Suzanne O'Kelley, VP of Product at AppNexus gives 5 lessons she's learned building and leading product teams.

1. Reflections from a
Reformed PM

2. Hello!

3. Worse Better

4. Don’t Go It Alone

7. Bear Hug Your
Toughest Crowd

9. “Under the hood the tech is good,
but subpar basic functionality.”
“The layout needs to be in a
tabular form to analyze data,
with the bonus of fitting more on
the screen.”

10. Make Time
for Maker Time

14. Shift to a
Gardener’s Mindset

20. It’s OK to Get Help

21. Skill Area Mid-Level PM Profile Senior PM Profile 1H17 Skill Assessment
Ownership Level: Competency
• Takes on ambiguous development
projects and defines clear plans to
accomplish goals.
• Works closely with multiple
engineering teams that touch
different parts of our platform.
• Able to be the product DRI and
bring a feature from development
to general availability.
• Can synthesize complex
information from differing
viewpoints to derive and articulate
solutions.
Level: Leadership
• Defines product vision and
roadmap that aligns with company
strategy.
• Owns full product development
lifecycle, including: proof of
concept, productionalization,
maintenance, and
end-of-life.
Assessed level: Competency
Areas of proficiency:
• New feature release
succeeded w/ cross-team
coordination and
sophisticated rollout.
Achieved sufficient adoption
per KPIs.
• Some small feature
improvements were also
completed as expected.
Growth areas:
• Target release dates have a
history of slipping. One
challenge has been aligning
engineering teams to unblock
dependencies.
Expertise Level: Competency
• Has solid technical knowledge of
owned features as well as
tangential features and
dependencies with rest of our
platform.
Level: Leadership
• Product expert for technical
understanding of specific products,
both ours and the competition’s.
• Possesses in-depth understanding
of platform architecture and all
dependencies related to owned
product areas.
Assessed level: Leadership
Areas of proficiency:
• Regularly demonstrates deep
knowledge about product, and
commitment to knowledge-
sharing.
• Peer feedback: “Great at
explaining things, always
very helpful."

22. BetterWorse

23. sokelley@gmail.com
suzanneokelley
@sokword
Thanks!