Patrick Davis

Thank you for the question and I'm sure this is exactly not the answer you're looking for which is, "it depends" You're balancing building trust and relationships, understanding your users and the business, and likely an evolving company strategy. So the question you need to ask yourself is what are you optimizing for? The runway of your company is critical to consider, but I always lean towards how might we prioritize learnings and building trust to build out a strong product roadmap

This is a good one. I think there are two that often get missed and largely it is because they are hard to measure and expensive to move. 1. Product excellence. How do you measure customer delight in an impactful way? CSAT and NPS have lots of opportunities to be gamed and are frankly easily ignored. Some of the best products I've used focus on finding the right critical user journeys and continuously measure the success rates of those quantitatively and qualitatively 2. Product health. Cold boot, warm boot, latency for critical actions, crashes, uptime. All of these things contribute to Product excellence but are much more directly measurable and can really sneak up on you

I'm lucky in that Google has a really rigorous interview process that I benefit from. Google is also known for taking a long time during that process but I promise you that is largely because of the rigor. Post that process though what I look for are three key signals 1. Grit is my first. Big companies are notoriously slow, process heavy, and plodding. But the way I look at this is that with so much user trust, such a large business, and really a huge opportunity that we have to respect we want to get it right. I tell my team all the time that if you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far go together. And we've all chosen to go far so grit is critical (and sounds cooler than patience) 2. Passion. Yes this one could seem to fly in the face of the first one. But I often find that I'd rather have somebody always frustrated we can't move faster, always frustrated that we can't do better and help them mature into taking a balanced position than the other way around. Another way to say this is that I can help show somebody the upside of measuring twice and cutting once, but I've never been able to teach passion. 3. Finally EQ. Most of what PMs do depend on building trust and trust is built via relationships. Too much detail isn't likely needed here as this one is obvious but where I will go into detail is that EQ isn't the same thing as being sociable. I have excellent PMs on my team who build strong relationships that aren't loud and in your face extraverts. EQ comes in all shapes and sizes so look carefully.

Oooohhhh, this is a good one and something I spend a lot of time balancing. Product owns the product and at the end of the day both gets unearned credit and unearned blame. It is your neck on the line for the end to end experience. Thinking through the experience that users get both in product and out of product (traditionally the domain of marketing) is well within Product's scope. That being said, as you expand your career and scope you'll find more and more that you don't scale. Not just in terms of time but in terms of expertise. Figuring out a structure that lets you contribute to marketing efforts without owning them is your best bet for the future. The final thought here is be generious with credit. There's no limit to the number of disciplines that can get credit for accomplishments. Give Marketing unearned credit for things mostly drive by Product and what you'll get back is much more willingness to get your guidance and willingness to collaborate.

This is a good one; and I'll admit that I've never been the first PM hire in a company, but I have worked to establish a new PM team within an existing structure. Here are my tips: * Be humble and go on a listening tour. Things have clearly been working (to an extent) and it's your job to go around and understand the lay of the land, folks expectations of you, and how you can help. Building trust often leads to the best outcomes * The best quick value add you can likely achieve will likely come out of that listening tour. Again be humble and take on some grunge/grunt work that will have some outsized returns but nobody wants to do. Earn that trust and respect * Finally the best defense (in terms of establishing your discipline and the role you and your team will play) is often a good offense. Build a roadmap. Put some stakes in the ground backed up by as much cross functional support, user research, and data as possible.

Let me give some guidance here on how I think about it. 1. It's critical to have a strong vision, strategy, roadmap, and success metrics for a team 2. Your org structure should be organized to support the pillars of your strategy 3. Beyond this there optionality to organize your team functionally the way that engineering teams are organized or strategically that maps more to your success metrics or some hybrid of both 4. Most critically though you need to have as clean as possible swimlanes for PMs. Giving them a problem area to solve gives them a runway to grow and build a visions, strategy, roadmap, and success metrics for themselves. Don't give them projects, give them problems. To directly answer your question though I organize my team strategically tackling the strategy pillars we've set out to solve and my engineering and ux counterparts map our squads to each other based on the most logical function overlaps. But this does mean that one PM may be interacting with several engineering leaders to get their work done.

Here's how I'd think about it: * Some planning cadence where strategy and roadmap can be reviewed at different levels of fidelity. (Annual, Quarterly etc.) * Product review with key cross functional stakeholders that isn't viewed as a gate keeping exercise but a feedback process and of course has PMs giving each other feedback * Experiment review where the focus is creating excellent hypothesis, treatment arms, and making sure you can measure what you need to * Cross functional discipline review and the two most critical ones are UX review that is of course led by the UX team and Launch review Now these are critical processes even if the PM team is just 1 but the importance of them just grows as you expand the size of your team and these are often the bedrock of how you keep the trains running on time.

I'm not sure it is the most effective because I've really only used one strategy, but it has been effective for me. 1. Grow your own scope, take on more than you can handle, do a good job of pitching the problem space and opportunity and get broad consensus that this work is critical and required. 2. Then make it clear and obvious that to succeed in this new problem space it will require you to drop a piece of your current scope that is critical 3. Hire for that role In particular something I'll note is that the best thing to give up to grow a team is the thing you're closest too. The thing you know best. It'll be the hardest thing to give up, but in doing this you help guarantee that the person you hire is best set up for success and that you'll be a good manager/mentor for that person.

I'm a huge fan of all success metrics and OKRs (objectives and key results) being shared between the core cross functional working group. Of course there will always be some that don't match up; I'm thinking about some SLAs, uptime, latency type KPI's that your engineering team tracks. But by taking them as shared and getting your buy in on those you'll much better understand the deployment of the engineering resources and how best to support that team. All cross functional teams are critical, but the engineering team is the most critical :)

Absolutely, welcome to the discipline, you're in for quite a ride and I'm super excited for you. 1. Optimize for learning and honing your craft. There's a balance to have the confidence to make decisions without all the data and put stakes in the ground even you actually have no clue while balancing always opting to listen and learn and never actually being the expert on anything in the room. Confidant enough to leader while humble enough to learn. 2. Your career is a long ark. Think about when you started dating. You had no idea what you wanted to needed to be happy. Gaining experience in different areas, different teams and managers will help you put yourself in the right environment to excel 3. Finally use those same PM skills you build on shipping products on your career. What are your career success metric, what is your career roadmap, what hypothesis do you have about your career and how can you test them.