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Decoding Product Led Companies Insight

Welcome to our Product Newsletter, a biweekly email highlighting top discussions, and learning resources for product managers.

What We Will Cover In This Edition:-

Top Discussions: 

1) How to gauge if a company is Product led?

2) How do you store insights, feedback and ideas from various sources?

3) Truly exceptional PMs

Top Learning Resources:

1. What is good retention?

2. Drive growth by picking the right lane

3. SQL fir beginners

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Top Discussions

Question 1) How to gauge if a company is Product led?

Before I proceed any further, let me explain what I mean by “Product led” in this context. In very simple terms, at a product led company, Product Managers make (most of) the decisions that influence company strategy.

After being in this role for a few years, my hypothesis is that PM growth is much better at Product led companies as opposed to companies where product plays a support/ consulting role. Growth here refers to growth in PM skills, a path to leadership positions, and exit opportunities.

That brings me to my question – While researching a company, how does one find out if its product led? Sometimes it’s obvious but often it’s not evident when you are viewing from the outside

Here are a few techniques I have been using to figure this out. Would really appreciate feedback on the techniques and any additional pointers!!

1. Understand what’s the core product of the company

If the core product is not the consumer-facing digital product, the company is likely not Product led. For example, the mobile app is not the core product for an insurance provider like Anthem. It’s the insurance plan and partnerships. A PM here will no doubt influence metrics but will never drive strategy.

2. Talk to PMs working in the company

A few questions I have tried asking are:

  • What part does product play in setting the roadmap/ vision in the company?
  • Does the Product team own outcomes or only features?
  • What job family holds most of the leadership positions at the company?
  • Do they have a chief product person?

What else could one use to identify product led organizations?

Also, if you are aware of any companies (small/ medium/big) which are truly product led and have a good Product culture, please mention them in the comments! I’m looking to jump ship and this info would be really helpful.

Thank You!!

– Cathryn Cui

Discussion

A] Ask the PMs and your hiring manager something like this:

  • What was a feature you didn’t ship and how did you decide not to do it?
  • What was the most recent feature you shipped and how did you decide to do it?

Pay attention to how concrete their answer is or whether it’s high-level fluffy bullshit.

Says a lot about who actually gets to make decisions and how data-driven the org really is.

– Angela Blue

B] I think your definition of a product led company needs some work. I think product led is mostly talked about in the form of product led growth as a go to market strategy. This as opposed to a sales led growth for example.

I don’t think product managers should be making company strategy, I think they should be in charge of executing the strategy as it pertains to their product or portfolio of products. It feels a bit like the tail wagging the dog the way you phrased that.

As to your questions, what makes you think product management principles can’t be applied to a non-digital product? What if the chief product persona is the CEO/founder? I’ve seen that in a lot of companies that are still growing the technical founder will still do a lot of product management function.

I also think you should keep in mind a good product culture isn’t the same as product led. Meta is known for a very good solid product culture, same for places like Netflix and Uber. I don’t think they’re product led, certainly not by your definition. I think having a good product culture is what you’re truly asking about here. And be wary of product managers in name only at companies but also the opposite. A technical program manager in many places I know is a product manager by another name.

– Naomin Wosu

C]Been in this sink hole. What I did (two diff startups same result – one was complete rebuild) was get the key stakeholders included in the build journey so they “get/understand” how software is built iteratively – effectively becoming my champions/defenders. How I did this: got them to agree overall scope and roughly what was going to come each iteration (yep scope was tough) but crucially I got them to come to our show&tell i.e. demos to see what was ready for use practically based on each iteration scope and where we also covered briefly other items/prod issues delivered in that same iteration.

The number of times they said things like “wow I didn’t know it took that long to do that or hmm and you guys dealt with that prod issue too; amazing etc.” stunned me too in the 1st startup.

They just have no idea why things take the time it takes; how other issues can affect us, and I had to bring them – school them – in my world. It shocked me that some thought it should be easy for dev team to multitask i.e., work on X and also on Y same time cause that’s how it’s kind of done in their world.

I initially tried some of the stuff posted by others but no change, so I went the route described. May not work for you.

