Discover a Website Invoice Sample for Product Management that Simplifies Your Process

Website invoice sample for Product Management

[Music] all right everyone well I know you've sat through a couple presentations and you're probably in that post-launch fatigue so I'm gonna encourage everyone this is your chance stand up get a little energy you know maybe it may be a little stretch the left side little right side jump up and down yeah this is your chance to do it because now you're not distracting anybody awesome well good afternoon I am really excited to be with you today it's great to be back in Europe I live in New York but I was previously out in Amsterdam and Copenhagen for some conferences and speaking with some startups and so this is my first time in Lisbon I want to thank Andre and the productized team for making it possible for me to be out here today what I want to share with you today are some ideas that build on some of the things that Michael's talk covered on what product managers are the roles they play and also how to hire for them so quick quick show of hands who here today serves day-to-day as a product manager as a product owner raise your hand all right good good number of you now who is involved or responsible for hiring or leading teams of product managers or involved in in that process all right so if you want a job you know where to look but hopefully this talk is going to be valuable for both folks in terms of thinking through what product management can be so click back around me I started a company earlier this summer called headlight it's my second company this focuses on talent assessment and so how do you identify and screen for the kinds of skills you need whether it's product management engineering design and prior to that I spent a couple years at Etsy as a product manager helping the sellers we have 1.5 million sellers in that community helping them manage the workflows mobile app and desktop web prior to that I did marketing and product at an enterprise software company called percolate prior to that I was asked to serve in the federal government as part of a initiative to bring innovation and you know tech best practices into the federal government so all that is to say that I've seen how products are built in a variety of circumstances and a large number of skills and despite all of that and spending all this time thinking about what product does I mean I think this question is constantly on the front of my mind right and I'm sure it's something that you all face when you meet someone for the first time and they ask you what you do and you say you're a product manager and they say oh what's that right and then there's a whole conversation so I'm curious you know we saw some definitions earlier about what a p.m. does but I'm curious to hear from from some of you how do you answer that question when when someone asks you what you do and you say product manager what is how you elaborate on that I love to hear someone from the audience everyone's a little shot because they know that their answer might not be difficult I mean Josh Ullman has a good definition he is now an investor at Greylock he previously I believe was a was a product manager at Facebook and he says that a product manager ships or helps the team ship the right product to their users you know and then you breaks down that definition and I think that's helpful but I think that we still have this challenge right and different people have different definitions about a product manager does you know whether it's Steve Jobs to the mailroom clerk I mean I think many of us as product managers see yourselves as superheroes saving the day trying to make sure that a train doesn't crash and we're sort of the last line of defense from that but there are times where we're just chickens with their heads cut off right hopefully not too often and of course there is this great diagram by Martin Erickson who created this in 2011 long time product manager who puts product at the center of user experience engineering and business which is I think a helpful orientation it this is if this is like a now we know sort of where product fits in that map but it's still pretty vague right does it mean that some of the time we're a UX designer and then some of the time we're an engineer and then some of the time we're a business person whatever that means I think it leaves a lot open for what a product manager really looks like and so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and I want to propose a framework for you that has two axes the first axis is the head and heart axis so the head is really about thinking things through logically and with a with data and being really rational and sort of being very disciplined about your decision making and then there's the heart the heart is about understanding people and understanding stories and emotions and feelings and a good p.m. has to sort of succeed on both of those fronts right you know we care a lot about making decisions that are driven by data but at the same time how many people have maybe proposed to a friend something that was very logical made total sense and yet they didn't want to do it right if we miss that emotional aspect of the work we aren't as effective the other the other spectrum here is the divorce and the trees which is sort of the high level the big picture as well as the tactical the detail-oriented and the day-to-day and so when you plot these in a two by two matrix as every MBA would love to see we get four rolls or four sort of across cross-sections here so the first one I call the Explorer and so the Explorer is someone who is going out into the marketplace and really looking at you know what are our competitors doing what are the big trends in the market what's going on that people need to know about that is really happening at a macro level and then we've got the Advocate who is also looking at the big picture but looking at the emotional needs of our users are stakeholders reminding ourselves of our bigger vision of our company values thinking about the people and the stories that we want to tell at that high level so I call that the Advocate then we've got the organizer who is maybe more internally focused thinking about again people and emotions but maybe more granular maybe within your team maybe within a specific user or a specific meeting or a retro recognizing that those are important and taking care of those aspects and then finally we have what I call the technician which is using your head but also focusing on the details and this is really about that tactical problem solving something is going wrong there's a fire how do we figure this out how do we reconnect things or we've got sort of a really t problem and how do we sort of unpack it and figure out a way to move forward this is really about what the technician does and so let's explore these personas a little bit more in person and talk about what I've seen in terms of what that persona looks like and how we might try to hire for someone who is strong in that persona so the first persona is the Explorer so we talked about it again it is looking at the trends in the market looking at the big picture thinking about the data that's necessary to justify a decision let's see we have been running this marketplace of handmade goods craft supplies and vintage goods for for many years and about a year ago we are actually earlier this year we launched our first new marketplace in