Natalia Baryshnikova

As a general manager, I own specific business goals and outcomes that I need to achieve, and am responsible for on an organization level. Those goals are very specific and measurable, so I always know where I stand on them. As a team leader, I measure success through my team's happiness, proficiency, ability to grow their careers, and our ability to scale the team (e.g. we can quickly and effectively onboard new team members and set them up for success). As a product manager, I tie my own evalua ...Read More

My personal acronym for the skills that make product managers succesfull is H.A.C.K. H for Humility. There are two particularly important benefits of humility. First, humble people better navigate the emotional roller coaster of being wrong and having to admit it. They quickly recover from situations where their ego might have gotten hurt and move on to the next experiment or iteration. Product managers make a lot of decisions and the ability to course correct quickly without dwelling produces a ...Read More

Let's take a look at common milestones of a product management career, and which skills you need the most on each level. This not an exhaustive list, but you can see the trends of how the skillset evolves.  Individual contributor (IC) PM: Prioritization, trade-offs, taste (sense for what makes a good user/developer/API experience), empathy for users/stakeholders/engineers/designers, knowing how to develop and test a hypothesis, grasp of success and guardrail metrics, growth mindset (ability to c ...Read More

Your ability to create value quickly will depend on how quickly you can identify the problems and gaps in ways your organization operates today, and demonstrate progress towrds fixing them. Here's how you can do that: When you join an organization, schedule introductory 1-1s with a wide variety of stakeholders in your first couple weeks, and ask everyone about what problems they wish they'd see fixed. After 10+ conversations, you'll see clear patterns. Identify 1-3 small improvements (low hangin ...Read More

A common pitfall that slows teams down is inability to make good decisions quickly, especially if these decisions involve many stakeholders. One of the best-kept team velocity secrets, especially in larger organizations, is having a consistent and efficient decision-making framework that is practiced across teams. With a small initial upfront investment of agreeing on a decision making framework within your organization (or just starting to practice it consistently), you will be able to save man ...Read More

Check out my other answer in the AMA outlining the difference in skills between different PM levels. As for how do I know that someone is ready to take on a Sr. PM role, the answer is I can see them operating with a mastery of skills that I expect from a senior product manager, while their title may still not have a Sr. in it. Best folks always uplevel themselves a little faster than the title, because if you are a growth mindset person who always likes to learn, you will most likely outpace you ...Read More

There is a fork in the PM career path road: one is becoming a people manager, the other becoming an expert in a deep thinking product area sans managing a team.  My recommendation is to figure out which one is right for you. Many folks want to jump into management simply because they think this is the only way to grow, make more $$$ and so on. That is not true. Big and small orgs I have been a part of value senior individual contributors that are passionate about their individual craft. Speak wi ...Read More

Best product management candidates craft compelling, concise and inspirational narratives when they interview. They demonstrate clarity of thinking, knowing both the facts and the "why" behind their answers, and genuine curiosity. I always walk out of an interview with a great product manager feeling like I have learned something valuable, and inspired. I spoke to the skills I've seen among successful product managers in another answer to the AMA, but if you are looking to impress hiring manager ...Read More

The most concise way I've described the difference between being an IC and a manager to someone was: "As an individual contributor, you need to get sh*t done. As a manager, you need to make sh*t happen". I have covered the specific skills need for both senior PMs and Directors in another answer to this AMA, but the most important difference between a senior PM and a people manager PM is that the former needs to excel at being a good PM themselves, and the latter is evaluated on how good their te ...Read More