Nico Rattazzi

Congrats on your new role! Joining as the first PM at a company can be both a blessing and a curse. The first thing to acknowledge is that you are going to be strapped on your time so you need to ruthlessly prioritize your time and focus to ensure you're driving value and impact to the organization. First, you should understand whether the roadmap is clear and that it is the most impactful items the company needs for the road ahead. Is the roadmap clear and is there alignment amongst the leaders ...Read More

My CS degree itself was not that important but my CS background and experience as a software engineer was critical to my success. Learning to code, understanding web frameworks, knowing the process for software development, and making tradeoffs between complexity and impact really help provide effective solutions for the organization. Granted, you can have an incredible tech lead but that won't always be the case. I believe that if you're working on a digital product, it helps to have some techn ...Read More

Product, Engineering (and even design!) should ensure the majority of the user's experience is measured (engagement, conversion), the platform is functional (speed, etc), and that the company's key metrics are preserved.  A big miss that comes up between product and engineering is when there is confusion around a product experience.Product Perspective: "This is not working as expected. This is a bug"Engineering: "This is what I was asked to build. It's working as specified" This will happen from ...Read More

KPIs around delight unless this is your key product differentiator (which is proven to be compelling to customers). Focus on building an intuitive and effective product experience that users would want to recommend to their friends/colleagues. Focusing on the final pieces of polish such as interactions, delight, animations, etc are fluff until you're really providing value to your customers. This is why keeping your KPI or success metrics concise and essential will allow you to provide the most ...Read More

It's worth ensuring you collaborate closely with your PMM to ensure you know who is responsible for what along all touchpoints. In general, top of the funnel channels owned by marketing should be owned by their team (social, paid, blog, email, etc). Everything else should be owned by the product/design/engineering team (with the exception when marketing owns the development of those product ie. lead gen with "no code" tools). The touchpoints where marketing hands customers over to the product ex ...Read More

I would start by understanding what is the company being graded on by its investors and how is this new product going to deliver/contribute to that KPI. Let's say your investors are keen on seeing revenue growth this year. You can begin by benchmarking the lifetime revenue growth of the various product offerings of your company and then estimate (based on your user research/data) what will be the adoption rate for this new product area/market. You can then begin to model out some first year numb ...Read More