AMA: Mezmo Sr. Director, Product Management, Ashka Vakil on Building a Product Management Team

This is a great question. In my opinion, a lot of product teams especially ones that are focussed on customer-facing products completely miss tracking product health KPIs like bugs in the product, product uptime, and product reliability to name a few. Most product teams miss them as this product health metric is not tied directly to any business objective and is considered an engineering vanity metric. The reality however is this KPI is really critical and can inform customer experience that can translate to customer satisfaction and retention. 

The product manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the right product is delivered to the market at the right time. In order to do this effectively, you will need to establish a framework for prioritizing needs and deliverables. This framework should take into account the company's overall goals and objectives, as well as the needs and wants of your customers and stakeholders. There are a number of prioritization frameworks available with RICE, Value versus Effort, and Kano Model being the most popular ones. You can pick any of the popular prioritization frameworks or even create your own. What matters is using a systematic and structured approach to prioritize your needs and deliverables, so that you can deliver the right product to market at the right time. Another thing when picking a technique to keep in mind is to pick one that is easy to use and will fit with your company's culture and can eventually scale as the product team grows. 

Product teams that don't have strong collaboration and communication with the product marketing team fail to deliver a delightful customer experience. These siloed product and marketing departments that do not work together result in failed customer expectations. Marketing teams without having proper knowledge of actual product capabilities will end up building messaging and running campaigns that either overpromise or underpromise products to the customers resulting in mismatched customer expectations. To provide the best customer experience and grow a product, it is critical for product management and product marketing teams to work closely together. I believe product managers (PM) and product marketing managers (PMM) are doppelgangers - product managers build products that solve customer problems and product marketing managers help take the product to prospective buyers and help them understand its value. They need to be in lockstep and the best way to align and hold each other accountable is via shared KPIs. Once the KPIs are defined and agreed upon by PM and PMM, it is important to establish clear communication and collaboration channels. This can involve regular meetings (synchronous) and/or asynchronous collaboration via Slack to discuss the progress and goals of the launch or research project. Another way to keep both teams accountable for their tasks is the creation of shared documents and dashboards to track the KPIs and ensure that everyone is on the same page. It can also be helpful to establish a directly responsible person (DRI) on each team to facilitate communication and coordination. Additionally, making sure key stakeholders from both teams are kept informed of the decisions and involved as necessary can help ensure that the KPIs are aligned with the overall goals of the organization and the product.

When joining a small company with no or little structure or joining a small but growing product team, it is essential to understand the current state of the product management process before establishing new processes. Rushing to make changes and establish processes that have worked for you in the past is not ideal. What worked in one company may not work here due to differences in the culture and how teams have been set up. In your first few days, you should set up a meet and greet meeting with stakeholders from product, engineering, customer success, sales, and marketing. Use this time to introduce yourself, understand their working style, and get a clear understanding of what is working, what is not working, and what are their expectations from your product management. Once you have collected all the information, synthesize it to form an opinion on the operating procedures you want to put in place that will help meet the objectives. Share your plans, collect feedback, and iterate and formalize the process. By using this shared way to drive change, you are bringing everyone along instead of dictating how things should be done. Keep in mind more is less and there is no shame in iterating if a certain process does not work the way you expected or you have outgrown the process. Processes are there to help establish structure and make things painless and repeatable for everyone. Based on my experience working at a small company with little to no structure, here are some areas where you will need to establish operating principles. 1. Define clear roles and responsibilities - Having clear ownership defined within the team prevents duplicated effort and stepping on each other's toes. Every product manager on the team knows what their charter is and has the needed space to operate. 2. Articulate clear product vision and strategy - This is extremely important to align and rally the team towards common goals and objectives. 3. Create product roadmap - A roadmap is important to drive the team towards common outcomes and provide a reference point for decision-making. Without a roadmap, no one knows where we are headed and everyone makes their own assumptions. 4. Outline the product development process - This is critical to ensure the team is working efficiently and effectively and has a common understanding of what it takes to take a product from inception to launch. 5. Establish effective collaboration and communication - The product team works with stakeholders across the company and setting up collaboration and communication processes and tools in place will allow keeping engineering, marketing, customer success, sales, and support on the same page.

