The most valuable skills that you can learn in an internship?
What goes into developing a product outside of coming up with an idea and building it? Hint - there are lots of answers.
Learn how to structure your thinking. Many creative people are able to explode forth with creative ideas. Coming up with a meaningful and communicable structure for those ideas is at least as important as coming up with them in the first place.
How to pitch an idea, and how to tell a good idea from a bad one. What makes an idea stick? What makes a project succeed or fail aside from the capabilities of the individuals that are involved?
What could an intern or newly hired Product Manager do to add value as quickly as possible?
Domain: within first few weeks, try to find a project with measurable impact you want to deliver on over the course of your internship. Then make sure that you execute on it.
Skills: each product management opportunity is different, but functionally, they’re typically design (information architecture, UX, or graphic design), development/spec’ing (detail-orientation, learning to work with engineering, etc), or project management (ticketing, prioritization, etc). Make sure that you leave the internship having built some of these skills.
For valuable skills, I would say:
Prioritization: This is hard as a PM. With limited resources and a backlog of projects, you need to make sure you identify the highest-impact projects to work on. Your choice of prioritization impacts everything: what gets built, how the rest of the product is affected, the morale of the teams working on the feature. You should be using data, user research, product vision, and an understanding of engineering costs to help prioritize features.
Vision: Anyone can come in and suggest we move a pixel here and a pixel there. Where do you see the product going in three to five years? What about the product today is being missed by our users? How do we turn a moderately successful app into a sensation?
Analytics: PMs today need to be data-informed. You should be looking at how people use your product and generating ideas there (in addition to more green-field brainstorming). You want to empower the engineering team. 15 You should be measuring the performance of features rigorously and only releasing what does well and killing what doesn’t.
What are some mental models you use to view the quality of a product? In other words, what are the criteria you use for judging how successful a product is?
At a high level, I ask myself: “What is the user’s goal?” and “How hard does this product make it to accomplish that goal?” It shouldn’t be that hard to get done what you need to get done as a user. If it’s Airbnb, it should be easy to book a good place to stay. If you’re Uber, it should be easy to get a black car fast. If you’re Google Search, it should be easy to find the right information.
From a metrics standpoint, you can also measure a product by the following: 1. Retention: But also understanding the nuances within retention (e.g. one day vs. seven days vs. six months). 2. Engagement: Level of interaction and the durations that people are on Yammer. 3. Virality: How many new users are our current users inviting and converting.
What are the metrics you use in measuring your own success? Which ones are the highest priority, and why?
Quality of relationships with peers.
Regularity of high-quality product releases.
General organization on a day to day basis.
What are some of your responsibilities as a Product Manager at Twitter?
I mentioned earlier that organization, communication, and thought leadership are great skills to develop. These are some of the cornerstone responsibilities of a PM at Twitter.
Diligence is another responsibility of every PM. The product you build is a reflection of you and the effort you put into it. That means being honest (and sometimes critical) with yourself, The buck stops with you. PAUL ROSANIA 42 your team and your work. A good PM wants to do what’s right, even when it hurts. That means doing homework and proving to yourself and others that your product is as good as you think it is, and your vision is ‘correct’.
For me, this level of diligence was unnatural at first. There’s so much stuff that happens each day that your memory gets overloaded easily. I quickly realized I had to stop trying to keep everything in my head. I had a couple instances where I forgot to do something I’d been asked to do, or where I stepped into a meeting and realized I hadn’t planned out what I was going to say as much as I thought.
Nowadays I write everything down immediately, even if I plan to do it right away. For simple tasks, I use Things.app on my Mac. When I meet with someone, I jot down notes in Evernote as we talk. As a result, I never forget to do things, and I never forget conversations with team members. When I have product ideas I jot them into a running Google Doc for the project. This system frees my mind from remembering things, and lets me concentrate on organizing and planning without wasted cycles trying to remember things.
I also find that writing helps me keep myself honest: sometimes an idea that seems crisp in your head is hard to explain in prose. That’s a sign your thinking isn’t yet complete.
