Nico Rattazzi

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 technical understanding to ensure you're working with the development team responsibly. Also, really helps to understand what engineers go through during implementation to ensure the specifications are 100% clear. 

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 leadership team? Work with executives to understand the companies priorities and why these items are priorities Is there research or data to back up customer needs? Set up the processes for understanding the customers through qualitative or quantitative methods. Is there a way to measure the impact of past/present/future releases? Make sure the right tracking is in place to measure the impact of product releases Are prod/design/eng + stakeholders aligned with the roadmap, what comes next and why? Ensure you have the right tools to provide transparency to the org and the right avenues for feedback + collaboration.

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 time to time based on how mocks, specifications, or flows are interpreted. The best KPI here is to ensure that all user stories are covered by the experience, the experience is fully tracked (to catch bugs or unintuitive experiences) and that all members of the team test the experience. Shared ownership of the customer experience saves people from the blame game and instead focuses on how to solve for how things should be without judgement.

They don't change that much. While most of your KPIs will be around conversion, efficiency and time to completion, you should also be focusing on customer enjoyment/delight/satisfaction. I recommend looking into CSAT or NPS to ensure people enjoy the experience of using your product and would recommend it to their friends. If people are effective on the platform but don't enjoy it, you could see a competitor come and eat your lunch.

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 impact to customers.

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 experience should have the right metrics tracked to understand A) the quantity and quality of users and B) how they are experiencing the product. Regardless of who owns what, product should be sure they have the full customer experience tracked (because if it's not tracked, product will be on the hook!)

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 numbers. Of course, this will seem super arbitrary but truth be told once you launch, your predictions for subsequent quarters/years will only improve and that's when it's critical that the KPIs are accurate. Focus on product market fit for your launch and then focus on modeling according to comperative product growth.