Why do we need product management?

In short, product management is needed in order to deliver products that matter to customers, while driving growth for the business.

What are the core responsibilities of product management? What does product own?

In order to deliver products that matter to customer, while driving growth for the business, I’d narrow down product management’s responsibilities into the below 3 categories:

• Strategic planning – get to know your market and your customers through research and interviews. Set a product vision that is based on understanding the outcomes you are looking to deliver for your customers, and ideally looks out 3-5 years (but this may vary based on the stage of the company). Then, create a strategic plan that details how to get there and how you will measure success along the way—and be clear about what you are doing now, next, and later.
• Prioritization  – have a clear process for how you decide what work to say “yes” to and arguably, more importantly what work you say “no” to in order to keep the team focused on achieving the vision. Also – not all work is tied to the vision. It is important for product management to identify how across balance the strategic, iterative, and operational work.
• Cross-functional communication and collaboration – product ties everything together by communication and collaboration across stakeholders (sales, engineering, customer success, marketing, etc.). Strong communication creates buy-in and alignment across your team.

What are the key activities of product management?

• Understand your customers – ideally, product should have conversations with customers every week. Talking to customers will help you identify what’s important to prioritize, and also help you gauge value before committing engineering resources
• Understand your data track key metrics and usage data – measure and track how your product is being used, and results from your launches. Have your key metrics available on a dashboard monitor. Keep an eye on all of your data sources, understand how they impact your goals, and determine any adjustments as you learn from them.
• Partner with engineering and design: the partnership of the 3 teams is critical to the success of the product. These teams should be meeting weekly, or most likely daily, to enable alignment on the future goals and also focus on the current deliverable at hand.
• Drive stakeholder communication and collaboration – product should talk to stakeholders, understand their perspectives, and layer findings on top of their own learnings and expertise. This is also important in order to coordinate launch activities with the GTM team to magnify the success of what you’ve built.

First Hires

When do you need to hire your first product manager?

When a founder no longer has time to lead product – whoever wears the product hat part-time at first (often a founder) will reach a point where they don’t have enough time to dig into the details. That will create a bottleneck, where product isn’t working, features aren’t launching, and customers aren’t adopting, and you’ll need to hire dedicated full-time product management.

When the engineering team hits 5+ – an engineering team this size will be reliant on detailed direction from someone with PM expertise. If you have a founder with a technical background or who’s product-oriented, you might be able to get further without hiring a product manager, but this is where a typical founder needs to hand off product.

When hiring your first product manager what should you look for? What’s the right balance of scrappiness and experience?

Clearly define the role and what it will own – identify a skillset that’s appropriate to your company needs. For example, consider how important industry expertise is vs. product development expertise.

Identify the level you are looking for – for the first PM, it is common to look for a Sr. PM and not a VP level. This is an individual who has some strong product experience (~5+ years) to come in and be hands-on, without taking the vision off of the founder’s plate quite yet. But you also want someone you feel can grow in the organization—different companies will have different needs and it is important to identify what level is important to you.

Ensure the first hire is comfortable with scrappiness – they likely won’t have all the resources they need and will need to figure things out on the fly. Make sure the candidates you talk to are comfortable with this, and have experience with limited resources.

How should you onboard your new product hire? How do you transfer founder knowledge about your customer and product?

A few tips for onboarding a new hire:

Don’t ignore the time between the offer and the start date – make sure the new hire knows you’re excited about them coming on board. A lot can happen between the offer acceptance and the start date, and you want to make sure they remain excited about the opportunity. I am not suggesting that you send them things to work on  before they’re getting paid—but sending them company swag or weekly emails go a long way to help keep them excited about starting.

Create a central location where they can access important documents – This should include things such as market/customer research, vision/strategy documents, KPIs, team orgs, and roadmaps. This will be helpful reading for the new hire to get up to speed but also encourage them to write down questions they have.

Block off time on your calendar to be available to the new hire – for the first couple of weeks, I like to make sure I have availability for them frequently. Commonly, I’ll block off first thing in the morning and towards the end of the day. This makes sure the new hire feels they have a place to go with their questions and it gives them confidence their leader is there to support them. After the first couple of weeks, you can slowly reduce the time and eventually transition to weekly 1:1s.