–  Marco Silva

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Question 2) How do you store insights, feedback and ideas from various sources?

I find myself taking notes in a notebook, capturing some stuff in spreadsheets, trello, miro, docs, etc.

I can’t find a way that works for me to capture these things in a way that makes it easy to review it later on and to keep adding to it.

The input comes from various sources, research, customer service, market insights, conversations with colleagues, etc.

Anyone have any methods or tools that can solve this problem?

– Joel Schulman

Discussion

A] Productboard, has integrations to bring feedback from sources like Slack, Intercom etc. plus ability to add manually (e.g. for interview notes) so sounds like it can cover what you mentioned and keep all that feedback in one place.

– Marco Silva

B] Yup. I tried a few different things and found productboard the best when I was dealing with a significant volume of input, mostly because there was more flexibility with the structure/relationship between the snippet of feedback or request or idea and the potential solution. Too many of those tools are built more to help you generate roadmaps, or prioritise feature requests (I’m on a personal mission to eradicate feature request voting anywhere I go) so it was difficult to store stuff first then join the dots later.

Productboard made that way easier and when it came time for someone to say “OK we’re going to go ahead and build something for this purpose” I’d be able to bring up a single view where I’d collected loads of feedback related to that thing that would help us start the conversation about further research or scoping.

Yes I sound gushy, but it really was a game changer for me.

– Rohit Kumar

C] The sooner you can get your notes out of internal, hard to share notes/docs/spreadsheets, the easier everything will be for you. My company uses confluence, and that works really well. When a challenge / limitation /opportunity / tradeoff etc. arises, we just document everything and share it internally via copying and pasting the url. For monitoring/transcribing meetings/interviews/partner meetings etc., platforms like dovetail and otter.ai are also worth looking into.

– Nathan Endicott

D] My experience of it went like this:

Say someone requests “Reporting” in your product. You get 500 votes for that. Great.

But what about all those votes for “Dashboard”? Did the people who added +1 for reporting mean what you imagine when you think of reporting? How is that different from a dashboard? How do you know how to scope the initial stab at it? You’re starting from zero when it comes to finding out what someone wants to achieve with this thing that they’ve asked you to build, so now you have to reach out to them all and say “hey when you asked for reporting, what did you mean?” and it turns out that half of them meant having a weekly email summary and the other half wanted a dashboard. Or better, half of them thought it sounded like it might solve an issue they are having that would actually be better served with a completely different kind of functionality.

It’s solution-led, it makes extra work for discovery, it gives a false sense of being quantitative data, and it means you end up deciding which feature is more important to build instead of which problem is more important to solve and basically discards most of the skills of the PM, designers and devs in coming up with the best solution to achieve a goal. It’s impossible to know if you can provide something with x amount of resources that actually fits the need because the need was described as a feature, not a need. You could easily miss out on building something that really hits the spot for a load of your customers because there isn’t an obvious and familiar solution to a need that they have. It’s also a recipe for having other teams point the finger at product for missing a sale or renewal or getting loads of tickets “because we need to build feature x” without taking into account any of the stuff I just explained.

Ultimately my problem isn’t with the voting. It’s with voting on features. If customers could vote on “which issue impacts me more” or “which problem is more important for me to solve” I’d be all over it

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Question 3) Truly exceptional PMs

Few years ago, I worked with a colleague that I consider to this day, is still one of the truly exceptional product managers that I’ve ever worked with in my 5-year career. The reason why I felt she was exceptional are as below:

  1. Excellent interpersonal skills: there was one time we were both seated in front of a director, and she asked about her daughter and family plans for Halloween, before we jumped into the topic. I also noticed she constantly makes it a point to say good morning to most colleagues & silently supporting their career growth.
  2. Incredible product smarts. She was silently chipping away at a possible feature idea for a few months before her departure, and unbeknownst to us, when she came to present her findings and solution, it was very convincing, capturing detailed use cases and showed a lot of stakeholder management interviews baked into place. It netted company 100% conversion for that product line. I think what was impressive is that she really demonstrated personal brand in leveraging her sources & her own background in marketing + PM to drive initiatives, usually with a very smooth leadership approval. Exceptional PMs always wins top decision makers over to take a chance on them, because they can prove value through big and small wins
  3. Risk taker: Despite the trajectory she could’ve gone on to become VP of product, she went to work for a startup, which then became unsuccessful, and she was vulnerable about her single parenthood. Despite that, she is now the Director of product in a fast-growing tech company. Never let setbacks pull you away from learning and growing – both self-growth & professionally.

