Roshni Jain

The jump from IC PM into product leadership whether as a Group PM or a Director of Product is one of the most challenging progressions in a product career. At this step a Consumer PM's career, the skills and behaviors that have helped them excel as an IC PM - excellent execution, strong PRDs, great squad management are not the exact ones required at the Director level. To earn this role, it's important to really think about the responsibilities about the Director - the main criteria of success are around building a strong team, ensuring that they're working on the right things and that the sum of that work aligns to the outcomes the business needs. A lot of the job becomes setting the vision and strategy for this broader area, setting up the organization to best deliver against it and then focusing on enabling PMs, not making the specific decisions for each feature or launch. To succeed as a Directors it's important to have strong cross-functional relationships at your level and to have really strong executive communication. You want the other company leaders to really understand what your team is doing, why, the impact and how it moves the company forward. The way a PM might be evaluated as ready for this role is demonstrating an ability to take on larger and larger strategic scope. Even without the formal role, they've enabled others enough to have the bandwidth to think and act with a larger scope than one or two teams, but rather a broader area. One way I've seen PMs successfully bridge this is by taking on strategic projects that cross outside their teams. In articulating an approach that works across this scope and then working across the teams to have this delivered - they show the ability to own larger initiatives. Lastly as a Director of Consumer PM, it's important to have a strong understanding of your core customer. This is an area that you cannot delegate away - you must stay close to the customer and have a strong perspective on the most important problems you can solve for them. This, in addition to staying up to date on successful consumer products and experiences will enable you to keep innovating while ensuring your product meets your customer needs.

There is no right answer, but here are a few lenses I've used when providing counsel to others and in considering the companies I've worked with: * Is this a product that I'm personally excited about? I don't have to be the ideal customer, but is there something about the product that excites me - it could be that it's a problem I'm passionate about solving, an approach that is truly innovative or differentiated, a customer that's a lot of fun to work with, or a business model that creates strong competitiive advantage * Are the secular trends in its favor? Is the company leading the way in transforming how things are done, or focused in an area who's time has passed. Another way to think about it - is the potential target audience growing or shrinking? * Does the company have a unique shot at winning in this market? Some markets are large enough to support many many companies - others are winners take most. Which type of market is the company in and is it well placed.

This is linked to the other question, so I'll be brief here. The vast majority of fundamental PM skills are transferable regardless of B2B, B2C or platform focused work. By fundamental skills I mean * Leadership and communication - the ability to lead through influence, work with engineers, designers and many other functions and very strong verbal and written communication. PMs are the spokesperson for their product and they must have excellent communication to build the credibility they'll need to move their products forward. * Product strategy - critical and analytical thinking, product sense, business sense and the ability to bring all of this information together to build a strong strategic approach to your product * Prouct execution - ability to work across complexity, unexpected challenges and find a way to make things happen with high quality in acceptable time frames If a PM has these down solid - they can transfer to a different type of customer. The biggest differences a PM may find is that the pace of consumer product may be faster as there is a large scale and can be easier to make adjustments to a consumer experience than a large worrkflow. They may find the complexity of execution varies between B2B and B2C products. They are also likely to find it easier to find and interact with users, and see data and results faster as well. 

Part of what drew me to Consumer Product and why I love it so much is that as individuals, we are all consumers. I studied Consumer Marketing and Consumer Psychology as an undergrad and I've always been fascinated by why people make the decisions they do with their time, money and attention. So, as a consumer yourself in many cases as a PM it can be easier to more deeply understand your customer, even if you are not the target user for your product. In B2B, PMs also deeply understand their users, but typically in the context of their livelihood - how your product helps them more effectively do their job or run their business. As a result the needs can be complex, and product behaviors are often driven by a myriad of factors that may or may not be linked to that end user's individual behaviors and preferences. The typical competitor products and differentiators might be more focused on advanced capabilities like security, or financial data, or workflows. As a result some B2B product managers may have less familiarity with consumer attitudes, shifting preference, the bar for great product and the very large competitor set you're dealing with when trying to earn an incremental visit, time spent or transaction. The good news is that this is an addressable skill gap. When I interview B2B PMs looking to move to consumer, I look for strong product intuition - do they understand why the best consumer products and consumer product businesses today excel? Can they brainstorm how they would improve my product? Can they form creative hypotheses and rapidly provide perspective on who the likely customer for a product would be and why? These behaviors (alongside all the core must have's of a great PM -strategic and analytic thinking, communication, leadership, and more) demonstate that a B2B PM could make the jump. If a B2B PM is interested in switching, I'd encourage them to spend time studying consumer products - analyze them, tear them down and try to back into why certain things are being built. Spend time thinking about your own product choices and how you'd like to see the products improve. This practice will enable you to demonstrate that while you may not have worked with this customer before - you a foundation to quickly get up to speed.