Create a list of stakeholders they should meet with: be clear on who the stakeholder is and how the product team works with them. Encourage the product manager to schedule 1:1s to meet the stakeholder and understand what is working well and where there can be improvements.

Send new product managers on a customer listening tour – have the product manager sit in on  customer calls. Have them start by sitting in and listening; as they gain fluency they can begin to lead calls.

What mistakes do organizations make introducing their first product hires?

Not doing the proper onboarding – the time between the hiring of your first PM and their first contributions is crucial. Keep the new hire engaged, have an organized knowledge transfer, and empower them.

Failing to clearly define the role to the organization – other stakeholders may expect the first product to come in, take their requests, and complete them if they are not familiar with the role of product management. With this mindset, the product manager can end up becoming the project manager if you’re not careful. It is important to make sure you set the right expectations not just to the product manager themselves, but also to the organization in order to ensure everyone has the same expectations as to what product delivers.

Roles

When do you need a Head of Product?

If the founder has trouble translating vision into a strategic plan – a lot of founders are visionaries but don’t know how to translate that into a strategic plan. A Head of Product can help actualize that vision. They’ll make consistent steps toward your goals and help the rest of the organization understand where you’re headed.

When the product suite is growing in complexity – if you’re launching a new product or going into a new market, product management gets a lot more complex. There are suddenly many more personas and you need a leader with a strategy to distribute resources that cross teams.

As you get more product managers – as the number of product managers you hire grows, it makes sense to hire a head of product to oversee them and provide increased structure and strategic oversight into your growing product org.

As you start to have multiple PMs, how do you divide up your product?

The truth is, there is not a perfect answer here – all approaches have pros and cons, and I recommend documenting approaches you are considering with their pros and cons to help facilitate a conversation on what the best approach is for your organization.

With that said, I do tend to lean into building teams around strategic focus areas and related KPIs – when you break your product vision into strategic focus areas, you can then divide up product ownership based on these areas. The downside to this approach is that several people and teams might touch the same codebase or functional area; so you need to have a communication plan for meeting and discussing roadmaps to avoid conflicts.

Ultimately, I recommend pressure testing your approach – to ensure it is allowing the teams to have clear goals and that they can be empowered to make decisions.

How many product management employees do you need?

Maintain a 1:5 ratio of PMs to engineers – it’s not an exact science, but this is a good rule of thumb for a typical product org. The ratio can vary depending on the complexity of the product, the size of the organization, or the quality of product results.

Supplement PMs with an operational role depending on performance – if you’re starting to hear that the rest of the org doesn’t know what’s launching, how decisions are made, or where roadmaps are, then you might need to add a product operations role.

What other internal stakeholders does product need to build relationships with?

The stakeholders that product management needs to build relationships with include:

• Engineering and design – these are both teams that are  involved in the building and design of your product or features. Based on this, product should be working directly with them frequently.
• Marketing – your launches will only be as successful as their marketing and promotion. Make sure there’s clarity and collaboration between product management and marketing.
• Customer success – make sure you’re hearing what current customers are saying from CS, understand what they like, and what’s causing issues.
• Legal – if any product decisions are made that might affect legal matters, you need to consult the legal team.
• Finance – meetings with finance may not be as regular as with other functions, but make sure you understand all of the business and finance considerations to significant changes.
• Sales – product management collaboration with sales is critical to understand what they are hearing from prospects. Obviously, if you’re eCommerce and don’t have a sales staff, this is irrelevant.

How do marketing and product share responsibility for the activation funnel parts of the website and product?

Both teams need to care about it – you can’t be successful without a good activation funnel and strong collaboration between marketing and product. Ideally, both teams have similar goals they’re working towards and they can identify the portion of the roadmap each of them owns.

Product can provide tools that marketing can use and own – many times the product team can provide tools to support  marketing do their work without requiring them to need their own product development team. For example, creating an easy way for marketing to publish content and edit pages through a CMS. In this case, product would own the underlying technology of the CMS while marketing would own the content that gets published.

Responsibilities

How should you approach roadmapping?

