Producter Prodminds is an interview series featuring senior product managers, founders, and other individuals who provide insights into product management. Prodminds readers have the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge about product development, the product lifecycle, and the successful launch of products. Prodminds serves as a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn about product management and enhance their career.
Aspiring product managers and industry enthusiasts alike will find valuable insights as we explore the strategies employed by this seasoned leader to oversee the work of his team.
Listening to customer feedbacks is essential for B2B SaaS startups. Startups develop a problem-solving product by identifying customer needs. To activate all these processes, product managers use multiple feedback collection strategies.
Product Operations is a discipline that facilitates and increases the productivity of the product team by making product management and development processes easier.
Product backlogs can become overwhelming and disorganized, but creating future sprints and using divider tickets can help manage them. It's important to prioritize grooming and reviewing tickets and sync with the development team on backlog management preferences.
Strategy for measuring team workload in startups is to set clear goals and objectives for each team member. This includes defining specific tasks, deadlines, and deliverables for each team member.
Customers found it too hard to use and simply stopped coming back despite training and appreciating the problem the product was supposed to solve.
In all seriousness, it’s a great job but it’s often hard to feel you’re making an impact. I was a really strong individual contributor earlier in my career, and it took me a long time to let go of the fact that I wasn’t being measured on output anymore.
I believe the product-led growth strategy helps companies to taste the real-market much faster than traditional sales-led growth models. You can run agile experiments and learn the market dynamics more effectively. Also, fundamentally, buyer behavior is changing as well.
Product managers usually tend to satisfy power users’ needs because these users are more vocal and send emails to customer support more often.
I believe if you’ve understood the problem well, then building the right product is just one step away. And understanding the problem well is only possible by closely listening to the customers.
In my definition, a product-led company is a company where everyone believes they support the product directly. This includes teams like Finance or People Ops, which are typically considered “far away” from product development.
Communication skills are a given with almost any role, but it is the ability to listen - really listen, to what is being said by users, customers, sales teams, about what they want from a product.
Managing internal stakeholders begins with prioritization (like so many topics in product management). Since PMs have an essentially unmanageable number of stakeholders, it’s critical to know at any given time which ones can make the biggest contribution to the success of a product.
Successful products attract rapid growth in usage and it can be a huge challenge to keep up with performance, availability, and security demands.
A key to master the art of being compelling as a PM is to focus on both the “substance” of your argument and the “style” of the argument, particularly as it relates to the target audience and key stakeholders we are trying to convince.