There are only particular instances when, in my experience, it can make sense to have multiple product managers within a team. If your engineering structure is a squad/pod model where there is a dedicated set of engineers along on a core mission with clear ownership, I would most typically have 1 dedicated PM to this team. Instances where you could consider adding a second PM include: * Wanting to train another person in a specific area so there is an opportunity for future transition. The addition of the 2nd PM would be temporary and often someone more junior to the existing PM working on the team * Where there is a very large team and a Principal or very Senior PM working with them, it's a great opportunity to upskill an Associate PM or early career PM. They can own specific features or projects within the broader scope of what the team is doing, get mentorship from the PM and provide the team with more help. Typically this would also be a temporary situation. * A similar situation is where you have 1 PM working across two teams that are working on related missions - for example a search experience team and a search infrastructure team OR an Android app team and iOS app team. In these cases, a second PM can help with many of the more execution-related streams of work, but ensure there is still strong coordination and a single strategy at work. * There is a brand new project or feature that the team will be working on that is very different from what they've done so far. A second PM with expertise in this type of work, more familiarity with the customer problem, business need, or other engineering teams involved could be a good choice to work with the team on this specific project

PM to engineer ratios can range wildly from 1 PM to every 2-3 engineers to something 1 PM to 15 engineers. This largely depends on the size of the company and the type of product. In a more entertainment context, like a gaming start-up, you might have leaner engineering teams with more PMs to develop the ideas and concepts for all of the experiences. In a scaled big tech company you might require many engineers and teams to work across all the platforms involved, so the ratio of a PM and product initiative to engineers might be 1:10 or more. That said, the most typical ratios I have seen are 1:5. More technical the teams and products will tend to have fewer PMs and the more customer facing and experience oriented the product will tend to have more PMs

I would work on doing both. When you start out in a new role it's important to get quickly up to speed, create a plan and start adding value. Most likely you'll see many opportunities to make things better now that are a light lift. So, I would add these best practices (could be simple things like getting a new tool, email updates, adding a new ceremony to the team), while you figure out the ideal team composition and start filling those roles. A potential way to think about this might be to pick several best practices you can embed in the first 3-6 months and start on those while you work on hiring and building the team. Do that in parallel and hopefully within those 6 months you'll have some new additional people you can work with on this.

This can be a challenging situation as there are many places the 1-2 PMs could add value. I would recommend taking two filters to the workload. First, categorize the priority of the existing multiple products across the three horizons: * Horizon 1: Strong current drivers of value that need to be actively maintained, but are not expected to drive future growth * Horizon 2: High-potential products that are expected to grow in impact over time through more investment * Horizon 3: Emerging products that could one day drive significant value, but currently have a limited contribution Then, based on the skills and interests of the current PMs assign their capacity against these tiers. An initial allocation of all the PM capacity might look something like: * 70% Horizon 1 * 20% Horizon 2 * 10% Horizon 3 As the PMs are able to spend time on the Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 areas, they will mature and show progress and build a more compelling case. The capacity could then shift to something like 50/30/20 through the addition of more PMs.

This varies a lot based on the size and stage of the company - so it's important to think about: * Which audiences you want to communicate updates to * What level of detail each audience needs * What frequency each audience needs * What existing mechanisms and forums exist where you can make these happen Once you do this analysis, I would recommend starting with the most detailed and frequent need (perhaps it is to the other teams in your pillar who need good detail every week). Then use this to create the content for the other audiences and forums. You can then build a communication calendar that might look something like: * Weekly updates to the pillar via email * Monthly updates to the full group as a segment in the group all hands * Quarterly updates to executives and full company via a memo and company all hands presentation