First, allocate development time between different “buckets” on your roadmap – how much time are you going to spend on each of the development categories? Often, different buckets compete for time and resources—if you start with a top-down allocation of time, you won’t have to compare apples and oranges in each instance.

• Innovation – the new developments that are helping fulfill the vision and strategy.
• Iteration – you can’t ignore your current product(s). It has to work, so you need to tweak and iterate.
• Operation – this includes items like tech debt, bugs, and security issues—these are real issues that can easily feel like they come out of nowhere if not planned for.

Use a “Now, Next, Later” approach to roadmapping:

• Now – items that you plan to accomplish in the current quarter. The ideas and plans are solid, and you’ve done research and feasibility studies.
• Next – items you hope to accomplish in the next six months. These are informed by progress on the items in “Now”—you adjust as you learn.
• Later – a list of ideas that are further down the road—you’ve considered them and believe they will help support your vision, but aren’t going to happen today.

Roadmaps have to change as you learn – I have yet to see a year-out roadmap that ends up being accurate. Roadmaps change, and they should as you learn. You don’t want to launch something just because you wrote it into a roadmap last year.

What discovery and testing tactics should you make use of?

Discovery and testing tactics are important because the cost of development is high –You focus on discovery and testing to ensure you are not investing in development at a higher rate than your level of confidence. 

Here are a few tactics I recommend for discovery:

1. Create clickable prototype with design – before engineering develops the feature, work with design to create a prototype that allows customers to interact with it and get their feedback. Adjust and iterate on the prototype along the way as you learn. 

2. Identify engineering-light ways to introduce features to customers to learn from live tests. Some examples include:

• Waitlist test – create a waitlist for a new launch, then track clicks and emails you receive for the waitlist. It helps you measure concrete interest in a feature before you actually build it. Plus, it creates a gold mine of contacts to reach out to later for user testing while you are building the feature. You can also do this through AB or multivariate testing to experiment with a few options.
• Hidden door test – display a section on the site that speaks to the new feature or product which invites the customer to interact with it. However, once the customer clicks in, they receive a message that lets them know the feature is not yet available. This is a common engineering-light test that lets you demonstrate interest before deciding to build.

3. Keep collecting customer feedback throughout the development process – don’t assume that because you collected feedback during a prototype,you know exactly what to build. Keep customers engaged throughout development to get feedback on it while it is being developed. Bring customers in or give them temporary access to a QA environment and watch how they interact. This allows you to address any issues before the feature launches, and ultimately launch with a product you have higher confidence in succeeding.

What types of metrics and KPIs should the product team establish and track on an ongoing basis?

Make sure your KPIs are leading indicators for moving your business goals – commonly, business goals are lagging metrics, which means they take a longer time to move. For example, retention is not a number that changes overnight. This is why it is important that your product KPIs are leading indicators and can be measured easily and frequently.

Be clear about how your KPIs add value for your customers – make sure you know what value you are driving for your customer and that you have  a clear way to measure success. No customer will tell you their goal is to be retained. They will tell you the value your product provides to them, and it is the product team’s job to identify how to measure that we are helping them reach that value. 

Overall

What are the most important things to get right?

Have a strong vision and strategy – if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know whether the decisions you’re making today are right or wrong?

Empower your product teams – give product teams goals, not projects. Product managers shouldn’t be taskmasters, they should be making decisions and building a plan  to achieve outcomes and KPIs

Listen to customers – your customers are your most valuable resource. You might think you know them, but you can’t without talking to them. You’re not the customer and you’re too close to the product to make decisions from the lens of a customer.

What are common pitfalls?

Saying yes to everything and being a people pleaser – we all want to be liked and say “yes” to people. But that’s not your job as a product manager—consider all perspectives and say “yes” to things that drive customer and business outcomes.  And so “no” to things that are distractions.

Falling in love with ideas – don’t fall in love with an idea and follow it blindly to completion. Be analytical, take note of different perspectives, learn along the way, and look to accomplish goals and outcomes to drive value for your business.

Holding on to outdated assumptions – the bigger your customer base gets, the further you’ll be from understanding the full scope of your customers. Don’t hold on to early assumptions about your business or products. Recognize changes and don’t keep referring to ideas you heard two or three years ago.