Adding every new member to the team adds friction and operation overhead increases. You will need to set up processes that allow the team to operate independently and work with each other effectively and efficiently. Your main job will be driving alignment within the team and across the organization, along with coaching and mentoring the team. You will need to make sure every team member has a clear area of ownership, can articulate product vision and strategy effectively, and understands product goals and objectives. You can achieve this by having a product operations framework in place. The product operations framework should have guidelines for gathering customer, data, and competitive insights, building and communicating a roadmap, and effectively working with the stakeholders from different parts of the organization to build, launch and iterate. Besides setting up these guidelines, you will need to set up some structure on how decisions can be made and what needs to be communicated by the product manager and how. Make sure you have the following recurring meetings in place to give the product team the time they need from you as a product leader - * Weekly or bi-weekly team meetings to share regular updates with the product team * Weekly or bi-weekly product brainstorming meetings where discussions can range from strategic to tactical depending on the need * Regular 1-1 with the team ideally weekly * Regular meetings with product development leadership to discuss progress and blockers * Quarterly product review meeting with stakeholders from GTM and leadership * Regular meetings with the marketing team to share product updates and collaborate on launches * Regular meetings with the design team to brainstorm new ideas and define research and validation plans

What product management updates get shared with the rest of the company and how they get shared will vary based on the size of the company and the function of the company. The goal for communication, however, remains the same and that is to keep everyone aware of what is happening with the product and how it fits into the overall goals of the company. Here are a few activities that I think help drive better alignment and transparency across the organization. 1. I am a big fan of maintaining and managing public roadmaps tied to OKRs in product management tools like Aha or productboard so that they are easily accessible by everyone in the company whenever they want. This drives transparency across the organization, especially GTM. 2. Conducting quarterly roadmap sessions that showcase what was delivered in the last quarter, what is underway, and what is planned for next quarter to make sure there is a common understanding across the organization 3. Monthly newsletter or update via Slack, teams, or an equivalent asynchronous tool that highlights wins/losses and key metrics. 4. Synchronous meetings with sub-teams focussed on large initiatives or key announcements/launches with a readout posted to key stakeholders and execs that need to be kept informed. 5. Asynchronous updates to stakeholders in case of an escalation from a strategic customer or a critical outage 6. Big launch announcements and shoutouts in Slack or teams as well as company/group all-hands meetings.

If your PM team only has one or two people responsible for covering multiple products with complex features, I would recommend building a prioritized list of deliverables that are necessary to achieve your objectives. Make sure the list is as small as possible and is the one that would move the needle the most. Once you have a list of the most important items to focus on, divvy it up among the team of 1-2 product managers and define exactly what needs to get done. This ruthless prioritization and focus on must-haves will help ensure that the most critical work is completed, even with a small team. Additionally, you can seek to offload some tasks to other team members in the adjacent team so that it can free up PM bandwidth. For example, if there is an opportunity, EMs could create Jira epics and stories based on PRDs created by the product manager. Product marketing can help out with discovery and customer success can help a bit more with customer validation. In short, don't be afraid to find opportunities to creatively off-load in short term some PM tasks onto other teams. In addition, look for opportunities to introduce tools and processes to help manage and organize the work. For example, prefer asynchronous communications over synchronous meetings whenever possible to drive productivity and efficiency. To support the long-term growth and expansion of the team, I would recommend identifying areas where additional support will be needed, such as specific products or features, and hiring additional PMs to support those areas. This will help to distribute the workload more evenly and allow the team to better support the growth and expansion of the products. Overall, the key is to prioritize the most important work, automate manual tasks where possible, get help from other departments in short term to take on more responsibilities where possible for a short period of time, plan for additional head growth and hire incrementally.

