Ask me Anything, with Product Managers from Twitter, VMWare, and Box

Ask me Anything, with Product Managers from

Twitter, VMWare, and Box

/Productschool @ProductSchool /ProductmanagementSF

Who Are You?-Engineer -Design-Business (Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, etc.)

-Student -Product Manager-Aspiring Product Manager

-First time at a Product School event?

-First time hearing of Product School?

-PS student/alum?

May Allen

-Product Manager @ Projector

- Previously Senior PM @ VM Ware

-Former Entrepreneur & High School

Teacher

-8+ years of PM experience

-Upcoming Product School Instructor

www.productschool.com

Alex Shih

-Director of Product @ Planet

- Previously Head of Mobile Products @

Twitter

-Former Founder


-Product School Instructor


Jeremy Glassenberg

-VP of Platform Product @ Pypestream

- Previously Head of Product @ Edmodo, Box,

Tradeshift, among other companies


-Upcoming Product School Instructor


Talk to us about your journey intoProduct Management.

May: Valued creativity and independence, collaboration/teamwork, didn’t fit into marketing,design, or eng; she started her first PM role without realizing she was technically a PM;power user of a product when she was teaching, wore lots of hats- QA, marketing, etc. Thenwas asked to be the PM.

Alex: Also happened into the role, not an end goal, not even a goal to end up in tech. Wanted tosolve real, important problems: international development, access to info/tools to increaseproductivity; started working on GoogleApps, was always interested in this product, saw acompany in India using the tools, saw the reach/power of these tools; then TwitterInternational initiatives (during grad school)

Jeremy: More “formal” route, engineering degree, got an MBA, always wanted to be in tech, don’tneed the MBA anymore, learned a lot more on the job, not as much content available, lotsof rejections to start, became obsessed with APIs/hacking away at APIs, not to get a job, butbecause of passion; advice? find an area of focus, genuine enthusiasm for the product

Why did you decide to teach at Product School?

Jeremy: Always trained PMs: Box was scrappy in the beginning, he write code as a PM, etc, as theteam grew, he got to train up APMS, helped teammates move into the role; mentoring,consulting; Product School? wanted to do something more formal

May: Learned everything on the fly, would have liked some formal training early in her career;Carlos (CEO) reached out and she was impressed with the curriculum; loves teaching andcomes from an education background

Alex: Volunteer teaching experiences, cynical about the SV scene, wanted to contribute to thesolution, help aspiring PMs to think about solving big problems, brought in real examples ofhis issues, having a conversation around his day-to-day challenges

What skills did you learn on the job thatwould have helped you grow early inyour career?

May: Negotiating with people on your team about prioritizing features; pros and cons ofchoices; how to communicate with stakeholders; feature audits/data analysisaround choices; UI/UX/wireframing

Jeremy: How to write impactful PRDs, how to write user stories, documents that resonatewith the different stakeholders

Alex: Also PRD writing: limits PRDs to 3-5 pages, includes mock ups (Invision, Balsamiq)writing documents that stakeholders actually read and understand

For Alex: What should I leave out of a PRD? Alex: Try not to propose a solution, don’t step on engineers’ toes, views PRD as a livingdocument that is a starting point, but will grow along the way; getting peoplealigned in the right direction

Difference between startup and bigcompany PM roles?

May: large company: many product peers, larger sets of customers/data, data analysis = keyStart up: might not have lots of data/customer; lots of customer development; Idingneeds, product market fit; communicating bad news around setbacks

Jeremy: big: More overhead at a large company//Startup: fewer resourcesDifferences = structure and culture impacted by other factors besides sidesSize matters, but look at the other factors Starting at a startup = risky; big company = credibility, good training

Alex: Google = training machine, resources that set up new PMs for success; tools/resources Startups: no resources/previous learnings, hard to access data (he needed to build hisown internal dashboard to find good data); not as many tools available

Communication challenges with devs?Tools? Methodologies? (start up)

Alex: Imposing timelines/features that didn’t align with tech stack, no visibility to roadmap, hadto work through that process Bi-weekly sprints; Jira; Invision, Sketch, Balsamiq (tools)

May: Her company = Heavy on engineering, light on sales; needed to build a product worthselling; lost touch with customers/market; motivates engineering = get product out thedoor that people are going to use, ship quickly, learn, fix; recognizing where thoseimbalances might be; given (situation), then (solution)- smaller, more focused stories

Jeremy: startup is going to be chaotic, you will feel the pressure! Product team should balance,Edison strategy, bring in the right minds together to bounce the right ideas; empowerfree/open communication; Agile meth - strong engineering counterpart to push to ensurebalance/Agile; Tools? GoogleDocs; Balsamiq, up to what the engineering team, Trello, Jira,Pivotal Tracker

Methods in gathering user feedback?

May: Feedback in the app stores; google “customer development labs” - helps to askquestions/understand what to listen for; customer (paying for something withvalue, implies PERSON) vs user

Alex: No silver bullet to getting feedback; employ a lot of different channels, some will bemore valuable than others, but variety matters; B2B; reaches out to trustedcustomers; record each testing session; come up with hypotheses is before startingthe test/analyzing the data, might be overwhelming without that frame

Jeremy: B2B world-data is different- less data, less customers, great communication linefrom sales/support, train them on asking the right question; don’t build exactlywhat people ask for. Figure out the problem**

Advice on how to break into Product?

Jeremy: Look internally first; work as closely as possible with PMs, take on some of theirwork, make it clear that you are interested; find your passion and work on sideprojects, volunteer, SV is built on karma, help, give, etc.

May: Ask the PMs if you can help! Go through the bug backlog and help them figure outhow to solve a real problem; going through user feedback on the app store, makesense of it, go above and beyond in helping out

Alex: Regardless of role, you can practice the processes/ways of thinking that PMs useron a day-to-day basis; learn all that you can about users

Ask me Anything, with Product Managers from Twitter, VMWare, and Box

Technology

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