Ask Me Anything with LinkedIn's Senior Product Manager

/Productschool @ProductSchool /ProductmanagementSV
November 30th, 2016

Agenda
● Welcome!
● AMA w/ LinkedIn Senior PM - Naman Goel

Who’s here?
Company size (no. of employees)
1-10
10-100
101-499
500-1000
1000+

Who’s here?
Role
Product Managers
Software Engineers
Project Managers
Designers
Consultants
Hardware Engineer
Misc.

Upcoming Classes
Santa Clara
Weeknight cohort:
November 29 - February 2
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30pm to 9:00pm (sold out)
Weekend cohort:
December 3 - February 11
Saturdays from 9:30am to 3:30pm (1 spot left!)
Apply At
www.productschool.com

Mohammad Musa
•Lead Product
Manager @ Google
•VR Startup Founder
•3X Product School
Instructor

Yotam Soen
•Sr. Product Manager
@ eBay
•Director of Product
@ Honeybook
•Returning Product
School Instructor

Meet A LinkedIn
Senior PM

Naman Goel
- 5+ Product experience
- Led the build out of deep people-
centric sharing experiences in
Google Photos and the launch of
Google Contributor
- Product management experience
with LinkedIn, Google, Goldman
Sacs.

Question #1
HOW DID YOU BECOME A
PRODUCT MANAGER?

WHAT DOES A TYPICAL
DAY LOOK LIKE FOR
YOU?
Question #2

WHAT MADE YOU
TRANSITION TO A PM
ROLE?
Question #3

ADDITIONAL
Q & A By The
Audience

What are your biggest
challenges?
Question #4
- Being able to take a step back from the day-to-day
- Constantly asking, “what is going wrong? What can I do
better?”
- Thinking about next steps, approach in product cycle
- How involved to get in various aspects of product cycle?
- E.g. working with UX designer closely on wireframes.
- How much you go with flow and how much you take a step
back?

How balance technical
v/s nontechnical teams?
Question #5
- Product Manager needs to understand how much support each
team needs
- E.g. Engineering team is weak and needs technical
direction. PM invests his or her team in this area to ensure
the product is going in the right direction.

How did you get into
Google?
Question #6
- Luck :D
- Interviewed for engineering position while in grad school
- Recruiter followed up every six months to check in
- After getting product experience at Goldman, he decided to
apply for a PM role at Google on the 2nd time around.
- Understanding what companies what from each product
manager

How to transition from
finance to PM?
Question #7
- Financial service industry & culture - dealing with huge sums
of money so need to be exact and no experimentation
- On other hand, Google is mostly an experimentation lab
- Failure is accepted at Google, as long as you learn from it
- How much experimentation does this job allow?
- Seeking out mentors, experienced folks in that role who
understand company and function deeply

What was your first 6
months at Google like?
- Similar to challenges
- How not to get fired in first 90 days!
- Financial > Google, immediately understanding Company’s mission
- Meeting as many people as he could to understand Company as best
as possible
- ‘I’m facing this issue in my role, how would you do it if you were
in my shoes?’
- What does mission mean for the company? Product’s vision?
- What do I need to do?
- Google - Engineering-driven culture
- How much involvement do engineers have in the process?
- Design is important to pick up as a PM
- usually you have less designers than developers on the team
- user empathy, helps with product decisions, how design works &
design decisions should be
Question #8

If you were to design a crash
course, what resources
would you include?
Question #9
- What skills do you already have? What’s the skill gap?
- Top skill - user empathy
- understanding who is going to be your user group
- understanding which user groups exist
- E.g. designing a Macbook for global users vs US users
- What are the other things you want to do with users?
- Technical skills - going deeper into how technology works, domain
space, trends in that space
- Design - philosophy, wireframing, mockups & design principles
- PM influencers - Andrew Chen (Uber/Growth), Ken Norton (Google
Ventures), Josh Elman (Greylock Ventures), Open PM (online
aggregate of PM resources)

What is the career
trajectory of PM?
Question #10
- Responsibilities of PM from beginning vs later in career
- Product strategy for a lagging product line
- Associate PM given a product feature, not the whole product
- E.g. Youtube suite of products vs. sole feature or product
line
- Sr. PM’s handle entire product of company or major product
lines, e.g. Sr. PM at PayPal managing entire PayPal
international payments product vs Associate PM reporting on
feature of int’l product
- Group PM’s manage product managers
- setting quarterly/yearly objectives (ROI, user growth%,
etc)

What do you look for in
job applicants?
Question #11
- Linkedin’s philosophy of ideal candidates
- varies on the role
- Professional experience
- has launched stuff before
- Entrepreneurial
- pursued ideas to concept
- learn from failings
- Did you work on anything outside of your current role?
- ‘What have you built?’

