X person:
- Been in the tech industry for 20 years, 10 years in PM
- b2b , b2c, automotive, real estate, fintech
Average day:
- Every role varies→ b2b space (enterprise product), a couple of meetings with the business to understand problems, customer care (interact directly), sales bc theyre trying to sell the product, on the execution (engineering, program management), marketing when the product launches
- B2c → landscape is very different (consumer base is very large → no 1-1 interactions with costumer → understanding the pulse of the market, a lot of research on how the market is shaping up and executing the product
- Sitting at the intersection of business, your core customer base and execution → you play
→ specifically likes b2b space → enjoys conversations with real customers, what makes the customer successful, where are the bottlenecks, what are their pain points, how to make their lives better → get to go to the costumer’s office and understand how they work and their business, conduct workshops, design workshops
→ technical lacks: how she approaches it: to start with the customer problem and go from there (if you understand the customer problem very well, you can understand if the product that exists today solves the problem well or not) → learning from users, data and market to inform decisions (core skill)
→ domain perspective: its just interest, its not about one product that you’re building, it’s about the frameworks that you use to go deeper into any field
→ not possible for you to be an expert → frameworks: build expertise from scratch throughout your career/ your technical stack (mobile apps)/ SaaS products
→ best way: build a framework/transferable skills across:
- 1st 30 days: set up 1-1s with many people around
- Build a landscape of what the area looks like: what are the challenges, why are they selling well?
- Talk to engineering → what’s going well? What’s going wrong? Why are you not able to build faster?
- Create a 360 degree point of view
- What is the internal point of view vs external vs the metrics
- Talk to stakeholders to figure out where to take the product
What does a bad day look like?
- Build the mindset of “there’s no bad days, there’s just bolder and bigger challenges and
- Bad day happens when you dont plan it well, making false promises, overstraining yourself and underdelivering
- As a PM, every day cannot go as you planned
- Convert the bad day into a good day by providing a solution to whatever problem you’re facing
- Product management is a craft, its not a skill, its not a science, you can mold it the way you want it
- It is a role in which you are at the center of everything, you need to be able to handle everything gracefully, credit goes to other people, you take credit when it goes bad
A good day:
- When she speaks to the customers, when her team is able to celebrate a win
- When the customer shares something that changed their life for the better
It felt really awkward during the intro and the outro of the call, I felt like I didn’t know how to start the conversation and introduce myself properly to a stranger over the phone, and then transition to asking them questions, and I also did not know how to end the conversation.
Y person!
- Transitioned into PM 15 years back → knowing engineering is always helpful
- As a PM you gotta wear multiple hats
- If you always think like an engineer, it will not help being a pm
- PM: shape the product vision and roadmap to make that product successful
- You dont have authority over people but you have direct influence → what they work on depends on what you tell them to work on
- How do you do that?
- A thought process, a workflow that you need to do
- His workday spans multiple tasks as opposed to an engineer who works on the same thing every day → validqation for some feature through customer, release (you need to ensure that its going on smoothly), gatekeeping some of the teams, ease the marketing information, your manager has asked for an update (increase what we’re pouring into the product/decrease/shut down), if you want engineers to work on something in 6-8 months, research what is happening in that frontier.
- Tasks: talking to customers, researching how the market is doing, what the landscape looks like (any competition), the segmentation/personas of users→ learning from users, data and market to inform decisions (core skill)
- → work through that persona (talk to multiple people in that segment), start gathering as much information as possible, never think about the “how”, stay in the “why” space, asking the right type of questions to users
- These user interviews translate to requirements, you work with UX designer to come up with a mock up (the PM is expected to come up with mocks ups quickly so they can show it to customers and engineering) → 40% understanding of the feature, validates with customers that this fulfills their need and solves their pain point
- You cant associate each feature to a dollar
- 2) engineering
- 3) release of the product
- 4) marketing
- 5) monitoring the feature/metrics, drive key metrics
- How do you do that?
- Bad day:
- Honestly, every day is super exciting
- There are days where you can’t finish your tasks
- Everyone wants everything yesterday
- A bad day → you’re not able to deliver, its about stakeholder management, you are the face of everything, you will be held accountable for everything that goes wrong
This interview felt very unnatural because I felt like the interviewee was going into extreme detail about their job, which did not allow me the chance to probe into what I thought was interesting about their job.
