products should still see adoption of enhancements and strong usage. Usage patterns may vary based on the industry and type of product so it will be important to understand the type of usage you expect your product to see and then measure that. As with any metrics and measurement it’s important to make sure the metrics align to your business and product strategy. Be honest with yourself on what data you need and if that data can provide you insights. You don’t want to be data rich but insights poor.