How would I prioritize
experienced candidate
vs recent grad?
Question #12
- Resume reflects personality
- entirety of what this person has done
- What has this person done outside of their normal
duties?
- Above and beyond the line of duty, how did you
impact a milestone?

How do you bring Google
culture of experimentation
& innovation into finance?
Question #13
- experimentation and innovation in finance is hard,
because of the fact they are dealing with money
- innovation can happen in the processes
- E.g. HFT lag time to process orders, level out
playing field
- Personal finance - opportunities for innovation
- Banking, set & heavily regulated not as likely to
innovate

How to make feature
decisions @ LinkedIn?
Question #14
- Incremental improvements for larger set vs big
improvements for smaller set
- Metrics defined at LinkedIn, Google
- Define strategy - where company will be in
1,3,5 years?
- Success metrics - KPI’s
- E.g. incremental improvement for 5MM users
or feature that increases ROI
- looking back at strategy and defined
success metrics
- Metrics

What are examples of
KPI’s?
Question #15
- LInkedIn’s metric, e.g.
- # of users on LinkedIn
- DAU, MAU, etc
- Revenue metric

How do you prioritize
outside-of-the-box ideas
for company?
Question #16
- 70-20-10 ideas prioritization
- 70% - things that align with LinkedIn’s vision
- 20% - 10x, moonshot ideas for long-term vision
- 10% - crazy/viral, e.g. LinkedIn Antarctica, limited or
no internet access

How do you pitch your
ideas at LinkedIn?
Question #17
- Writing the story of your idea
- Frameworks
- e.g. Press release for your product BEFORE
iteration/release - headlines, fill in the details
- forces you to explore the idea further
- e.g. VP Product @ LinkedIn
- pitch in person, then follow up via email
- Wide acceptability of idea, get people aligned with your
vision/excited to start working on the product
- Core of being a great PM - sell a very good story
- Yahoo! hackathons

Where do you find
solutions to big challenges
facing LinkedIn?
Question # 18
- If this product didn’t exist, and I build it from scratch,
what would the MVP have today?
- User empathy
- meeting with teams to test hypothesis
- testing with user groups

How important is
business acumen for
PM?
Question #19
- understanding unique value you bring to the table
- Product vision & strategy
- user story
- coordinating with cross-functional teams to see where they need
help to ship the product
- How does revenue, P&L impact your product? More important than
knowing specific business terms

How important is
technical background?
Question # 20
- Naman hasn’t written any code in his PM career,
even at Google!
- Depends on the product
- E.g. VMware vs. Cisco
- Youtube, understanding how video streaming
works
- API PM’s need to be technical, but consumer-
facing PM’s not so much

How did you prepare for
your Google interview?
Question #21
- Understanding product manager role is all about
- user empathy
- storyteller
- your superpower
- What questions would be expected of me?
- e.g. What should Samsung do next after Note 7?
- More structured responses so interviewer understands your
story, thought process
- Cracking the PM interview by Gayle Laakman McDowell
& Jackie Bavarro

Does it make sense to
incorporate the story for
all aspects of PM?
Question #22
- Business - impact, ROI, strategy
- Technical - impact on product architecture

What is the toolbox for
PM’s?
Question #23
- You as being the user
- testing product once it’s built
- Design - Balsamiq, InVision, Proto.io, Sketch or
Post-it notes >> mockups/wireframes
- Data - Optimizely, Mixpanel, Google Analytics,
Kissmetrics, Tableau (visualization)
- PM - usertesting, uservoice

How to deal with
opposing points of
view?
Question #24
- Do you have strong opinions?
- Conviction of your beliefs, and flexibility in
compromise
- Understand other person’s perspective
- try to ask questions until they run out of
answers or you become convinced by their
answer
- Ken Norton - Weekly Hell of PM - the other people
on your team disagreeing with you!
- arriving at common ground to keep the team
moving
- e.g. engineering team not buying into your idea

How do you find
established user base to
test?
Question #25
- Users who would be early adopters
- enthusiastic to use your product
- E.g. going to middle schools and asking students to
test out app
- creating a test group

How has Microsoft’s
acquisition of LinkedIn
affected the product
vision?
Question #26
- Wait and see
- Currently running independently

Roadmap hijacking,
what are first 3 or 4
questions to keep your
roadmap intact?
Question #26
- User empathy, true north metrics to come to
conclusion
- How is this helping our company’s strategy?
- Which hypothesis will have greatest effect on
metrics?
- Strong opinions, weakly held

What methods allow
you to stay intune with
user needs?
Question #27
- App reviews
- How to find users at the right time

Upcoming Workshops
Santa Clara
Dec 7: How to Solve a Communication Breakdown in
Product Management
Dec 14: "Ask Me Anything" with Product School CEO:
How to Become a Product Manager

APPLY AT
productschool.com
OR
Let’s talk :)
Email: jake@productschool.com

Ask Me Anything with LinkedIn's Senior Product Manager

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