Kaustubh "KV" Vibhute

Mistakes that I make as a #ProductManagement mentor/ leader Mistake 4: Focussing to mentor only on the hard skills- problem structuring, product discovery and prioritisation. And not mentoring on the soft skills like relationship building, proactive communication and messaging for different stakeholders to build trust and credibility in the system.

41

 Some great thoughts here by Apoorva Mishra. Particularly the point on frameworks being “supplements, not substitutes"... Worth a quick look for anyone in product development!

4

A great breakdown and visual representation of the four pillars of product management (from a Reforge POV). I really agree with the commentary on how this should feed up to a balanced strategy. #productmanagement #strategy #theory

5

1 Comment

Product Managers, if you're seeking career growth insights, Lenny Rachitsky's recent podcast featuring Vikrama Dhiman is an absolute must-listen. Vikrama shares a valuable PM skill development framework, and immense wisdom and specificity on how to sharpen skills at every stage. While avoiding generational stereotypes, he definitely addresses what, I'd hazard, other leaders have noticed as a rising trend of young professionals seeking rapid career progression ahead of skill enhancement - and he does it with gracious & empathetic advice that is right on the money. For leaders aiming to mentor product managers effectively, this discussion is a goldmine too. Thanks Lenny and Vikrama for the thought-provoking dialogue #ProductManagement #CareerGrowth #LeadershipDevelopment

13

PM Stereotype #3: The Facilitator This person’s job is to run between managers, stakeholders, and team, collect everyone’s product ideas, then mediate some compromise. In practice good products are never “discovered” through consensus, so this is a massive waste of PM talent. The facilitator PM is powerless to make decisions, even if she understands the users, market, product and the business very well. Her ability to create a positive impact is very limited.

59

6 Comments

💡 Understanding Different Product Manager Roles 💡 One of the most common questions I get my interactions with aspiring Product Managers is, What are the different types or product managers and what do they look like? The first thing you need to understand is that not all PM roles are made the same, product management is a diverse field with specialized roles to fit various organizational needs. Here's a quick guide: 🚀 Growth/Outbound Product Manager: Focuses on driving user acquisition, retention, and monetization through data-driven strategies and experiments. These are commonly found in product lead growth companies such as #Airbnb, #Lyft etc. They work very closely with marketing, business development and are heavily outward focused. This category of PMs is also catching up in #Google, #Microsoft as well. 🔧 Technical Product Manager: Leverages a strong technical background to manage products requiring advanced technical knowledge, bridging the gap between engineering and business. These PMs are also external customer focused buy work equally if not more closely with engineering, and design teams than sales and marketing. The most distinct feature for me is that customers are also technical - IT, SWE as they most commonly own B2B SaaS/Cloud products such as #AWS, #Microsoft. 🛠️ Platform Product Manager: Manages underlying technology platforms, ensuring they meet the needs of various applications and services, balancing technical requirements and business objectives. They own platforms that enable the external customer products within the company, and their customers are internal product , developer teams. They share the deep technical knowledge as Technical PMs. Very common in multi product technology companies . #Netflix, #Uber are a great example of these and have strong platform PM teams. Explore more about these roles and their impact in this article by Product School here. https://lnkd.in/gKXsTrHp If you want to break into product management or want career guidance in high-tech, post MBA do reach out to me here - #productmanagement #career #Technology

