Main Takeaways: -Change: Effectively drive change across Dev, Test, Sales, and support by embedding yourself in their organizations -Know your team: Product managers need to intimately understand what each discipline does and how so we can achieve change quickly. -Make the first move: They will never come to us. We need to go to them to gather information and understand the real blockers to our Product's success.

1. www.productschool.com
Full Stack Product Management
by fmr Microsoft Product Leader

2. CERTIFICATES
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Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
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Certificate™

3. Corporate
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Level up your team’s Product
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4. Free Product Management Resources
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5. Full Stack Product
Management
Pardeep Singh Athwal

6. TOC
 About Me
 What is Full Stack Product Management
 Understand each discipline in your stack
 How to build a higher level of execution
 Questions

7. About Me
 B.Sc.
 Disney
 Abatis Startup
 M.B.A. Uvic and ENPC Paris
 Microsage Wireless (Co-Founder)
 Microsoft Leading a team of Program Managers
 Windows Server, Server UX revamp, Server Management
 Rogers Senior Director Data Center and Cloud
 Product Management Consulting
 Director Product Management Colligo SAS Web App
 Director Product Management Procurify SAS Web App

8. Full Stack Product Management
UX
Development
Test
Support
Sales
Product
Management

9. Full Stack Product Management
 Focus on Execution
 Lead with Facts
 Build Velocity
 Build a product team that has cross discipline experience and
understanding.
 Cross pollinate Product Team background, some product managers in the
team are ex-test, ex-dev, ex-support etc.
 This has worked well from my experience in software driven product
development environments. (Mobile, SAS applications etc..)

10. Product Management Rotation
 Rotate product managers through a 2 to 3 week period of embedded
engagement within each discipline
 MBA education you learn the different disciplines accounting, finance, HR,
law. We need to understand the different disciplines that we rely on to be
effective and execute.
 Development
 Test
 Support
 Sales
 Any other disciplines that might be relevant.

11. Embedded in Development
 Attend the larger development meetings in an observation capacity as
appropriate
 Understand the challenges the development team faces
 Build strong relationships with the development team
 Learn development processes, demo features without assistance
 Once you’re capable and competent the development team will be more
candid with their challenges
 Confident that you will represent and resolve any roadblocks
 Demo days are they well attended by sales, support and other disciplines?
 Key Takeaway: Do you understand your team’s development environment
and technologies? Identify challenges and opportunities.

12. Embedded in Test
 Attend the broader test team meeting, what are the challenges they are
facing
 Understand how bugs are classified and what criteria is used for
prioritization, this is obvious but often its misinterpreted.
 Test team often understands the product the best, can provide insight into
possible weak spots in functionality or identify bug farms.
 Often test your features in the test environment and run them yourself. Key
expectation of a Product Manager. What you spec’d, is it what's been
built in the sprint.
 Key Takeaway: How many bugs have you filed as a PM? How often do you
test your features in the test environment?

13. Sales Team
 Embedded with the sales team, attend appropriate meetings. Be familiar
with their sales pitches and sales scripts.
 Understand how they’re compensated/incentivized for your product, how
your product fits in with the overall solution that they’re pitching
 Regularly attend sales calls, sales often comes to us for with feature
requests but the context is missing.
 Get into the mind of a sales person, be empathetic to their challenges in
selling your product.
 Your software service/feature may be one of many they’re pitching.
 Key Takeaway: How often are you looped into sales calls? Get engaged
understand how you can support the sales team’s win/loss.

14. Support
 Attend their meetings and understand their proficiency with your products
and features their tools and training
 Understanding support as a discipline, building the right relationships
through engagement and understanding their day to day job help you
execute.
 Onboarding challenges, customer feature confusion, UX issues. Why build
new features when customers are unable to use existing ones?
 Do they have the right support scripts, addressing pain points in your
product, will make their job easier and also increase customer retention
and satisfaction.
 Key Takeaway: How is the support team engaging with users are the right
bugs/features/UX requests even making their way to your team?

15. FullStack Product Management
 Follow the MBA style approach to understanding and engagement with
different disciplines.
 Medicine also follows this approach. Residents are immersed in a particular
discipline as they rotate between specialties.
 For example what is truly blocking greater test automation coverage for
your product? Is it training, resources or tooling.
 Development, could refactoring the code enable faster feature
development? Finally crush a bug farm?
 Why does sales never present your SAS service to customers? Understand
how they’re comped, solve the puzzle.

16. Why do Full Stack Product
Management?
 Building a aspirational roadmap and feature release timeline is easy, it’s a
fantasy.
 Understand your Product Management stack and identify which discipline is
the weak link. Do they need additional resources/training?
 Execution is about building velocity, can’t do it if one or more disciplines
are hobbling along.
 Understanding their challenges and perspective can enable you to
capitalize on opportunities and drive towards results.

17. Questions?

18. www.productschool.com
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