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Product Management Challenges & Interview Tracking Analytics

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) Stakeholders want feature parity and shorter deadlines. How to handle them?

2) Is keeping track of customer interviews complicated?

3) What is everyone using for product analytics?

Top Learning Resources:

1. What’s DevOps?

2. How to become a peak Product Managers

3. SQL fir beginners

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Top Discussions

Question 1) Stakeholders want feature parity and shorter deadlines. How to handle them?

I am a Product Manager for the next generation software to decommission an old product. Now the stakeholders- mainly sales and marketing – are jumping up and down and they escalate because they never listened to the fact that I told them we have a v1 and then a v2 and lots of scalability issues. They don’t really understand Product and they keep pushing of course as they want to sell more licenses.

My two issues are:

  • Priority: I told my management that if we want to prioritize this huge development we would need to deprioritize or add resources.
  • Feature parity: I am not going to just copy and paste a 10-year-old software without clearly seeing the value or getting usage data.

Now I am getting more and more as the bad cop in that company, and I think I am also just not yet good enough at stakeholder management. What can I do? Get detailed estimation for all of their features wishes? Create my own roadmap and vision? Get signed off commitments? Other idea?

– Yuri Roman

Discussion

A] This is a super tough situation. Some companies just can’t handle how expensive software is. They want it now and want it to have no impact on the roadmap.

The only thing I would do, which you may well have already tried, is working through a few key use cases, getting engineering across it and getting some high confidence estimates. Or walking through the effort of recent deliverables. Or getting estimates for a full rebuild.

I’d then focus on getting some people across how big things truly are and convince them that a full rebuild just doesn’t make sense. If you can get a base of supporters on side you can have alignment cascade up or down from there.

But I won’t pretend that it’s easy or even possible, it depends.

– Naomin Wosu

B] I just inherited a product in this same situation, spent the last 4 yrs building net new and it’s still not quite ready for prime time. Meanwhile the old solution hasn’t been updated in several years so it’s way behind competitors. Everyone’s out of patience, not been a fun for a few months.

It sounds like your instincts are good, but you also have to face reality that company can’t take a couple years off while solution is rebuilt. How long is the v2 build estimated to take?

As another comment said, people outside of it day to day rarely understand how long it takes and how expensive it is to build software.

Is it your idea to rebuild, do you really have to rebuild or is there another path? You’re going to need massive buy-in from leadership across the company to do a full rebuild and lots of patience. All the way to the CEO really, or you’re in for a really challenging project.

– Marco Silva

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.

–  Richard Soneva

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Question 2) Is keeping track of customer interviews complicated?

Hey, I’m relatively new to the role & am the first PM at the company, so I am setting up the structures as well as running them. There has never been any customer engagement & I’ve started doing customer interviews, which is absolutely awesome & revealing so much! But I’m finding it hard to remember to follow up efficiently or schedule future contact at a regular cadence to keep the conversation going. It’s all a bit hit & miss & disorganized! Any advice on tools or techniques to use to help this would be very much appreciated!

– Natalie Smith

Discussion

A] I tend to go with a goal and hence related questions to customer interviews. I also use otter.ai to record and transcribe interviews. That way I am not distracted by note taking plus it’s so easy to go through the transcript and highlight information later (Otter.ai is awesome). Then I would create categories of information for example – User goals, user challenges, user wishes. Overtime patterns will emerge that can become ideas. Add those ideas to idea backlog that will eventually be reviewed for product roadmap.

– Donovan O’Kang

B] With the GDPR and other high-privacy user concerns in my segment of the market, I pushed through the formal initiative that if we don’t have a wide disclaimer of privacy policy acceptance by participants, we don’t send interviews to transcription services, automated or not, doing them internally instead. We also provide a detailed disclaimer as to how we don’t link any personally identifiable information to the interview data and delete the audio after doing the transcript.

Something to consider, it’s not just Facebook that loses confidential files.

– Marco Silva

C] Setup a clear process you follow. For example, interview > notes > review and key learnings > decisions. Productboard can help you capture those notes and the insights from them but sounds like your issue is more of a process one. I’ve done this simply with a calendar for interviews and tasks/reminders for followup. Calendar you can book regular times or recurring meetings and keeps it easy. You can also farm some of this out to an assistant or member of your team to help.

– Felipe Ribeiro

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Question 3) What is everyone using for product analytics?

What is everyone using for their tech stack, specifically for product analytics?

Has anyone used Amplitude?

– Natasha Martin

Discussion

A] I’ve used Amplitude. Also familiar with Segment, Mixpanel, Braze, Appcues, Braze. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat directly.

Re: Amplitude, great as a starting point for behavioral analytics of your users. No matter what, I still find that I go back and forth between direct querying against our data warehouse, Amplitude and Cognos Analytics (BI tools).

– Donovan O’Kang

B] You mean on Taxonomy? So… You need to consider what exactly you are trying to event. And then we had to understand that the structure we would use will be a) used by business users, not just PMs and engineers and b) by people long after we are gone. So instead of calling an event something like: CFlow – CNCL Comp; we went with more readable CancelFlow – Cancel Complete.

I know it sounds really self-explanatory; but it’s something we are glad we took extra time to go through. And we worked with the Amplitude success team on this… They were great to work with.

– Felipe Ribeiro

C] Your data schema also impacts post-instrumentation data analysis depending on whether your data is spread out across multiple tables in your data schema, or your data is all housed in one massive table. Out of the box tools like Amplitude typically have expectations/limitations of how they expect your data schema to be. For us, we instrumented so our events were grouped by components with rich sets of properties.

This makes direct querying easier and faster, but we hit snags in Amplitude with some analyses like Pathfinder and Personas not being able to drill down to the level of detail we needed to leverage that amplitude analysis…

– Donovan O’Kang

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Top Learning Resources

What’s DevOps?

When a team of engineers builds an application, it’s just a bunch of code. And that code needs to run somewhere for users to access it and get value out of it. During development, developers tend to run that code on their personal computers, but that’s obviously not scalable – so when they’re ready to share the software with the world, they’ll put that code on big powerful servers, and let people access it via a domain name.

How to become a peak Product Manager

This analogy resonates even more today. Product Management is a fluid, connective role. It is highly demanding and varies considerably by the situation and from company to company.

The best PMs — the peak product managers — don’t just ship features. They do whatever it takes to deliver valuable outcomes for their users, their team, and their company. They do whatever it takes to deliver business impact.

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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