Nicolas Liatti

The role of a product leader is to develop products customers love, yet in a way that helps business. Specifically, the product management function's role is to help reduce the risks on value and viability of the products. I don't see any difference between a traditional "product manager" title and "product growth manager" title. Those are just titles, and eventually what is expected from them is the same: help develop the best products, in a way that helps business. What may change is their are ...Read More

On a daily basis, product manager's job is to bring clarity and alignment among teams. As a consequence, working with cross functional teams is part of the job. I wouldn't have one answer on how to do so, as it really depends on the situation. There are lots of different frameworks that can work depending on the situation, and the best PMs know which ones to use in which situation. But at the end of the day, what really matters and what makes a difference is the relationships you have with other ...Read More

The way how you measure your own success depends on the criteria you have for yourself. However, I think it's very important to know that when you go into the PM career that there are some specificities: this is a late reward career. Being a PM is not like an engineer or a designer or a sales where you produce outputs. The way how you measure success for a PM over time usually take years, to measure impacts that you brought with products. For myself I use 2 indicators to measure my own success: ...Read More

Metrics depend on the context. The most important is to have metrics that are aligned and shared with other stakeholders (marketing, sales, engineers, etc.). That's the most critical part: alignment. However, don't forget that metrics are just compass, and most of the time you don't have real influence over it. At Amazon they prefer focus on the input for example, as you can control it, than the output: if we display 10 articles on a webpage we can achieve this. What happens if we display 20? wh ...Read More

I think it all comes to knowing the intrinsic motivation of your team. Money is just one part of the equation, and usually not the biggest one. When it comes to intrinsic motivation, people want to feel that:- they contribute to something greater that will impact people- they have autonomyI try to foster a culture for PMs where they can really feel this, where they feel empowered as part of the product teams to come with solutions.What helps also is having a manager that really knows what is "pr ...Read More

First it's critical to identify clearly who are the stakeholders. Usually business, engineering and design are the 3 you should work with very closely. Then you need to create meaningful relationships with them, so that they can really do their job of stakeholders as well. It's important to realize that being a stakeholder comes with a lot of responsibilities as well towards the team: stakeholders need to show up at the product discussions, provide feedback, etc.. Looking at who shows up or not ...Read More

I thought that execution only would allow me to continue to grow, that my actions would speak for themselves. This is true up to group product manager / principal level, but to become Director you need to work on the optics as well, how people perceive you. In many companies you need Senior Director/VP recommendations from other orgs to become a Director, and how can they do it if they never heard of you...? If you want to become a Director, I really encourage you to start reaching out to leader ...Read More

When you become a Director you usually become an executive at the same time. The biggest change that happens is the way how people look at you: everything you say is interpreted in a different way when you are a Director. This means you really need to change how you communicate and manage people, even if your scope didn't change much. This means that expectations from people are way bigger, and this usually comes with a big disillusion / crisis in the first few months after being promoted Direct ...Read More