Pitfalls of Poorly Designed PM Roles

In my decade-long journey navigating the realms of FAAMG giants and pre-IPO startups, I've encountered a multitude of Product Managers (PMs) ensnared in a web of stress, dissatisfaction, and an overwhelming urge to seek new horizons due to challenges with their current roles.

But what exactly delineates a great PM job? Let's delve into the intricacies of what constitutes an exemplary PM role and how companies can endeavor to retain their prized PM talent.

1. Dedicated eng team with frontend (app + web engineers)

Being a PM without an eng team is a farce. These roles are highly ambiguous, without no line of direct impact/delivery in sight and no way of attributing success back. Often times there are competing PMs with engineering teams who are actually delivering value. These roles tend to feel more like Program or initiative management. These roles can be high visibility, high accountability roles without much power in the organization to move the needle. Often times, these roles tend to be on the chopping block first and lead to the greatest frustrations.

Yet, these positions are everywhere. These positions tend to have the highest attrition.

PMs need to build and deliver features that impact users. This is impossible without engineers (or “ops” or “tech design” - people who release features). A magical ratio is 7:1 engineers to a PM.

2. Dedicated design analytics, & user research team members

Although lack of design works for certain backend teams, most those PMs end up in the position of needing to ask other teams for support to make impact. They end up in the same position as PMs without dedicated eng.

Similarly, analytics are critical for good prioritization and experiment analysis. PMs who are shipping lots of features don’t have time to write SQL queries and build dashboards.

Finally, working to do user research (UXR) on your own as a PM is time traded off with other activities. Discovery and usability testing are sciences best performed by experts. Also easy to lose credibility even after going the extra mile the experimental feature fails, its easy to say that the hypothesis was incorrectly built because of lack of thorough user research. 

Most PMs need at least half a resource of design, analytics, & user research. PMs doing these jobs trades off with driving execution, developing strategy, and bringing along the company. This causes PMs to either underperform or work long hours - driving attrition.

3. PMing a backend team or ML/AI team

While PMs can be successful in backend and AI teams, but these roles can be very hard to deliver on. Backend and AI teams generally have a lot of technical complexity and have Staff/Senior engineers for technical direction and strategy. Most of big tech companies hire/promote high agency engineers with direction/strategy sense to Staff roles. It becomes very hard for PMs to demonstrate value in those scenarios that engineers cannot bring to the table making the role less essential compared to user facing frontend teams. Backend teams can be user facing too and the users can be other developers. These kind of PM roles are platform PM roles. Generally engineer to PM converts in the team are happier in these roles compared to external PM hires for whom the rampup curve can be steep. 

4. Lack of clear charter and ownership

Often times teams have overlapping charter. For eg : retention can be part of growth and also engagement. Lack of proper org structure is far too common leading to lack of clarity of goals, collaboration nightmares, resourcing prioritization, unpredictability of roadmap, leading to lots of frustration. 

5. PM can be a lonely role

A PM role is all about bringing everyone together : engineering, design, user research, partner teams, etc. Yet the PM role can be lonely as no one role has this full view and at the same time shares all the frustrations described above. 

6. Working for a great line of product leadership

There is no formal training for product management. (The few that exist are not to standard.) Most PMs have to learn on the job.

As a result, leadership matters. Great product leaders teach specifically via feedback, 1:1s, and career sessions. They also teach by example. Decisions aren’t made by gut, but by discovery. Features aren’t graduated just because, but due to metrics.

Bad product leadership, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. It’s not uncommon to find product leaders who haven’t even been individual contributor PMs. They can rarely coach how to execute and influence. They don’t have the context.

7. Empowered to determine your own roadmap and strategy

Product managers who are glorified project managers rarely stay. Yet, this is all too common. PMs are handed roadmap and strategy by execs.

On the other hand, there are few thrills quite like leading an empowered product team. These PMs feel empowered to make an impact and change the world.

8. Collaborate with supportive cross-functional colleagues

Often, it’s an influential sales team blaming the product team. Other times, it’s marketing, partnerships, finance, analytics, design, or legal. Whomever the culprit, once other functions point the finger, PMs leave.

