Sean Falconer

I wouldn’t start by trying to sell product management. I’d start with a roadshow. Sit down with engineering leaders and do two things: Explain how you think about product, so what you do, how you work, where you add value More importantly, understand their world and where are they feeling pain today? Are priorities constantly shifting? Are they getting unclear requirements? Are they building things that don’t get used? Are they stuck translating between stakeholders? If product management can’t ...Read More

It’s a big question, and there’s no single answer but in my career the common thread is immersion. Early in my career at Google, I went through ~600 support tickets and grouped them by theme. That gave me a clear picture of where users were struggling. The biggest issue wasn’t advanced functionality, it was just getting started. That insight led to building a console to simplify onboarding. That was the seed of the idea. At my startup, we started with a much looser hypothesis. We wanted to do so ...Read More

This is very true and part of the fun and complexity of the role. You have to wear a lot of hats. As a former founder, I love this. I also think of balancing these different directions similarly to how I approached it with my own company. You have to put your time and attention behind the areas that are the biggest fires, biggest gaps, or biggest opportunities and ignore everything else. It's hard, because there's always a million things to do, but if you try to do everything, you end up doing n ...Read More

The importance of product vision doesn’t go away as a product matures, but how you apply it changes and so do the kinds of people and problems you need to solve. In the early days (0–1), it’s all about innovation. You don’t really know what will work yet, so the vision is more directional than precise. You’re deeply immersed with customers, forming hypotheses, and running experiments to find product–market fit. This phase tends to favor “innovation people”, those who are comfortable with ambigui ...Read More

In product work, the biggest real value from AI today isn’t that it’s magically building production systems for you. It’s that it’s dramatically accelerating how you think, explore, and make decisions. AI has made software more ephemeral. As a PM, I can spin up a working demo instead of writing a one-pager and hoping people can visualize it. Teams can prototype multiple approaches in parallel and stress-test tradeoffs in real code before committing. The barrier to building has dropped so low tha ...Read More

When you’re talking to potential users, the key is steering the conversation away from their ideal vision and toward what would actually change their behavior. Start by grounding everything in what they do today. Have them walk through a real example and where it breaks down. Then shift to questions like, “What’s the minimum this would need to do for you to use it?” or “If this existed tomorrow in a rough form, would you try it?” That framing naturally surfaces MVP needs. You can push further wi ...Read More

A lot of these situations come down to transparency and inclusion. In my experience, when sales leadership tries to dictate the roadmap (or anyone for that matter), it’s often because they don’t understand how decisions are being made or they don’t feel heard. When that happens, people fill in the gaps themselves, and that usually leads to tension. It’s much better to bring them into the process early, make the criteria visible, and show how input is actually being considered. You don’t have to ...Read More

When priorities shift, it should feel like a response to reality, not a shift based on a whim or your isolated opinion. Keep the conversation tight and grounded in evidence: What changed? New customer signal, deal pressure, competitive move, production issue, or industry shift. Why does it matter now? Tie it to impact like revenue, risk, adoption, or strategic positioning. What happens if we don’t move? This is often the most convincing part. Make the cost of inaction clear. What’s the tradeoff? ...Read More

Start with the why, not the template. In organizations new to product, roadmaps often get mistaken for delivery schedules or feature lists. Reframe them as a way to communicate priorities, bets, and direction, anchored in outcomes. Before introducing any format, align teams on what they’re trying to achieve and how success is measured otherwise you’ll get consistency in structure but not in thinking. Then take a product approach to rolling it out. Ask: what’s the MVP roadmap for this organizatio ...Read More

If leadership isn’t providing guidance, you have to step in and fill that gap. That’s the job. There’s never really a moment where a PM can throw their hands up and say, “no one told me what to do.” You either already have enough signal, or you need to go get it. Then put together a clear, evidence-backed plan and bring it to leadership. Don’t ask “what should we do?”, instead ask “here’s what we think we should do, here’s why, do you agree?” Especially with a new C-team, they often want that. T ...Read More