Victor Dronov

Product Manager position could be optional. A team building a software product will have someone fulfilling a product manager role either way. Who will take accountability for the market success of team’s work? Who will deeply understand the market, the customer and their pain worth solving? Who will fight for the team inside of the organization to acquire needed resources and to defend existing? Who will be a “PR manager” building team’s brand inside of the organization? Who will detect early l ...Read More

PM work life is a firehose of Slack/Teams message, customer emails, meeting requests and deadlines. Here is what I find helpful to make sense of the chaos and stay on top of the key things. Capture, Organize, Get Shit Done. Resist the urge to jump on every message or email the same moment - you may find yourself exhausted while still behind on your goals. Instead, find a tool which lets you to quickly “capture” a thing which require your attention - and move on. Organize these to-dos thoughtfull ...Read More

Here are some of the areas one can look to potentially increase engineering team velocity, i.e. do more over the same period of time. Cross-craft collaboration: PM, UX and Engineering. Do you make decisions quickly, or spend a lot of time debating the direction? Do you trust each other? Do people have to go back to PM for clarifications all the time (and stay blocked, while waiting for such clarification)? External dependencies: are you sell-sufficient working on your thing, or have to rely on o ...Read More

Let me assume you are staying within your software (or hardware) realm, as switching from software to hardware product management (or vice versa) could be way steeper hill than entering a new domain like AR/VR. Here is something that would made me seriously consider a candidate without a specialized AR/VR experience - for an AR/VR position: Stellar track record in non AR/VR product management. You rock as a product manager - many will consider this more valuable than hands-on with the domain. Th ...Read More

Okay, you are not happy with your recent track record - good opportunity to flex your analysis, story telling and “marketer” muscle. Goals. These features didn’t seem to support your goal - but they likely supported someone else’s (even if you were unhappy about it)? Demonstrate how you supported supported those goals or how you thought outside of the scope of your immediate team, to support some fellow team. Learning. Did these features fail, though you knew this from the start? Focus your stor ...Read More

Listening to the voice of your customers for a mature product may differ to what it looks like for a newer, rapidly growing product still looking for it's niche and stable product-market fit. Your advantage is (typically) larger user base, who was with the product for a long time and understands product well. Sometimes this may be a challenge too, with customers (especially in Enterprise) resisting change and protecting their entrenched workflows. Here are a few areas to look for diverse feedbac ...Read More

Ultimately the answer would be to modernize the underlying stack, but one doesn't have to make it in one leap, while impeding their roadmap for a long time. Let's start with understanding the situation. What does the outdated stack primarily impacts? (In)ability to deliver new competitive experiences? Velocity of delivering this experiences? Reliability of the product (which may both impact customers, and slow down engineering team)? Security risks? Be realistic about the improvements you can de ...Read More

Mature products are the ones well out of the product-market fit seeking phase. They are characterized by all or most of the following... well defined market, customer profile and value proposition financially sustainable (whatever that means for the parent company's strategy, does not always equate to "profitable") generally slower growth rates less room for pivot, due to the risks to the existing business and customer base design and tech debt, which limits or slows down forward looking improve ...Read More

It comes down to a question: Is AI solving an existing user friction point, or is it a solution looking for a problem? Feature theater you mention usually looks like a generic chatbot slapped onto a sidebar because leadership panicked about an AI strategy. It creates high cognitive load for low utility. To ensure genuine enrichment, I filter ideas through three criteria: High Frequency, Low Joy: Does it automate a tedious, repetitive task? Many people use Trello's Slack and MS Teams apps - to ca ...Read More

Trust isn’t broken when AI makes a mistake; it’s broken when AI acts completely confident while being dead wrong. Design language of predictable imperfection is what can help here. Here is what I love in the emerging AI experiences, which are designed for those inevitable misses: Tone down the certainty: Shift the UI copy from definitive to suggestive. Use terms like "Suggested tags" or "Drafted summary" rather than framing outputs as absolute facts. Visual hedging: Use distinct visual wrappers ...Read More