If you are a PM struggling with some of these issues, feel free to drop me a note with your story. Happy to advice. 

Meta Messaging and Commerce Strategy

• Recently $FB / $META organized a Conference called Conversations 2022 which show cased their progress and strategy on messaging including Kustomer acquisition. 

  
  

  Seems like most of Fintweet and US investors are oblivious to it. Heres a thread with the highlights 
  

   

• 1/ Zuck : "Businesses want to be where people are. We saw that with Feed, Stories, now Reels and Messaging. Already more than 1Bn users connect with a business account across $META 's messaging services every week. Users use messaging for discovery, checkout, etc"

• 2/ $META launching whatsapp cloud API. Key features - Any business can customize their experience on whatsapp, speed up response times - Customer to biz conversations grew 50% over last year - $META will provide hosting service, network, compute for free - results from partner

• 3/ Customer experience and improving touch points - 1800 numbers are 1960s technology - teenagers dont read email - 1-2 hours wait time connecting on phone - 7/10 people prefer to connect businesses via msg - 65% ppl feel more connected to businesses that respond over messaging

• 4/ Momentum behind this trend of customer business messaging - By 2025, 80% of customer service orgs will abandon native mobile apps in favor of 3rd party msging platforms - Gartner - 50% of US online adults use chat for commerce - Forrester

• 5/ Takeaway for brands : Brands that have made the switch by embracing messaging as a customer service strategy and are meeting where the customers are have experienced more agent efficiency, customer satisfaction and improvement in marketing and sales.

• 6/ Example 1 : KLM Royal Dutch airlines : call volumes increased by 500% during COVID-19 peak. KLM reduced wait times for most urgent calls to almost 0 by introducing Messaging based automated responses to simpler queries.

• 7/ Example 2 : C&A global fashion brand invested in whatsapp integration in brazil : 50% of their digital revenue in Brazil, which last year was 900M Reals came through Whatsapp

• 8/ Example 3 : Aldi reduced response times for what items are in stock from 3 mins to 3 secs by deploying an AI backed assistant on messenger

• 
  9/ Example 5 : Indosat inspired by customer service on whatsapp, introduced prepaid services, refills growing revenue 5x

• 10/ The sooner you are able to turn down your call centres (cost centres) to profit centres through messaging by enabling you to upsell and cross sell. Messaging is the best way to generate and qualify leads.

• 11a/ $META portfolio of products to help businesses - WA business app - small business and entrepreneurs. Lightweight business inboxes in messenger / insta - Meta business suite - for larger businesses - omnichannel capabilities to interact cross app wa/msngr/insta

• 11b/ $META portfolio of products to help businesses - Kustomer - omnichannel - messaging first CRM platform comes with many enterprise integrations. - META is working with 100+ partners that help build customizations on top of the APIs META recently closed this acquisition.

• 12/ $META launching a startup accelerator with PlugnPlay - a VC firm

• 13/ "For many businesses whatsapp is their business, its their website, store counter, their livelihood" - Ami Vora, WA VP. Example 6: of an ad on facebook that clicks over to a whatsapp chat. These first party conversions will also be ATT resilient and be first party data

  
  

• 14/ Example 7 : Test feature on whatsapp in Sao Paolo : Businesses can get listed in a directory, right inside whatsapp

• 15/ Example 8 : catalog feature enabling checkout on whatsapp in India. This is how mom and pop retailers are selling in India now, something which US investors have no idea about. "For many people WA is their first e-commerce experience, it is making commerce more accessible"

  
  

• 16/ Example 9 : $GM found a new way to sell cars through whatsapp when COVID-19 forced them to close stores and sales went from 15k to almost 0 across the country. If $GM closes Whatsapp today, they have to open 25 stores to mitigate the volume. The entire CAC can move to WA.

• 17/ $META launching Recurring Messenger Notifications to re-engage customers on Messenger. Throughout testing Recurring Notifications vastly outperformed other channels like email and sms driving sales. Most examples from emerging and developing markets.