18

🚀 Excited to share insights on what it takes to excel as a Product Manager! 🌟 In today's fast-paced tech landscape, the role of a Product Manager has never been more crucial. Here are some key attributes that I believe contribute to being an effective PM: 1)Visionary Leadership: A good PM is a visionary who can articulate a compelling product vision and inspire their team to work towards it. They're not just managing tasks; they're steering the ship towards a brighter future. 2) Empathy & User-Centricity: Understanding the needs and pain points of users is paramount. Empathizing with your users allows you to create products that truly resonate and solve real-world problems. 3) Strategic Thinking: Balancing short-term goals with long-term strategy is a delicate dance. A successful PM can see the big picture, anticipate market trends, and make strategic decisions that drive the product forward. 4) Effective Communication: Clear and concise communication is key to aligning cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Whether it's crafting a roadmap or presenting a product demo, communication skills are non-negotiable. 5) Adaptability & Agility: In a constantly evolving environment, adaptability is crucial. Being able to pivot quickly in response to feedback or market changes can mean the difference between success and failure. 6) Data-Driven Decision Making: Data should be the compass that guides your product decisions. A good PM knows how to leverage data insights to validate assumptions, prioritize features, and optimize product performance. 7) Collaborative Spirit: Building great products is a team sport. Collaboration across engineering, design, marketing, and beyond is essential for delivering exceptional user experiences. 8) Resilience & Grit: Product management is not without its challenges and setbacks. A resilient PM perseveres in the face of adversity, learns from failures, and uses setbacks as opportunities for growth. 9) Continuous Learning: The tech industry is always evolving, and so should you. Staying curious, seeking out learning opportunities, and keeping abreast of industry trends are essential for staying ahead of the curve. 10) Passion for the Product: Last but certainly not least, a genuine passion for the product you're building is what fuels your drive and commitment. It's what gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going when the going gets tough. Being a Product Manager is both an art and a science. It requires a unique blend of skills, mindset, and personality traits. But for those who are up to the challenge, the rewards are endless. Here's to all the passionate PMs out there shaping the future of technology, one product at a time! 💼💡 #ProductManagement #Tech #Leadership #Innovation"

39

1 Comment

If you are looking for a simple process to land that amazing new role in product, and quickly level up when you get there....grab a copy of my ebook: Land a New Role and Step into Leadership in Product Be sure to grab a copy. This simple approach will help you LAND an amazing role in product. Comment LAND, and I’ll send you a link to the playbook! #productmanagement #productmanagers

2

4 Comments

Are You Wasting Your First 30 Days as a PM in 1-1s? 🔍 The conventional wisdom says you should spend your first month setting 1:1s with your team, understanding the business model, and building rapport with engineering. While those are all important, the highest leverage activity is not relationship building (it will build over time in any case) but creating a visual map of your product's customer journey. This may sound basic, but you'll likely find that stakeholders have conflicting assumptions and interpretations of how customers interact with your product. 👁️ Marketing sees one journey, support sees another, engineering yet another. This misalignment often goes undetected. Within your first 30 days, use tools like Figma, Canva, or Lucid to sketch the customer journey. In your 1:1s, ask stakeholders to describe their version of the journey. Highlight areas where there is disagreement or confusion. 🤝 Then bring the key players together to align on the true journey. With an AI assistant like ChatGPT, you can even get suggestions on the right way to address potential misalignments. A shared understanding of the customer journey is like having a map for your product road trip. Without it, your users will get lost and frustrated. Don't expect customers to clearly articulate their needs either. Like a cat knocking over a vase, their behaviors often don't tell the whole story. 🔍 Dig deeper into the Jobs To Be Done—the underlying motivations driving customer behaviors. In your first month, resist the temptation to make quick changes. Your highest leverage task is bringing alignment across the org on the true customer journey. With that foundation in place, your product efforts will gain tremendous speed and clarity going forward. Your stakeholders will appreciate you taking the time to build this understanding. 🙌 Not because you did the work but because many misconceptions and assumptions get removed for your stakeholders themselves. #ProductManagement #CustomerJourney #StakeholderAlignment #JobsToBeDone #ProductLeadership

5

1 Comment

Mistakes that I make as a #ProductManagement Mentor/Leader Mistake 5: Assuming that enabling means setting the org structure and adding sufficient people for a cross functional product team to function well. And not setting up the team for success by ensuring that the respective people are also mission-aligned to the common goal (with the necessary strategic context) and are empowered to function collaboratively and autonomously without much functional conflict.

