Saloni Patil

The balance/percentage should be agreed upon by the EM and the PM and shared with the broader org for visibility. For example, in a team of 5 engineers, one engineer's time could be set aside for 'must do' work and the rest will continue to focus on goal strategic efforts. Similar approach can be applied if the organization is big - eg. one pod assigned for maintenance work and 2 pods working on strategic efforts. In the end, key is alignment with the broader organization and stakeholders so right expectations are set!

Customer feedback is a key driving factor in shaping the product roadmap. A good way of looking at a roadmap is categorizing intitatives into different buckets - eg. Strategic/ Innovative, Maintenance/Keeping lights on, Platform Enhancements, etc. Customer feedback can be incorporated in almost every bucket depending on how well the team has done user research and gone through the discovery process. We use tools such as Salesforce, Product Board and Zendesk where feedback gathered from the CS teams can be directly tied to a feature/epic or even story which can further help determine the value/impact. Each request is carefully associated with a value/impact score which translated diretly into the OKRs

The best part of Product Management is that many of the skills are transferable and while domain knowledge can be important, even that can be learned on the job. Key skills can differ based on which level you are at in your PM career, so am focusing on some that I think are most relevant for a middle management PM role. * Strategic and critical thinking: Thinking long term, big picture is important you ahve to drive the vision for your product and make decisions quickly by cutting through the noise. You should be able to analyze information and provide actionalble insights to the team. * Communcation: This by far is one of the most important skills. Communicating with customers, articulating the value and benefit of your product, collaborating with internal stakeholders as business/product decisions are made to ensure internal alignment, communicating with the dev teams, the CS teams, etc. The more effective communication, the easier is your product adoption. * Prioritization and time Management: As a PM, there could be a million things coming your way and ruthless prioritization is what you need to be able to focus on the critcial aspects of your day to day and manage time effectively.

Misconception: B2B is about selling to businesses and so the end UI/UX is not as important. In reality, the end user is always a person and there are people that are looking at easy products to use and making the decision to buy from you. The easier your product makes their job, the more inclined they will be to get your products. This applies for products as well as product operations - easy on-boarding, solid customer support and focus on data and reporting as possible.