23. ● Be resourceful
● Build product opinions
● Be right more often
● Simplify
Data
+
Intuition
24. ● Few Specialities
○ Growth
○ Marketplace
○ Operations
○ Monetization
● Few Industries
○ Consumer tech
○ Enterprise
○ Retail
○ Healthcare
Generalist vs
Specialist
25. ● Unblock the team
● Do the scutwork
● Be Organized
Walking FAQ + Help Center
Social Capital
26. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management, Coding, Data Analytics, Digital
Marketing, UX Design and Product Leadership courses in San
Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Santa Monica, Los Angeles,
Austin, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Orange County,
Seattle, Bellevue, Washington DC, Toronto, London and Online
Editor's Notes
Before getting into the meat of the presentation. I want to spend a minute or two giving a glimpse of my career thus far -
Started out as a SE at Microsoft working in Visuals studio and towards the end of my stint was part of the Search Engine team.
Microsoft in 2011/12 was very different from today, so decided to come to Silicon valley and join LinkedIn. That is where I had an opportunity to work with some of the best product folks but I was still in Engineering management. While at LinkedIn tried to spend 50% of my time on building Internal analytics and reporting platform. With no PM on the team, it forced me to act as PM which I loved.
While I was trying to figure out what is next play, I wanted to see if I can participate in the 0-1 product development hence joined an AdTech startup (Adara), which is where I transitioned full time to Product
Even though the company was great, I missed consumer aspect of the role and was lucky enough to find Instacart in its early stages for my next gig.
Enough about me. Moving onto the meet of the talk. I would love to cover 3 topics of the day and leave enough time for QnA at the end of the talk.
Thanks to the community we have for PMs, We all have access to enough materials for what makes an awesome PM. I would love to go deep into 3 of the skills that I wish I had mastered years before my product stint
Given some of the learnings from Instacart early tenure, I wanted to share some tips about Product management in a startup
Finally, I wanted to share some tips for someone starting and aspiring to have a product career.
At its very core, Product management is Hypothesis testing. PM should have a world view and constantly work to confirm or deny it at every step.
It is expected for PMs to have opinion about the product and the directions
It is also equally important to NOT have a fixed mindset about it and think about constantly refining it through data/user research/product feedback/etc.,
Finally as part of testing it is important to ensure the experimentation is constantly advancing the advancement. Not take 1 step forward and 2 steps back
2nd skill that is important is an ability to “Think Big but Move small”
While it is important to visualize what Eventual success looks like, it is also equally important to break the problem into solvable components
It should be done by setting bold + achievable goals and working with the team to navigate a path to get there.
PMs should have a good intuition around when to push to Speed Vs Quality vs Efficiency in the product dev process. Even though we want all 3 it is seldom not possible at every step in the way.
As I was referring to before, Product dev is way of testing hypothesis at every step. So it is ok to fail. But it is never ok to compromise experimentation. Also every failure should have the right learnings and enable for future success. Try and avoid the same failures
3rd and arguably the most important skill is Communication. I am sure you have heard of numerous talks where Communication is touted to be at the highest levels of PM hierarchy of needs. Well add this talk to that list as well!
As part of this competency, I would love to share 4 tips that I have learnt and still trying to master
Different stakeholders.
Think of how will your audience communicate this to.
Anchor the message around few key takeaways
Emphasis on repetition (Difference channels)