Hi all, can someone please explain what is the hierarchy of a PM after getting the role and where does one reach with almost 5-10 years of experience in the field?
– Shiya Oliu
Discussion
A] It feels like the PM role is the new investment banking job after an MBA these days.
You can become a PM with or without an MBA. Also, some big companies will prefer MBA candidates fresh out of school versus someone who have an MBA a long time ago.
The bigger question is what do you want to be after 5 years of becoming a PM? Managing PMs? The higher the PM role, the fuzzier the path to move up. It looks to be easier to become a VP/CPO of a big company as a founder of a startup acquired by a bigger firm than grinding yourself by promotion.
It depends!
– Marco Silva
B] It’s been increasingly in vogue the past few years. Of course, if we really zoom out on MBA in tech it’s been a bumpy ride. I think the prototypical MBA student will be disappointed.
Marty Cagan had a post earlier this year on MBA education being one of the product pathogens because of how poorly MBA education prepares one for product management. Lots of unlearning. Too much old-school marketing lens “product management.
– Jesus Rojas
C] I’m not going to add more on the different potential ladders for PMs. But in all honesty, sounds like you haven’t yet gotten into a PM position yet, and you are already thinking about what’s next, and yes product people love to talk about vision, but maybe climbing the ladder is not a great and motivating vision, but understanding what you want to achieve in your career or life.
All these will have different answers and would require you to focus on a different path, focusing on the ladder you are going to miss into what is going to be more important for you.
Also for me when I started as a PM it was a huge discovery journey that has taken me on completely different paths than I expected, as I have been discovering things that really interest me and never knew about before.
Anyhow, just trying to bring a different point of view. All the best getting into PM.
– Naomin Wosu
D] I see PM more as a path to entrepreneurship than any other corporate ladder climbing. There aren’t that many PMs who end up as CEO/CFOs, though that’s probably a function of how new the title is than anything else.
It puts you in the right mindset for problem-solving and dealing with people – the marriage of skills that are really necessary for building a business while simultaneously networking for fundraising, hiring, and managing your culture.
How do companies with a freemium model work around the email quotas in marketing automation tools like HubSpot, etc.?
Like I’m thinking how do Calendly or Grammarly do it?
– Risa Butler
Discussion
A] I’ll try to be more specific. We use HubSpot for our lifecycle emails to users. We also use Sendy for bulk emails (like the Black Friday discount campaign).
We have a certain marketing contacts quota on HubSpot over which we’ll be charged overages. We’re expecting the active lifecycle audience to go up significantly in the coming months leading to much higher costs. That made me wonder how other companies deal with the restrictions of these marketing automation tools.
– Rohit Kumar
B] This is specifically an issue with HubSpot, which charges you per contact (versus other places will charge you by email sent)
The best “workaround” is to juggle who is synced to HubSpot to stay under your contact limit. Stop syncing/deleting older users who haven’t been active in a while, who fall under a certain usage limit after a certain length of time, etc.
Otherwise, call up a sales rep and ask for a discount. We put the squeeze on them (and they put the squeeze on us to sign days before the end of their fiscal year) and I think we got a 68% discount for life or something. I wouldn’t expect something that high, but they can really work some magic sometimes.
– Nathan Endicott
C] Yeah – I’d assume companies like HubSpot love it when their customers are successful because that means more $$$. There are some folks from Calendly on this Slack but consumer-facing products don’t tend to be HubSpot’s bread and butter.
If you have an app and you’re walking your users through a lifecycle then Iterable, Braze, and Customer.io are more popular. I think all three charge by send volume. HubSpot’s pricing is a little weird (and probably partly related to its legacy): you’re paying for contacts but those come with send limits (5x contacts for Starter, 10x contacts for Pro, 20x for Enterprise) and you can add on transactional email capabilities though I don’t see any information about their limits.
But HubSpot is probably the wrong tool for a company at a Grammarly scale.
I’m in talks with the COO of a company about joining them as their Product Head. I’ve got a long list already, but what questions would you ask to gather data so you can evaluate where the product is today, identify potential opportunities for the future, and identify potential red flags and risks.
Background:
B2B company working with SMBs.
Has been around for ~10 years, bootstrapped and profitable,
~80 employees/10 people on the design/engineering team. That entire team would report to me.
CEO had been a de-facto product manager but realized he doesn’t have enough time to do that justice.
– Anonymous
Discussion
A] I’d ask the COO what their strength is — are they an executional, strategic, or visionary leadership style?
None of these is bad, but if you’re the Head of Product, you need to know if you’re the right counterweight to them. 2 visionary leaders won’t go well, and 2 executional leaders will work for a while, but burn people out without a ‘why’
Then go ask others who report to the COO what role they think the COO is, and what roles they play. Does the COO have a good sense of its own strengths?
Similar to the above, I’d also ask for a recap of the last exec meeting — it’s helpful to know if that meeting is combative if decisions actually get made after discussions, etc. As a Head of Product, those people will be your peers, not your team, so your relationship with them is going to be paramount.
– Donovan O’Kang
B] I forget who mentioned this before, but a walkthrough of the last feature release from idea inception to release to follow-up is a good way to hear how the sausage is actually made. Definitely helps to ask about surprises and learnings along the way.
– Heather Kurtz
C] I’d ask about his personal / company values to figure out if I can work with him.
And I’d ask about what part of the production process he’s planning to hand over to you 100% vs still being involved. Realistically, he won’t give you everything at least in the beginning.
As product people, we want to work in a product-led company. Note: this does not mean that the product org is “in charge,” giving orders and engineering/design has to get on board. It does mean a place that truly values the craft and contribution of product, and that empowers individuals and teams to work to their highest potential. A place that is built around creating amazing products that truly make life better for the people they’re trying to serve.
The crux of this article is that waiting too long to add sales involvement often leads to a large opportunity cost. Many successful self-serve applications saw their market position usurped by competitors who adopted a sales-assisted motion and effectively firewalled the self-serve-only products out of lucrative enterprise segments (e.g. Dropbox).
It’s nice to have a metric that everyone can rally behind. It’s easily explainable. It’s simple. You can have a giant monitor in your office that displays the number ticking up in real-time and it will feel like Mardi Gras watching that number dance.
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