• 18/ $META also batted for SMBs : 90% of all businesses and 50% of employment.

• 19/ $UBER CEO Dara also showed up in the conf. $UBER is now thinking as a messaging first company because the real world is messy, there are lot of stakehodlers : eater, courierer, restaurant, rider, driver and messaging works better fundamentally to give a delightful experience

  

• 20/ In India you can call $UBER on WA, its a product WA to Ride. 33% of the riders coming on WA are new riders (for such a well known app like Uber). Huge incrementality working with Whatsapp. Significant younger customer base. Expansion coming to delhi and brazil.

• Thank you for reading, here is the tweet thread
  

Tips for Answering Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Engineering Manager interviews can be tricky as there are not much resources out there. Here are few things to consider for the EM interview

• Think, why are they actually answering this question.
• What are the possible behaviors, qualities, situations, tradeoffs this situation is trying to cover
• Depending on how I answer, what are the possible followups
• Emphasize your accomplishment and impact in relative light so that the interviewer can benchmark it. Always think how would your director/VP weigh your team's impact against another team. 
• You did 30 interviews last half to hire a team of 10. Put that in light of org average, how many does an average manager hire? 
• Your team got 10% metric win, is it easy/hard with a team of x? Put it in relative light of another team. 
• Also caveat answers saying that the EM job is to solve business and product problem. Different products and businesses have different problems, so you may not employ the same tactics there. You will calibrate the need and devise the right strategy. This answer is just representative of how you have solved certain problems only. 
• Dont go into unnecessary details. That will beg more questions and lead to distraction not giving the interviewer enough signal. Revise your answers and keep them crisp. 
• Behavioral questions can be explained using STAR(Situations, Tasks, Actions, Results) methodology.
• ABS - Always be selling, but you need to come across as authentic. You need to have the technology, infra, scaling USP(Unique Selling Point) on your resume to justify your engineering complexity that you solved as an EM
• If you dont have a story, dont say you dont know. Say that this is what you have seen other managers go through, and if you were in that situation, this is what you do based on those observations. This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate, how you would handle a unique situation that you havent faced as a manager before. 

If you are a manager who just finished interviewing, would like to hear about your experience in the comments. 

Product Manager's book reading list for an EM

This is a preliminary reading list. I expect PMs to be more thoroughly read. This article is geared towards an EM to better understand what your PM is reading and how he/she is thinking. Please leave your recommendations in comments. Will keep adding to this list.

Interviews

1. Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews
2. Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology

Writing

1. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Presentation

1. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)

Product strategy 

1. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)
2. Hard thing about hard things : Building a business when there are no easy answers
3. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Building Businesses

1. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
2. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
3. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Design and User Experience

1. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Leadership

1. Thinking fast and slow

Framework to decide between jobs - 3 Cs

1. Career
2. Compensation
3. Commute

Engineering Manager Interview Question - What would be your biggest challenge while onboarding if you join the team ?

This is one of my favorite questions that I use while hiring Engineering Managers. How would your rampup look like and what can go wrong/what would be your biggest challenges?

The reason this question is interesting is because it gives me insight about how well this candidate understands about the team and the role. It gives me a signal on engagement and how invested they have been in the process. It also gives me insight into how effective our interview process has been in terms of explaining our role, opportunity and challenges.

From the interviewee manager's perspective, it also gives them an opportunity in terms of showcasing how seasoned they are on all the manager dimensions : people, project, product, process. At the director level, I also look for signal regarding cross-org collaboration and setting right team structure.

A key quality of a good leader is to anticipate problems(in all the above dimensions) before they arise and to evaluate all possible options on an ongoing basis. While ramping up on a new team, it is very important for managers to absorb as much information as possible from team, partner teams, PMs and all other cross functional POCS. Even though it may be prudent to hold onto judgement quickly, it is important to detect and diagnose pain points effectively and analyse.

Based on my experiences hiring and onboarding managers and from my friends/colleagues who have onboarded as managers in the past, I have developed a thick skin. Gray hair has taught me to believe in Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" , especially in every dynamic and fast growing workplaces.

