Main Takeaways: -Prioritisation struggles of backend teams -Sources of data for the backend PM -What about mission teams?

1. Do Backends Need Product Managers?
by Visa Director of Product
www.productschool.com

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5. Do Backends Need
Product Managers?
Justyna
Walkowska for
Product School

6. Let me
introduce
myself
1. Current Location: Poznań, Poland
2. Educational background: PhD in
Computer Science (Natural
Language Processing)
3. 15+ years of industry experience
as a researcher, programmer,
engineering manager, product
manager, product team manager
4. 5+ in a pure product role
5. Companies you might have heard
of: Samsung R&D, Fandom, Visa

7. Today’s
subject
:
“Backends” not “backend teams”.
Do backends need Product
Managers?

8. Well,
DO THEY?
1. YES.
2. Competing request sources:
○ Logs
○ Users, customers and their
support teams
○ Frontend teams
○ Improvement ideas coming
from inside the team
○ Production crashes, DUH
○ Compliance (GDPR, ADA)
○ Company objectives

9. Well, DO THEY?
Red: goal-related completed
SP Yellow: total completed SP
Blue: total goal-related SP

10. Who is the
client?
1. The actual client?
2. The end user?
3. Internally:
○ Sales, marketing, solutions
○ Customer support
○ Other components of the
system
○ CEO
4. “As a service, I need to… “

11. Traditional
business
objectives for
backend teams
1. Sustainable Value
3.
Profit
○ support core value
○ create barriers to competition
2. Growth
○ grow market share
○ fulfill more demand
○ develop new markets
○ improve recurring revenue
○ support higher prices
○ improve lifetime value
○ lower costs
○ leverage existing assets
Source: Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing
Uncertainty

12. Traditional
business
objectives for
backend teams
1. Sustainable Value
3.
Profit
○ support core value
○ create barriers to
competition
2. Growth
○ grow market share
○ fulfill more demand
○ develop new markets
○ improve recurring revenue
○ support higher prices
○ improve lifetime value
○ lower costs
○ leverage existing assets
Source: Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing
Uncertainty

13. Metrics to help
with
prioritisation
1. Impact on infrastructure
costs
2. Future engineering costs
3. Performance
4. Security and compliance
5. Resilience
6. SLAs
7. Company-wide roadmaps
metrics

14. How to track?
Tools
1. No Google Analytics?
2. Meet
○ Grafana
○ Kibana
3. There’ll be a horror story
too

15. Grafana: “the leading open source software for time series analytics”

16. Kibana (ELK): “a free and open user interface that lets you visualize
your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack.”

17. The horror
story
1. Objective: lower costs by
reducing the bandwidth with the
help of the webp file format
2. Visualised metrics helped us
spot the opportunity
3. Visualised metrics prevented
big (financial) trouble

18. Opportunity Visualisation

19. The horror story
?!

20. The horror story

21. So you’re a
TPM?
1. TPM: Technical Product Manager
2. Two interpretations:
a. A PM with technical background
b. An “in the trenches” companion to a
more business-oriented PM

22. Backend teams
vs. empowered
mission teams
Backend products, backend teams,
backend metrics… What about
mission teams?
1. A mission team is responsible
for a product and does not get
blocked when certain parts of
the product need attention
2. The backend is (often) a
product in itself
3. Mission ≠ frontend + backend
4. A backend team can be a
mission team

23. Summary and
takeaways
1. Backend is a product.
2. Products need Product Managers.
3. Clients, remember them?
4. Think about what you should
measure (and measure it with
relevant tools).
5. Backend teams can be
empowered mission teams.

24. THANK YOU!
Find me at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justynawalkowska/
name.surname@gmail.com
https://medium.com/im-in-product-now (new blog, give it time)

25. www.productschool.com
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