Janet Brunckhorst

Director of Product Management, Aurora Solar

Content

What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first Product Manager at a company establishing the function?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

The fundamentals of prioritization are not too different when you're the first at a company. But in the early stages of a company or product, it's even more important to focus. At an early stage company, or a new product at an existing company, chances are you're finding product-market fit. W......Read More

1620 Views

Question about org structures - what does your PM team org structure look like?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

There's no single right way to structure any team. Some essential ingredients to creating an effective org are to create a structure that: * Supports cross-functional work * Aligns teams to customer problems * Encourages knowledge sharing * Provides for growth Your org structure will need t......Read More

658 Views

What is your advice for creating and/or improving the product management process when joining a small but growing team? Particularly for a small company with no or little structure?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

I'm a strong believer in "just enough" process, so my answer to questions like this is always some version of "it depends"! The one piece of process that every team must have is a way to reflect on, and incrementally improve, they way they work together. You can call this process whatever you ......Read More

553 Views

How do you break down responsibilities and KPIs for product launches between product management and marketing?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

I generally think in terms of OKRs rather than KPIs, so here let's agree that we are talking about some shared measure of success! On our teams, Product Marketing is responsible for all communication about the product or feature to people outside the Product-Eng-Design org. They're our liaison......Read More

478 Views

What are the key processes you'd set up when expanding the PM team from 1 to multiple people?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

The most important process you can set up is a retrospective of some kind. I talk about this in more detail in another answer, but as you add people, ensuring that you have ways of sharing and improving your processes is fundamentally important. Any process you introduce should have a strong r......Read More

453 Views

How do you communicate product management updates and activities to the rest of the company?

Janet Brunckhorst

Aurora Solar Director of Product Management • October 28

Great question, and it doesn't have a single answer. One thing that is important is having a consistent, accessible, forum/location for people to see: * What's been released; * What's coming up; * Metrics; * Issues/outages/major bugs. The details of how you do this will depend on a few fact......Read More

399 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Director of Product Management at Aurora Solar