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Started reading
August 17, 2018
At the beginning, you’ll be figuring out what to build; in the middle you’ll help the team make progress; at the end you’ll be preparing for the launch.
For example, the product manager will research the market and define the requirements.
This is the time when the PM is starting to think about what to build next. The next idea may come from a customer request, competitive analysis, new technology, user research, the sales or marketing teams, brainstorming, or the big vision for the product.
The PM talks to all possible sources to create a large list of potential features or development work.
customer needs, the competitive landscape, business needs, and the team’s expertise, he prioritizes the features and scenarios.
Other companies, such as Google, Facebook, and many startups, have a more bottom-up approach, where the PM focuses on winning over the engineers.
In the coming phases, everyone on the team will have questions, including “why are we working on this?”, and the PM will need to have answers. This is also the time when the PM starts defining success.
He’ll envision what the world looks like if the team is successful.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) t...
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Prioritization is one of the product manager’s most important functions at this point; if the team were to fix every bug and build every new feature idea, the product would never launch.
PMs who like doing customer research and market analysis could enjoy working on B2B products. These are also the products where PMs tend to exert the most influence, so they can be a very satisfying place to work.
This is why product sense—having the intuition to recognize the difference between a good product and a bad product—is so important for product managers.
They’ve found that passion, intellect, a strong customer focus, and lots of energy can be a winning combination for great PMs.
Many PMs communicate ideas without specs, through conversations and drawing ideas on whiteboards.
And some PMs fail because they write a spec but don’t follow through to make sure the team understood and implemented the ideas.
Some people think that a PM’s job is just to get the key stakeholders in a room together to make decisions. Good product managers don’t just serve as passive conduits of other people’s opinions.
Instead, PMs research the area and come up with their own point of view and frameworks for making decisions.
understand their opinions and priorities, but then they synthesize those perspectives, lay out the tradeoffs, and come up with a recommendation t...
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In any meeting or conversation, the PM needs to represent the interests of all the peopl...
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Product managers are able to reduce the number of meetings their teammates need to attend because they’re able to represent the team to other groups and find productive way...
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It’s great to do customer research and listen to what customers ask for, but it’s not enough.
what you want them to build, but then they’ll tell you how long it will take to build it. If the timeline is too long, you can’t just tell them to code faster; it won’t work.
Instead, if you have external deadlines you want to hit, you need to make tradeoffs and negotiate.
Not trusting the engineers’ estimates and promising other teams that the work will be done sooner than the engineers agree to is one of the fastest ways to ruin
your relationship with the team.
Instead, PMs influence without authority, building up credibility with the team, communicating clearly, gathering data and research, and being persuasive to lead the team. Teams follow PMs when they’re convinced that their goals align and that the PM will help them better achieve their goals.
the product, and engineers should be empowered to own the technical implementation.
PMs need to understand those choices and the impact they have on the overall experience.
In practice, execution of an idea is much more important. Many
As a PM, it’s important to take broad ideas and make them tangible and actionable.
finding servers to run your code,
convincing other teams to prioritize the work you depend on, and using the product consistently to find and iron out all the rough edges.
While most roles on the team are crisply defined, product managers have a more fluid role.
As a PM, you’re responsible for the success or failure of your product, and no job is beneath you.
Some companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, are very transparent, with lots of visibility into
what other teams are working on. Others, such as Apple and Amazon, are more siloed, with each team focused on their own work.
managers are deeply involved in product strategy, deciding which direction to take the product and when to start new initiatives.
PMs are expected to think about strategy for their teams, for example, which customers and areas to focus on.
Often, PMs at these companies can easily get an engineering team to build out ideas at least to the experimentation stage, not needing executive approval for launches until later.
Google is passionate about innovation and really values a culture where great ideas can become reality.
Product managers focus on strategy, analysis, and facilitation of the engineering team.
executive team takes questions from all Googlers at the weekly all-hands “TGIF” presentation. It’s not unusual for Google PMs to switch product teams during their career at Google.
The Search team tends to be very research driven, with engineers taking the lead on inventing new algorithms. For advertiser-facing teams, PMs gather customer requirements and communicate those needs to the rest of the team.
PMs join a team, and it’s up to the individual PMs and their teams to decide what they’re going to build. Often, a PM’s first
project at Google is to figure out what they should be working on.
Many products have only one PM, and for those that have more, the work is usually cleanly partitioned so that each PM owns a full area. In the day-to-day work as a Google PM, you’ll work mo...
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Many new ideas come from PMs, engineers, and designers drawing ideas on whiteboards and then ...
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Google strongly values analytical skills in its PMs, since data analysis can be a...
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PMs frequently look through the usage logs to come up with ideas for new projects in the...
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A big part of the PM job at Google is getting projects in shape for launch.