One last thing I want to say is that as a PM, you don’t have a ton of control or flexibility over your own time. You’re often at the beck-and-call of meetings, email and questions from other people. It’s tempting to fight back, but these obstacles are actually a part of the job. Be honest about whether each meeting is important, but also realize that by having distraction-filled days, you’re clearing distractions from your team. (And sometimes these meetings help you collect information that keeps you alters your roadmap and keeps you focused on the right goals, which saves time in the long run.)
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to block off time to do long-term thinking. I put one-to-two hour blocks on my calendar a few days a week when I’m busy, to make sure I have time to think. You need time to synthesize your thoughts, and if you don’t reserve that time other people will take it from you.
From your experience at Bridgespan, what were some of the most valuable things you learned about succeeding as a Product Manager?
Avoid “nice-to-haves”: As a PM, part of your job to make sure that the team is and feels like they are using their limited time efficiently. This means avoiding workstreams that are “nice-to-have’s” that won’t necessarily change the the “answer” or the direction of the product. Understanding what is a “nice-to-have” requires going through the hypotheticals. If a proposed piece of work could lead to “X” or “Y” results, but we also know that regardless of “X” or “Y” result, we’d still do “Z”, then that research might not be worth the time. It doesn’t change the answer. But you have to weigh the pros and cons and balance efficiency with efficacy. Sometimes a workstream might not immediately impact a product in the short run, but could build knowledge that will be useful down-the-line, or it could be a way to satisfy the team’s intellectual curiosity. So its not always cut and dry. There are tradeoffs.
Influence without authority: This is a key part of being a Product Manager, and is admittedly a very difficult thing to learn how to do well. As a PM you are coordinating a team of peers. You are working with other cross-functionals in the organization who might not LAYLA AMJADI A PM works with a team to decide what a puzzle will assemble to look like when it’s completed. 48 even have a time allocation for your product. You’re not the boss. But, you are responsible for executing the vision. So how do you navigate this? When I was working on the Give Smart video project, this happened very naturally (it’s important to be genuine) but I built very strong, one-on-one relationships with each of my teammates on the project and throughout the organization. I came to understand how important the project was for the person given all the other work they have going on. You have to remember, just because you are working 100% on something, doesn’t mean everyone else is. So you have to understand the full set of projects someone has on their plate so you can help them prioritize. I came to understand their likes, dislikes, what motivates them, what frustrates them. Having a really comprehensive understanding of the “John the whole person / professional” not just “John the PR expert I need something from” is the only way to be successful in “Influencing Without Authority.” You can’t just think about what’s in it for you all the time. What’s in it for them? What do they need? What do they want to learn? Having this mindset is key to being successful in a working relationship where the person you need something from doesn’t have to do it.
Overinvest in communication: Whenever I join a new team, I overinvest in communication at the beginning. This isn’t because I’m trying to micromanage the situation. It’s because I’m trying to sync up our brains. I want to understand my team member’s thought processes, biases, values, and expertise. I want to get to a point where I can anticipate what each team member’s stance would be on a particular decision or what area of the decision they would definitely want to weigh in on. I get to this point by constantly asking “Why?” This way, I can understand their points-of-view and if they happen to not be in the room at some decision-point, I can still represent their thoughts and advocate for them. This does two things -- it builds trust between me and my teammates, and at the same time it increases efficiency on the backend. Trust amongst teammates, I believe, leads to faster, better results. To illustrate, if John is going into a meeting with Jen about X decision, and I know John knows how I think and the calls I’d make, I don’t need to be in the meeting, and I can repurpose my time in a way that would better benefit the team’s needs.
In your opinion, what does it mean for a PM to be analytically skilled?
Given a problem, can they (a) understand the problem? Can they (b) ask questions that have simple data answers that lead you down the path of being able to solve that problem? (That includes asking for simple metrics, quick metrics.) And finally, can they (c) generate a clear hypothesis beforehand?
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