33

2 Comments

***How to actually be a data driven product manager? Well if you are are the kind of PM who only looks at data supplied by your analyst in excel and has never documented a deliberate instrumentation section in your PRDs and has never logged in into your web analytics tool but love to proclaim yourself as a data driven PM, well let me peel the layers a bit*** 1. Let's start simple - first step is understand some basic nuances of data that you are seeing - let's say you are looking at conversion data - some simple questions you could ask yourself - Is it visit level or visitor level data, does it make sense to look at this data at this level, what do the attribution windows look like? Default attribution is ok or should you look at longer term attribution. 2. If the data feels off, do you have the ability to look under the hood and know whether it is due to an incorrect instrumentation problem or due to incorrect segmentation strategy - eg some segments applied at visits level, some at page views level. Hint - segmentation should generally be applied at same granularity. 3. When you are asking for more granular data - know what is feasible and what is not. Eg. if as a PM while launching the product you never bothered to instrument price buckets for devices on key events - then expecting your analyst to supply you conversion data for high end vs low end devices is foolhardy. Sure, he could first pull out the data by different device models and then manually bucket them but he is just paying extra tax for your own sloppy work. If you were planning to do this analysis from get go you should have built it into your instrumentation strategy. 4. Which brings me to a very important point always be very very deliberate and clear about your instrumentation plan- events and dimensions and make it part of your PRD. 5. Finally, you need to know the right tracking strategy for the problem at hand. Eg. if you want to know conversion of users who click on filters in the funnel, what should your tracking implementation be? Do you think if you track the click info in a page level variable as normally click data is tracked, you will be able to find the conversion? I hope you will do this in the future before loudly and proudly proclaiming yourself as a world class data driven PM. Let’s stop BS-ing shall we? Follow me for high quality content, not product philosophy but practical insights - https://lnkd.in/gHweK_q7 AND also here https://lnkd.in/ggUKftFq While you are at it you can also grab my product assignments playbook, 19 real product cases, all successful submissions, real job offers, ~258 pages of content. ***Grab it now**** - https://lnkd.in/gHzyN-Xc #product #datadriven #analytics

48

What makes a Product Manager great? 1. Great PMs consistently and singularly improve the company’s trajectory. 2. Great PMs are masters of the art of blending quantitative and qualitative inputs, as warranted by each individual situation. 3. Great PMs become the worldwide experts in their domain. When new to a domain, great PMs bootstrap this process by seeking the counsel of existing worldwide experts. 4. Great PMs are diligent about using a variety of user research methods to inform what product to build in the first place. 5. Great PMs also listen to what isn’t said [by customers] and anticipate where the industry overall is headed when developing their product hypothesis. 6. Great PMs know that buy-in isn’t enough; you need passion & ownership to build great products. Great PMs facilitate discussions that get the entire team to come up with creative product ideas. 7. Great PMs understand task leverage and spend the majority of their time on the highest-leverage tasks for the company. 8. Great PMs, in the rare instances of product failure, improve not just their own approach but they also share the lessons learned with the broader company. 9. Great PMs are adaptive—they have a wide repertoire [of tools and processes and workflows] that they expertly tweak for each specific team’s needs. 10. Great PMs are outstanding problem preventers. Great PMs are discerning about which problems to prevent, which problems to solve, and which problems not to solve. 11. Great PMs edit the company’s product ethos—they identify the unintended flaws in the principles, fix the flawed parts—and only then follow & espouse it. 12. Great PMs know that career ladders are imperfect proxies: they’re more fixated on tangible competence & impact than on checking off boxes on the ladder. 13. Great PMs also learn through work projects, but they learn a lot more about their craft in their personal time because of their curiosity & passion for self-improvement. 14. Great PMs ultimately decide what’s best for users & the business. 15. Great PMs ensure the product strategy is optimal. 16. Great PMs work hard but are rarely overwhelmed. https://lnkd.in/gffB5NB7

1

Layoffs are never good for any team, but they tend to impact product management groups very differently. Suddenly, the folks who are left standing are asked to pick up all the initiatives, strategic partners, work-in-flight, responsibilities, and knowledge of the just departed PM teammates. Often this request is compounded by asks to pick up additional scope, responsibilities, or areas of focus from other teams that may have also gone through a downsizing. My advice for folks who find themselves handed a wave of new responsibilities: - Review the full set of area roles and responsibilities that they now face. - Highlight the gaps and blind spots that management may have missed. - Create a list of strategically important work and relationships. - Ask for clarity on the new expectations and areas of ownership. - Clearly state the work that won't get done vs the areas that will be done. Use the shift in the business climate to clean up the definition of and pathways to success. Don't just assume all the work and projects, have a real discussion about what work matters and what resources are needed to get it done. #productmanagement #layoffs #responsibilities