in a decade and it was a craft supply marketplace and I remember the Director of Product who was leading that effort a lot of what he had to do especially with teams that were outside his core team were to evangelize this opportunity explain why your team needed to help support that effort and talking about you know it's a it's a fourteen billion dollar market and you know here's what's going on Michaels and some of these other craft supply goods you've got the store but then the online presence isn't great and so really going out there doing that research with customers or competitors and kind of painting that vision what this marketplace could be and that was I think a really great example of being the Explorer you know thinking about someone who goes out into the wilderness and comes back and says here are all the things that I've seen let me tell you all about them so how do you hire for someone who's gonna be strong in this role so I think that it's really important to ask questions that are super specific to the job and at headlight we make it possible from floors to send take home assignments where you sort of give people two to three hours to kind of work on a problem maybe they put together a presentation or a one-pager on what they do but you can also ask this in an interview situation you can say you know what's a trend here's an example what's a trend whether it's cultural economic technological that's really exciting to you and what are the implications for society about this trend someone who's gonna be strong in the Explorer persona is someone who's gonna be excited to talk about whether self-driving cars AI virtual reality they've got something that they care about whether it's you know the the changing economic landscape they have things that they're they're researching they're thinking about and they've gone beyond just okay well truck drivers are gonna be eliminated because of self-driving cars you know what going a step beyond that you know maybe maybe hotels become you know car hotels where you drive somewhere and you sleep overnight in the car because you don't need a drive you can just kind of lie down and it's a substitute for airline flights right that's sort of showing that kind of thinking and being more visionary so next we have the Advocate the Advocate is again thinking about the big picture but from the story perspective from the emotional perspective and this person is all about taking care of stakeholders and listening to customers and understanding customer needs I'm a reminded of a terrible joke that that goes why are vampires terrible product managers because they're afraid of stakeholders sorry but you know communication is I think an important part of of this role it's it's not only do you understand can sort of but can you share and articulate those needs and those concerns in a valuable way I was recently helping a startup hire their first product manager and we were interviewing a number of people and one of the people you know we interview one person who had a design background and engineering background had better had a product had a similar type of company and they were very prescriptive you know they they they kind of knew all the answers and they had a plan already and then we interviewed someone who had actually been head of product training so not necessarily a product manager per se although she had been a product manager in the past but she talked about how she had to put together this team because they were losing all these deals and they didn't know why and so she embedded herself in several different customers for a week at a time and she commits herself to spending time talking to customers every single day and that's powerful right and she stood up this entire group to do product training and to help communicate internally to the team and then also externally to the customers what mattered and so that was a powerful example in my mind of what an advocate can do and so how do you look for this well I think one part of it is to put together a new scenario right and this one maybe it's so you've got a product launch coming up right and a week before the launch a couple beta users are starting to report some really bad bugs some some bad crashes going on and so what do you do right is this product manager going to is this person someone who's going to think about all the different players in the situation well how bad is is the bug what is that it was the pain point can we sort of contain it what is what what does engineering think about this what does design thing about this how is this can affect the marketing launch if this person is sort of jumps right into the weeds and it's like alright well here's how we diagnose the problem then you know that maybe they're not necessarily going to approach problems in the same way that someone's strong in that advocate role would you got the organizer so the organizer is thinking about people and stories but on a more granular sort of internally focused perspective and for the organizer this is someone who is caring about all the details right making sure all the people are invited to the kickoff meeting and not leaving anyone out or making sure that the meeting is scheduled at a time that doesn't overlap with someone's other important commitments right that might seem like a sort of a detail but how many times have you been upset when a meeting didn't get put together in the right way and then the dynamics in the room are all wrong or the wrong persons in the room or the right people aren't in the room right those are the kinds of things that someone who was strong as an organizer is going to think about I think about one of my co-workers Joanna who was also p.m. at Etsy and was one of those teams that was working peripherally to support some of the work that the Kraft marketplace was doing that I told you about earlier she had to be in so many meetings because her team had to interface with two or three other teams they were all making changes and so she had to be there kind of listened to what was happening what was going on and then asked the right questions and then relayed that back to her team and being a you know support her team and make sure that the the right information was in the room and I think that that's another important role that a product manager has to play it's being the organizer and so how do you how do you select for this role well I think that one way you can do that is to ask people about their ideal team process what is the team process that you think works best and of course the answer is always it depends but there are probably some things that they found works for them and for the types of companies that they've been involved in and so I would hope that a good product manager who is strong in this organizer role would be someone who both has a set of things that they think are effective but also is asking a lot of questions and saying well how does the team work are there people who are remote you know is the design of shared resources it someone who was dedicated to our team in our product alone those are the kinds of questions that really help you understand whether this person is able to think in this way and finally we have the technician and so this is the about diagnosing problems this is about actually unpacking situations and being a problem solver on a very technical level or a user experience level and I think about my own experience at Etsy when I was also