So – I would love to hear from your professional experience of examples or traits that truly stands out in a colleague who is an exceptional PM or product leader!

– Richard Soneva

Discussion

A] Since I’ve moved from Engineering to the Product team, I had quite a few managers (Head of Product). I got to learn some valuable lessons from each of them as follows:

  1. First manager: TRUST – he had trust in my abilities despite my lack of self-esteem.
  2. Second manager: TRANSPARENCY – he challenged me to provide transparency over the initiatives I was taking care of. Although I interpreted this as a micro-management backdoor, in the end, after he left the company, I realized how helpful his guidance was.
  3. Third manager: EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE – I learned to challenge everything that seems impossible and remove all roadblocks.
  4. Current manager: VISION – this is the first manager who really seems to have a vision greater than all the others put together. Moreover, he does not avoid handling technical things and even coding, although he is 60+ years old.

– Mario Romero

B] The person that took a chance on me and brought me into the product ownership realm. I spent 3 years learning how a highly functional team works to churn through work and features.

  1. Partnership. Product and engineering are partners. No chickens vs. pigs. No “I” only “us” and “we”. That makes a huge difference.
  2. Recognition. No one went unrecognized for their contributions to anything the team did because everyone knew we were in it together. Any work shared by the PM in meetings that was done by another team member was always attributed properly.
  3. Accountability. He took the largest portion of the punishment from the executives above him when things didn’t go as planned. So much so, that when I’d mentioned we succeed as a team as much as we fail as a team, he’d almost fired me for saying that in an executive meeting. His reasoning was that we were better able to perform if we were shielded from most of the politics and that he as the leader of the team was more accountable to the execs. He sort of saw his team as his kids in that protective sense.
  4. Leadership. He’d practiced in leading by example and when the example was not taken, he’d coach on expectations. He’d take the lead on an initiative, get buy in from the team, have everyone pulling in the same direction, and then we’d crank through the work to get something to clients.

On a side note, good instincts were also a plus.

I love this post and thanks to OP (@RichardsonEva) for it. We really need to shout out positives when we can.

– Michael Yoffe

C] As the only product person in my first PM role, I’d have to say I really look up to myself, which can be tricky if you don’t have the right mirror. But I think I’m exceptional for the following reasons:

  1. My humility. Humility is everything.
  2. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but I’m SO humble.
  3. My insane bow-staff skills.
  4. My dashing good looks.

On a serious note, thanks for the post, it gives me a great list of things to aim for.

– Vlad Podpoly

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Top Learning Resources

What is good retention?

Although retention is widely considered to be the most important metric to get right when building (and investing in) a business, it’s also one of the least understood. Why? Because unless you’re a growth expert or an experienced investor, you’re often relying on anecdotes, dated blog posts, and misguided benchmarks. I ran into this problem myself many times when working with startups.

Drive growth by picking the right lane

Once you get to even moderate scale, each of these lanes becomes highly competitive. In the case of paid marketing and SEO, you are competing for a customer’s attention. Paid marketing becomes a business model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that they can bid more than anyone else for that attention), and SEO becomes a ranking algorithm competition (who can capitalize on their content in such a way that “deciders” like Google want to continue to send traffic their way).

SQL fir beginners

SQL stands for Structured Query Language, but that’s a misnomer; SQL isn’t actually a programming language like Javascript or Python. It’s a standard (like a blueprint) for how to query data, sort of like directions for building a language. Each database like PostgreSQL or MySQL has its own lil’ flavor of SQL, and that’s what’s more analogous to a language. So the specific syntax of how you write SQL depends on which database you’re using.

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