I will cover each of the manager dimensions in more detail in future posts. In the mean time,  if you have interesting manager rampup stories, would love to hear from you in comments below. 

Pro tip : for EMs interviewing for new roles, this is a great question to flip around and ask the hiring manager. With an element of surprise, this question can be a great tool to get some insights about the team. 

Difference between PM and TPM roles

The goal of the PM(Product Manager) is to answer the "what". The PM is the customer advocate. The PM works with "Customer Research" to formulate customer needs/pain-points into product requirements which feeds into the product backlog. The PM owns the goal to measure progress against the product vision and strategy. The PM works with Engineering to create/define metrics to measure progress against those goals. The PM is responsible for prioritizing the backlog to make sure the most critical items are being executed on.

The Engineering Manager(EM) is responsible for the "how". This is about how to build the right engineering solutions to achieve the goals. The EM is responsible for determining cost estimates, identifying dependencies from other teams, risk mitigation, project sequencing and planning needed to hit the goals. This is effectively the roadmap which the EM and PM builds together.

The TPM(Technical Program Manager) is now responsible for driving day to day execution. In some companies, there is a specific TPM role for this. In some companies this responsibility is shared by the PM and EM. TPMs are more useful where there are multiple teams involved and it is a huge cross organization collaboration effort. Often times infrastructure, services and platform teams tend to have TPMs and consumer facing teams tend to have PMs. However, these are more of heuristics than rules. 

Build vs Buy Tradeoffs as Managers

Cultural Tradeoffs
A lot of the companies in the valley have a strong sense of purpose backed by a mindset of innovation and research. Fear of being outmaneuvered by the next startup or not being able to on top of the latest industry trends may be some of the underlying deep rooted reasons. This spurs innovation, new research keeps happening, engineers and scientists keep publishing papers and patents. Like any completion funnel, some of these research ends up getting productized leading to revenues and the virtuous cycle of investment on in-house research keeps going on. Some other advantages of building in house and open sourcing

• Brand building
• Leverage open source community
• Engineering recruiting
• Innovation and product development
• Strategic value development

This is all great. But there are always two sides to the same coin. Taken too far, this leads to the Not Invented Here(NIH) syndrome. The deep rooted fears behind this may be ingrained in the organization : defensive mindset, lack of objectivity, tribal territorial fear, touch of arrogance, complacency. NIH has several side effects like : "re-inventing the wheel", huge recurring maintenance costs, loss of focus as an organization, weak prioritization and goal setting, increasing costs.

Corporate Examples
At the time of this writing(2019-early 2020), companies blinded by "Capital as a moat" strategy pursued by VCs(read softbank), are subject to these states of dysfunctions. The typical path of misfortune while building for the wrong problems looks like : founder raises ton of money -> head count -> hiring ramps up to show growth and progress to the VCs -> NIH syndrome -> build everything -> engineers love this as they have opportunity to grow -> more senior engineers needed -> team grows -> managers get bigger teams -> becomes senior manager. This kind of bloat doesn't end well. As Warren Buffet calls it, "Only when the tide goes out you know who is swimming naked".

From internal conversations with Googlers, I feel Google was also plagued by NIH from 2010-2014. During this phase, there was a culture of arrogance that Google has the best technology and scale and they didn't even treat AWS as meaningful threat. They practically missed the essence of AWS and software as a service. This is why AWS had a huge headstart even though this was playing out in the public markets and everyone was aware of what AWS was building.

What can manager's do
As managers it is super important to be aware of the state of the company/organization/team relative to both external and internal technology/products. We need to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in either direction. As managers, raising capital(VC money/head count) is important, but it is also super important to ruthlessly prioritize and build the right products and the right culture within the teams.

Exercise for the readers : Often times companies make big acquisitions. Only some of the times are these acquisitions successful and the acquired company is successfully integrated into the mothership. What are strategies behind these successes with examples. Please leave your thoughts in comments. 

Product Managers Reading List

1. Product Habits Blog
2. Product Coalition
3. Mind the Product
4. Data Elixir - this one is for data science news
5. Ben Evans blog and stratechery are off course there in the list