Clara Lee

Having worked in Product in completely opposite contexts, the most valuable soft and hard skills depend on several factors, including product maturity, organizational maturity, availability of supporting functions (e.g., Product Operations, Product Analysts, etc.), and company cultural norms.  At WooCommerce/Automattic, the expectations I set for PMs are: Drive the creation and execution of product strategy for your focus area. Lead multi-disciplinary teams through the development process. Culti ...Read More

Ideally, your product roadmap reflects long-term strategy, narrative, and investment. If you are confident in your roadmap, you shouldn't need a rule that automatically places more weight on negative reviews than positive or neutral reviews. Feedback is very important - but it's equally important to avoid knee-jerk reactions and keep Product, Dev, and Marketing teams focused on the plan.  Generally, I try to balance negative reviews with understanding that (a) we're not necessarily marketing to ...Read More

Great question, especially for Product Marketing organizations that are still scaling to meet the footprint of much larger Product and/or Sales teams.  Although you may find your bandwidth consumed by executional activities, it's important to ensure you continue to bring market intelligence and customer understanding to product roadmap planning. A few tactics for doing this could include: Going direct. Find out where/how roadmap decisions are made, and request to be included those meetings and f ...Read More

There are many great approaches to this question – and to some extent, it will depend on what the company values. If you're a first Product Manager, it is most important that customer needs / expectations are at the forefront of any framework.  With my teams, I sometimes like to use a graph, where one of the axes represents customer impact (how much does this product or feature postively improve their lives?) and the other maps effort or investment. That will give you an easy 2x2 where there is ...Read More

Two approaches here, that may be used at the same time:  Direct communication. If you have a strong framework for how you've seen PMM function strategically in other organizations, don't be afraid to share it widely. Be prepared to talk about how this structure can help teams drive greater, faster, better results. Consider launches as a starting point. Use the time and collaboration with Product, Dev, Design, and Business teams to develop relationships. Ask questions, share ideas, and take the o ...Read More

Design and Marketing should ideally go hand-in-hand.  If the Design team is very mature, experts in the area, and functioning on a world-class level, then Product Marketing's input/review can be focused on later stage designs, possibly as key stakeholder sign-off. In younger organizations where Design is still a developing area, Product Marketing can and should add value to every stage of Design. In my experience, it can be helpful to frame input in terms of PMM competencies (e.g., research, int ...Read More

At the VP level, these are the meetings I try never to miss: Engineering, Design & Operations peers [Weekly] – Having this at my current has made the biggest difference. My peers are my "first team" and we have time set aside to proactively problem-solve together, instead of being brought together only in escalation situations. Anyone can add agenda topics, and we order them at the beginning of each meeting based on urgency. GTM Sync & Launch Readiness [Weekly] – This is a regular touchp ...Read More

The most successful products I've worked on – and especially 0 to 1 products – have come out of a close Product-Design relationship, from start to finish. Instead of feeling that you have to have a full-fledged layout to hand over to your Design partner (per the question subtext), why not bring them into your mind space and design it together? Manage your own defensiveness. Allow biases to be challenged, gaps to be identified, and conceptual pressure testing from a different functional perspecti ...Read More

In the cases where a Product Manager has consistently challenged your work beyond regular constructive collaboration, I have found the following tactics useful: Realign on company/product goals and strategy. It's possible that there's a gap in understanding or alignment that explains the pushback. Share your work and point of view more widely (beyond the Product team). This can be tricky depending on the organization, but sometimes, getting having your work seen by others can inspire renewed con ...Read More