Sirisha Machiraju

Prioritization is a key PM competency. When there are constraints you need to deal with, “ruthless prioritization” becomes even more important. Some guiding principles to keep in mind when balancing with limited resources: For any investment you are making, articulating “the why” and “why now” is an important exercise to drive confidence in your investments & timelines around them. This will help select the right priorities at the right time.  Always have a stack ranked list of OKRs and proj ...Read More

“Data depth” is a core competency for any PM and unlocks “data informed’ strategy.  However, how much data analysis a PM will need to do will depend on the maturity of the organization & available resourcing. At the core, every PM must know where the data is logged and in what format. In organizations, where there is an organization wide data platform that democratizes data access & there are analysts on the teams, every PM should still be trained on using this platform and run lightweig ...Read More

Customer discovery should never be treated as a 1-time planning activity. It should be an ongoing process to define a running backlog of opportunities. Customer discovery should be done across all available & valid channels - customer interviews, competitive intelligence, product usage analytics, support interactions, customer facing team interactions to name a few. The hardest thing is to identify and  keep an eye on all valid channels to build a holistic view. This can be very time intense ...Read More

Unfortunately, reprioritization of a  roadmap is not a fun exercise and can many times lead to frustration with long discussions and alignment meetings. Repriortization is the symptom of a different root cause. Rather than fix "how" reprioritization is done, understanding the "why" and solving for that will be more impactful. Not knowing the details of your organizations or how your planning cycles work, here are a couple of questions to ask that you can use to make these exercises more effectiv ...Read More

“Managing up” is core to being a successful PM given how front and centre product development is for a business to grow.  “Communication with the right level of detail” is key to making these communications meaningful. When communicating, expectations need to be set both in terms of projects in flight as well as new opportunity areas as they surface up.  For projects in execution:  1. A progress check in in how the committed projects are progressing - this can be a monthly discussion forum so th ...Read More

Engineering should be part of your planning journey and not be brought in only when scoping. Couple of ways to driving the understanding to your engineering team: Throughout the year, create a forum to discuss new opportunities with your engineering as you discover them. This will make sure nothing is a surprise when planning comes by. This also helps engineering start the thinking around engineering requirements sooner than later.  When planning activities begin, I would strongly suggest at the ...Read More

Making any discussion data driven helps drive meaningful outcomes. Start with understanding why a different team thinks they own the decision, which helps with your conversation. Given decisions lead to outcomes and hence impact KPIs, leveraging that correlation helps with alignment. Clarifying who owns the KPI, which is impacted by the decision helps identify ownership quickly. Once alignment is reached, always make sure to capture the decision/engagement model as a written artifact for future ...Read More

First of all, congratulations on your new role! I am sure there will be no dearth of problems to solve here:) But if there is one advice I can share -that would be to make the most of your first 90 days to connect, learn & build the trust. Meet as many people as you can, Don’t jump into problem solving unless you have been hired with some guidance from your leadership. Build trust with your tribe, absorb all the information you can including understanding the product, people & process an ...Read More

QA should always be an ongoing effort and be treated as a team effort. There might be spikes in QA efforts based on the complexity of the project but it should never be treated as 1 person responsibility.  Engineering is the first line of defense with unit testing.  Having a test environment where integrated end-to-end testing can be done is crucial for any development team.  PM + Design + EM should periodically be in the test environment testing an integrated experience. For complex products, t ...Read More

This would entirely depend on the stage of your product & the space you operate in. For example, if you are working on early stage 0->1 product, may be a monthly roadmap makes more sense. If you are working on large complex platforms, the roadmap might be a multi half e.g., data platform, FinTech etc. In such cases, capacity planning will be more than 6 months out more, in the sense that you have a ring fenced team focussed on this complex initiative.  A balance between 3-to-6 month roadm ...Read More