10

I want to hear a product story you're passionate about. (Edit for the Monday morning crew: the reaction to this post has been incredible. If you have PMs in your network who have amazing stories, I would appreciate a repost to reach them!) As a product manager, I know it can be hard to describe what we do to those around us. Our work often involves mountains of coded language, company and industry vernacular, and a variety of tasks and processes that can make it hard to describe. Yet, I love telling stories about products I've worked on. I can't be the only one, so I want to create a space for others to tell their stories in their own words. Let me be your audience. Any aspect of PMing is welcome. Your story could be prepared and practiced, or it could be the first time you've spoken it out loud. It could be about how you broke into product after years of trying, or accidentally stumbled your way in. Tell me about the thing you worked really hard on and you're proud to have launched. Give me way too much detail about how your users surprised you once your work was out in the world. I will listen to you vent about the nightmare stakeholder who almost torpedoed the entire thing, or lament the feature you've always wanted to launch, but have never successfully made the case for. I want to be clear: I'm doing this for fun. This is not an interview. I'm not going to come in with a set of prepared questions. Once you get going, I won't interrupt you. This is 30 free minutes to tell your story to someone who understands. And since it's just me on the receiving end, it's more talking to a friend than public speaking. I'm planning to record the audio of these sessions, but feel free to ask me not to. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but I promise I won't start a podcast. PMs in my network: feel free to book a time (or, you know, text me, you probably have my number). I would also appreciate if you could share or repost this to widen its reach. Click the link below to book a time to tell me your story. https://lnkd.in/d6hwuQJ6

20

Mistakes that I make as a #ProductManagement mentor/leader Mistake #10 Asking my mentees to pick up a problem/ project with urgency And not giving them the necessary context on the reason for urgency and helping them with re-prioritisation of the items currently in progress.

43

1 Comment

"A product roadmap is like a treasure map for pirates... except the X usually marks the spot where your initial launch date went to die." - Author Unknown #productmanagement #productmanager #productdiscovery #userresearch #customerneeds #problemsolving #innovation #humor #marketing #development #productlaunch #entrepreneur #customercentric #MVP #agile #ux #designthinking #learnontiktok #startups

2

Gain insights on how to better manage your PM career by doing your own self-paced masterclass by watching these videos from Shreyas Doshi. There are already 96 videos on various topics. https://lnkd.in/gJjYkWkC

16

1 Comment

The no. 1 way to grow in your career as a Product Manager is not by getting assigned “strategic” projects. You must create those opportunities yourself. Experienced PMs know that strategic work is seldom given. Instead, you must create it and lead it. How? 1. Become the expert on an overlooked problem space. 2. Diagnose the issue with the highest ROI. 3. Propose and lead incremental efforts to make measurable progress. Find opportunities and you will never run out of strategic work. Wait to be assigned one and you will never grow. 🔥Check out my free course for strategies to land an awesome PM job ➡️ arijanover.com

31

5 Comments

Product Leaders - what do you do when you can’t say no? (and want to keep your job!). One of the critical jobs of a product person is to manage the flow of requests coming into the team. Of course, all these ideas come with stakeholder expectations too. This means we’re not going to be able to deliver every request. How you deal with that will be very dependant on the maturity of the product model at your company. In a mature product operating model, this might look like: 🎯 Refocus back to the agreed outcomes 🏢 Alignment check with the product strategy ✅ Evaluation of the expected value v’s existing ideas 👩‍🔬 Targeted experimentation But what if these processes aren’t yet established within your organisation? You have feature requests coming out of your ears. Your stakeholders are demanding and expect more than is humanly possible. Some things that can help include: 🔀 Remind and refocus back to higher value delivering work in the short term 🕰 Get the timing for discussion right. You can’t logic your way through emotion. Carefully pick your timing for when your stakeholder is less emotionally focussed on that idea. 🔐 Consider running some discovery work in stealth. This will give you the results to showcase and get buy-in. Sometimes you have to build the wrong thing for the right reasons. Delivering that feature is a short term pain for a long term gain if it lets you build trust and influence. Use discovery as best you can to steer the feature into a better direction and maximise work not done. Want a friendly face to bounce ideas with whilst working through these challenges? DM me for a chat about mentoring and coaching.

26

2 Comments