If you are a junior PM who is the first product management hire, it would be fair to assume you are working at an early-stage startup where likely the founder is acting as the product leader. You were hired to support the founder and your focus will be more on execution versus defining strategy and vision. This would be a great opportunity to learn the ropes and over time if you can showcase strategic thinking there may be additional opportunities that can open up. Your focus should be learning as much as you can by taking up whatever you can even if it is not in your job description. Take time to understand the context in which you will be working, get a clear understanding of goals and priorities, be proactive versus reactive, communicate effectively, and lastly don't be afraid to seek mentorship and help. In your first month, focus on the following - * Get to know the team and the business - Take the time to learn about the team you will be working with, as well as the business and its goals. This will help you understand the context in which you will be working and will inform the decisions you make as a product manager. * Understand the product - Make sure you have a deep understanding of the product, including its features, benefits, and target market. This will help you make informed decisions and communicate effectively with the team and stakeholders. * Understand product goals and priorities - Get a clear understanding of goals and priorities for the product, and communicate them to the team. This will help everyone understand what needs to be done and why, and will ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

The product manager's job is to identify the most impactful problems to solve, enable their team to build and ship solutions that delight users, learn, and iterate. Product managers need a multitude of skills to be successful. The two most important skills that I view as must-haves no matter the seniority or product they will work on are owner mentality and leadership and influence. The reason for these two things being make-or-break things for me is because one has it or does not have it. It is extremely difficult to teach someone these two skills. Let me share a little bit about what having an owner mentality and leadership and influence translate to. * Owner Mentality - Owner mentality means thinking holistically and taking initiatives that may not be directly tied to the area of ownership to drive positive impact and achievement of business goals. A lot of times, PMs put themselves in a box where they just focus on building a new feature or shipping an enhancement without considering the entire experience that customers may experience. Great product managers work with stakeholders and define an end-to-end delightful customer experience by thinking about how new and existing customers discover the capability, what the monetization approach is, understand and influence how sales will sell and how customer success will support. PMs with an owner mentality wake up every morning thinking about what can be done better to delight customers. They don't operate in silos and hold themselves accountable for the success or failure of the product. * Leadership and Influence - PMs need to work with multiple teams to drive outcomes without having any direct organizational authority. To be successful, PM needs to know how to work with different teams, and inspire and motivate them to march on the path they have laid down the vision for to meet business goals and objectives. PMs need to act as leaders for their teams by establishing trust, being persuasive and reliable, focusing the team toward shared goals, and removing distractions by saying no to anything that is unimportant.

Building a well-rounded product team requires a combination of planning, recruiting, and development. By taking the time to identify the skills and expertise that will be needed, building a team around those needs, and then providing the necessary resources and support, you can build a high-performing team. Instead of focusing on numbers and putting out a generic product management requisition to kick-start hiring, spend time strategically thinking and planning about the needs and composition of the product team. A good place to start planning is to put down 1,2 and 3-year business goals and objectives. This will help you identify skills needed in the team as well as plan out team growth. For example, if the goal is to introduce a new product line this year with the target persona for developers, you need someone on the team who is technical and ideally had been a developer in their previous life. Similarly in year 2, your goal is to add support for FedRAMP, you will need someone on the team who has experience with FedRAMP. You, however, don't need to hire for this role and skill immediately. You can start hiring for this role in potentially Q3. To summarize, the first and most critical step in building a well-rounded team is to identify how many product managers you need currently, what is the incremental number and what are skill sets needed to achieve the business goals and objectives. Once you have defined your team's growth plans, make sure you make your recruiting team aware so they can schedule their sourcing plans accordingly. When hiring, it is critical to not only focus on the skills and experience but on their temperament and how they will collaborate and communicate with others on the team as well as cross-functionally. It is important to make sure every hire you make has clearly defined ownership and is given proper onboarding. After putting the right team is in place, your job is to make sure the team is aligned on the shared goals and vision and feels empowered to make trade-offs and decisions to drive positive outcomes for their areas of focus. In addition, as a leader, you will need to build an inclusive and open culture that fosters collaboration and communication within the team.