What Product Management in a Start Up Is Like by Instacart PM
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Main takeaways: - Top 3 skills for Product management - Introducing Product management in a startup - Planning for your Product Manager career.
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What Product Management in a Start Up Is Like by Instacart PM
- 1. www.productschool.com What Product Management in a Startup Is Like by Instacart PM
- 2. FREE INVITE Join 35,000+ Product Managers on
- 3. COURSES Product Management Learn the skills you need to land a product manager job
- 4. COURSES Coding for Managers Build a website and gain the technical knowledge to lead software engineers
- 5. COURSES Data Analytics for Managers Learn the skills to understand web analytics, SQL and machine learning concepts
- 6. COURSES Digital Marketing for Managers Learn how to acquire more users and convert them into clients
- 7. COURSES UX Design for Managers Gain a deeper understanding of your users and deliver an exceptional end-to-end experience
- 8. COURSES Product Leadership for Managers For experienced Product Managers looking to gain strategic skills needed for top leadership roles
- 9. COURSES Corporate Training Level up your team’s product management skills
- 10. Bala Subramaniam Director of Product TONIGHT’S SPEAKER
- 11. Engineering/Data LinkedIn 2012 - 2014 Journey so far.. Engineering Microsoft 2007 - 2012 Product Adara Inc. 2014 - 2015 Product Instacart 2015 - Present
- 12. ● Skills ● PM in a Startup ● Career Planning Agenda
- 13. Top Skills
- 14. ● Work backwards from the vision ● Strong opinions, Loosely Held ● Product Advancement Hypothesis Testing
- 15. ● Goal + Execution Plan + Strategy ● Speed vs Efficiency vs Quality ● Fail fast, Fail forward Thing Big, Move Small
- 16. ● Layer your message ● 2nd order audience ● Anchor ● Repeat.Repeat.Repeat! Communicate
- 17. Product @Startup
- 18. ● Founders can’t scale ● Productivity vs Busy ● Disconnect across multiple disciplines When?
- 19. How? ● Internal? ● 30/60/90 day plan ● Don’t do it all! ● Ownership ● Process
- 20. ● Leverage ✅ ● Business KPIs ✅ ● Sense of purpose ✅ ● Roadmap ✅ Smoke test?
- 21. Product Career
- 22. Linear Vs Exponential ● Spend time in basics ● Do the work for free! ● Scale with leverage
- 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)