From this presentation you will learn about typical PM mystakes

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5. Where I’ve Made Mistakes
● Agility
● Focus
● Customers
● Politics
With Mistakes and Lessons Learned from people who aren’t me.

6. Agility

7. Didn’t account for ML interaction with data
Hotel Sorting
● Quick hack that allowed us to serve up 400 hotels at a time instead of 100.
○ More content is good, right?
● ML team was running experiments at the same time
● A ring of 300 hotels around the center of each city had very sparse data.
● STRONGLY suggesting the Extended Stay America in Hyattsville
I managed a B2B2C marketplace that had become verbose, redundant, and cluttered.
Tightened up the language with my designer. It tested so much better with customers!
A week later I got an urgent message from the SEO team...

8. One time I deleted approximately 3 sprints worth of stuff in Jira.
On a more serious note: One of the biggest pitfalls I fell into was getting too
focused on the output and forgetting about the desired outcome.
building a thing that didn’t matter because conditions had changed... but
a quarter ago I said I would build it!
I.e. shipping the feature as opposed to the OKR the feature is supposed to shift?
Nishal Narechania
Senior Director of Product
Higher Logic

9. Moved too fast!
I've released an MVP or two that turned out to be nowhere near an
MVP in retrospect.
Learned to get feedback throughout the MVP build to find the right inflection point where
there is enough product value to expose to a larger audience without damaging the
existing product portfolio or the perception of the company.
depends on the size of the company! For bigger company, damage to brand is
bigger. For smaller company, lost time is HUGE.
Do you think damaging your existing brand is a bigger concern than the wasted
time/resources on an MVP you can’t learn from? Are there other risks to being too fast?
Alex Mitchell
Chief Product Officer
ICX Media

10. Customers

11. Built what the users asked for
● Customer wanted hardened version of web app that could be deployed
on-prem
○ MANAGEMENT wanted this, not users.
● Significant Development effort
○ 1 full year of a 5 person dev team
○ “Step 1 - port the entire backend from Node to Flask… Step 2 -
replace the entire data layer...”
● Deployment Issues
○ Users didn’t want it
○ Management interest waned
● Huge opportunity cost of missed features

12. One fail on my side is that for a SaaS company, we were working on new product
development to add to our small and growing suite of products. I polled our existing
customers on price and they all said they'd pay more for more products if we offered
them.
We did a rather large build, rolled out the new products, and all of
those customers who said they'd pay backed down.
In the end, we went too wide on products and not deep enough with the products we
had, and rather than solving the actual customer pain points we just built a bunch of
fluff.
Won't make that mistake again!
Craig Zingerline
Chief Product Officer
Sandboxx

13. Focus

14. Built instead of Buying
Internal tracks/analytics system
● Medium amount of effort
● Better ties to our transactional data, key context
○ E.g. not just bounce rate, but bounce rate conditional on which flights were
presented!
12 months later
● Another system to maintain
● Missing key features (like retroactive tracks)
● A vendor focused on tracking/analytics is ONLY focused on tracking/analytics

15. Didn’t Kill a Low-Performing Partnership
● Added a new vendor for discounted travel inventory
● Joined several other vendor integrations that each touched several different
major functions in the platform (query, book, sync, change)
● Engineering Tax
○ Engineering time spent on production bugs/issues
○ Decreased velocity for all new features
● I didn’t put the partnership to the question, or set it up to self-destruct
automatically
Increased surface area = decreased velocity

16. Politics

17. Took the need for my team for granted
● Built an ML Roadmap for the ML Team because I was the ML PM
○ Sorting
○ Pricing
○ Recommendations
● Stayed in my lane
○ I didn’t address user-facing display
○ I didn’t solve the customer’s problems
○ I didn’t understand why customers preferred different hotels
● Reorg
○ Data Scientists matrixed to teams as needed
○ Vertical Product Managers, all customer-facing
● Your Roadmap should drive your structure, not other way around

18. Letting Control groups (Risk, Legal) define the customer experience
by providing very narrow guardrails. This may be commonplace in highly
regulated industries, but ultimately may lead to negative outcome.
Similarly, allowing the technology limitations to result in subpar user experiences.
1. Understand if it’s a business risk or legal decision.
2. Show how competitors are doing it.
3. Use data to support CX recommendations.
4. Ask external council.
5. Get better lawyers.
How do you push back when you’re presented with an allegedly black or white
compliance requirement?

19. I work in health technology (diagnostics) where product takes years to reach customers.
A mistake I’ve made (a couple times!) is taking on a PM role where the company also
expected me to be project manager for product teams and pick up slack for other
functional groups which were not competent enough (or also resource
constrained) to do their end of the job.
You can imagine I’ve had no time to learn about the customer and build relationships.
So in hindsight, don’t take a PM job where the company can’t afford to hire the right
types of functional leads to make a team setup for success. Your product won’t see the
light of day anytime soon due to operational and resource constraints.
Rowena Mittal, PhD
Head of Product, Special Projects
Progenity

20. Achieving Nirvana

21. 20 years back - believing I knew more than customers, internal teams, or data.
15 years back - believing only data
10 years back - believing every problem needs a solution
5 years back - believing I love solving all problems.
Now I attempt to solve only problems that I have a high conviction to solve; then start
with a hypothesis based on a gut developed over years, next meticulously validate it
with customers/teams/data and finally sequence the roadmap based on ROI for
solutions/features.
ROI depends on strategic reasons, customer budget, willingness to buy, our cost,
margins and price etc. Pricing unfortunately isn’t only a PM decision so am researching
that next.
Manisha Gupta
Global Head Product Management - HCM Analytics and Data Science
Oracle

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