supporting this craft marketplace which clearly was a really sprawling project and at the time we had a challenge because we had just one of our designers had just left my on my team and we had a person on sick leave medical leave who was our QA analyst and so we were really short two members of our team and so what I had to do in those situations was to jump in I had to build out all the test situations I had to make sure that we were regularly running good good bug tracking bug testing sessions I had to be a designer and and make UX flows and then walk that through the other designer our team who was trying to be on both projects at the same time and so my job was really hands-on and I had to block off long stretches of time or I was working on those things because otherwise it wasn't gonna happen right and so that was me being the technician and so how do you hire for this role I think you talked about a product that you know someone who is strong in this role can think about products and think about not only delineate exactly what makes them so good but also what's wrong with them and how they would try to fix those things right and because they're they're able to kind of break down a product experience and think about all the the different aspects of it and to think about all the pieces that put it together and how how those things can be improved right it's not just what makes it great but what is necessarily wrong with it but what's adding friction and so with these with these four personas I don't think that they you're saying like we're just hiring an explorer or we're just hiring an organizer I think that every p.m. has to bring all of these skills and all of the perspectives into their role but it depends on the situation right so maybe you have a PM who's building an internal tools they might need to be really strong as technicians because they're solving these sort of complex problems internally and they need to be a good organizer because there's so many internal stakeholders that they have to coordinate with but it may not be as important for them to be a visionary right and alternatively you might have someone who is leading a new product line a new market opportunity and what you really want there someone who is a strong Explorer who can be an advocate and can really talk about the needs of the users and all the different players in the market and maybe it's it's early on so you haven't figured out all the technology or how the product is implemented yet so being a technician matters less I also think that it's important to think about the makeup of your team right so that some teams you may be you're full of people who are former engineers and former designers maybe you do need someone who comes from a marketing background who can bring some of that competitive landscape some of that thinking I was talking with one of the speakers at last night and we were talking about how at one point she was the team was thinking about hiring one of two people either someone who was very experienced in in IT and new to product marketing or someone who was a great product marketer but didn't have a lot of that sort of corporate IT experience and in that case she was like we need to hire that IT person even though of course we're product marketing we've got a whole team full of people who know tons about product marketing but they don't know a lot about IT management and so we need that valuable perspective and so when you think about your team it's not that there's one makeup that's the right makeup right it's it's about finding that balance so that your team as a whole is well-rounded so what about the fifth persona right we just talked about four but this talk is about 5% and I think the fifth persona really comes into play in a way that doesn't fit into the framework because you can imagine someone who is strong in all these fronts they can be a visionary they can speak to customer needs can organized things really well and they can problem solve and figure fight fires and do all those things but they still might not be that product manager that you really count on that you think of as like a 10x player what what is it and and so for that I think that there's a great analogy that I like to make about product management and it's about climbing a mountain or it's like helping a group climb a mountain and as a product manager you're supporting a group of people who are climbing this mountain right and you start out as a helper and you start out as sort of like a support player someone who's just trying to be useful and and trying to stay out of people's way and and this is sometimes where you know you'll hear engineers or designers who don't like product managers they say just stay out of my way they just don't just don't bother me right and and you know that speaks to you the fact that doing product is hard and a lot of times they've dealt with people who were actively making their lives harder right so step one is you just need to be a helper and over time you graduate to being a partner you're a core member of the team you're valued you're respected you're you're part of helping climb this mountain right where you're but sort of where you end up where I think that 5th persona is is being the Sherpa when you think about being a shrimper you think about climbing Mount Everest right you've got these expeditions that train for years and years and years and they have these expert climbers and there's this captain there's this leader who's climbing the mountain and they still then they go to the local area and they hire a guide and so this guide is being hired technically there's a there's a team captain and you're hiring the Sherpa but the Sherpa basically becomes the de facto leader right the trusted member of that group that everyone is looking to turning to to you know the the the team's lives is in the hands of that Sherpa to guide them through that mountain and help them you know if a storm is coming can we take another route you know this piece of equipment is broken what are we gonna do I think of my friend Belinda who started as an associate p.m. at a startup and there were two other PM's there and so she was the most junior one but this startup was going through a lot of growing pains a lot of churn and six months in both of those two other PM's had left and she was the most most senior tenured at that company product manager and she was staffed with the the best designer and the best engineer at the company and they were both initially like just to stay out of my way don't bother me but over time she really proved her value right she organized user research session she managed the backlog in an amazing way and she really just delivered she was there for her team again and again and again and by the time that company was acquired and she left she was considered by those same people the same senior designer and same senior engineer as the best PM that they had ever worked with and I don't think you can screen for the shirt but right there's no interview question that you can ask that's going to tell you whether someone is a Sherpa or not but I think that this is an ideal that as product managers as product people that we can always strive for in it and maybe not at every team not in every project not in every role but that we we hope to to reach that level in the future and that's the thought that I want to leave you with so thanks so much it's been a pleasure to be with you today you