The most valuable skills that you can learn in an internship?Â
What goes into developing a product outside of coming up with an idea and building it? Hint - there are lots of answers.
Learn how to structure your thinking. Many creative people are able to explode forth with creative ideas. Coming up with a meaningful and communicable structure for those ideas is at least as important as coming up with them in the first place.
How to pitch an idea, and how to tell a good idea from a bad one. What makes an idea stick? What makes a project succeed or fail aside from the capabilities of the individuals that are involved?Â
What could an intern or newly hired Product Manager do to add value as quickly as possible?Â
Domain: within first few weeks, try to find a project with measurable impact you want to deliver on over the course of your internship. Then make sure that you execute on it.Â
Skills: each product management opportunity is different, but functionally, theyâre typically design (information architecture, UX, or graphic design), development/specâing (detail-orientation, learning to work with engineering, etc), or project management (ticketing, prioritization, etc). Make sure that you leave the internship having built some of these skills.
For valuable skills, I would say:Â
Prioritization: This is hard as a PM. With limited resources and a backlog of projects, you need to make sure you identify the highest-impact projects to work on. Your choice of prioritization impacts everything: what gets built, how the rest of the product is affected, the morale of the teams working on the feature. You should be using data, user research, product vision, and an understanding of engineering costs to help prioritize features.Â
Vision: Anyone can come in and suggest we move a pixel here and a pixel there. Where do you see the product going in three to five years? What about the product today is being missed by our users? How do we turn a moderately successful app into a sensation?Â
Analytics: PMs today need to be data-informed. You should be looking at how people use your product and generating ideas there (in addition to more green-field brainstorming). You want to empower the engineering team. 15 You should be measuring the performance of features rigorously and only releasing what does well and killing what doesnât.
What are some mental models you use to view the quality of a product? In other words, what are the criteria you use for judging how successful a product is?Â
At a high level, I ask myself: âWhat is the userâs goal?â and âHow hard does this product make it to accomplish that goal?â It shouldnât be that hard to get done what you need to get done as a user. If itâs Airbnb, it should be easy to book a good place to stay. If youâre Uber, it should be easy to get a black car fast. If youâre Google Search, it should be easy to find the right information.Â
From a metrics standpoint, you can also measure a product by the following: 1. Retention: But also understanding the nuances within retention (e.g. one day vs. seven days vs. six months). 2. Engagement: Level of interaction and the durations that people are on Yammer. 3. Virality: How many new users are our current users inviting and converting.
What are the metrics you use in measuring your own success? Which ones are the highest priority, and why?Â
Quality of relationships with peers.
Regularity of high-quality product releases.Â
General organization on a day to day basis.Â
What are some of your responsibilities as a Product Manager at Twitter?Â
I mentioned earlier that organization, communication, and thought leadership are great skills to develop. These are some of the cornerstone responsibilities of a PM at Twitter.Â
Diligence is another responsibility of every PM. The product you build is a reflection of you and the effort you put into it. That means being honest (and sometimes critical) with yourself, The buck stops with you. PAUL ROSANIA 42 your team and your work. A good PM wants to do whatâs right, even when it hurts. That means doing homework and proving to yourself and others that your product is as good as you think it is, and your vision is âcorrectâ.Â
For me, this level of diligence was unnatural at first. Thereâs so much stuff that happens each day that your memory gets overloaded easily. I quickly realized I had to stop trying to keep everything in my head. I had a couple instances where I forgot to do something Iâd been asked to do, or where I stepped into a meeting and realized I hadnât planned out what I was going to say as much as I thought.Â
Nowadays I write everything down immediately, even if I plan to do it right away. For simple tasks, I use Things.app on my Mac. When I meet with someone, I jot down notes in Evernote as we talk. As a result, I never forget to do things, and I never forget conversations with team members. When I have product ideas I jot them into a running Google Doc for the project. This system frees my mind from remembering things, and lets me concentrate on organizing and planning without wasted cycles trying to remember things.Â
I also find that writing helps me keep myself honest: sometimes an idea that seems crisp in your head is hard to explain in prose. Thatâs a sign your thinking isnât yet complete.Â
One last thing I want to say is that as a PM, you donât have a ton of control or flexibility over your own time. Youâre often at the beck-and-call of meetings, email and questions from other people. Itâs tempting to fight back, but these obstacles are actually a part of the job. Be honest about whether each meeting is important, but also realize that by having distraction-filled days, youâre clearing distractions from your team. (And sometimes these meetings help you collect information that keeps you alters your roadmap and keeps you focused on the right goals, which saves time in the long run.)
If youâre feeling overwhelmed, donât be afraid to block off time to do long-term thinking. I put one-to-two hour blocks on my calendar a few days a week when Iâm busy, to make sure I have time to think. You need time to synthesize your thoughts, and if you donât reserve that time other people will take it from you.
From your experience at Bridgespan, what were some of the most valuable things you learned about succeeding as a Product Manager?Â
Avoid ânice-to-havesâ: As a PM, part of your job to make sure that the team is and feels like they are using their limited time efficiently. This means avoiding workstreams that are ânice-to-haveâsâ that wonât necessarily change the the âanswerâ or the direction of the product. Understanding what is a ânice-to-haveâ requires going through the hypotheticals. If a proposed piece of work could lead to âXâ or âYâ results, but we also know that regardless of âXâ or âYâ result, weâd still do âZâ, then that research might not be worth the time. It doesnât change the answer. But you have to weigh the pros and cons and balance efficiency with efficacy. Sometimes a workstream might not immediately impact a product in the short run, but could build knowledge that will be useful down-the-line, or it could be a way to satisfy the teamâs intellectual curiosity. So its not always cut and dry. There are tradeoffs.Â
Influence without authority: This is a key part of being a Product Manager, and is admittedly a very difficult thing to learn how to do well. As a PM you are coordinating a team of peers. You are working with other cross-functionals in the organization who might not LAYLA AMJADI A PM works with a team to decide what a puzzle will assemble to look like when itâs completed. 48 even have a time allocation for your product. Youâre not the boss. But, you are responsible for executing the vision. So how do you navigate this? When I was working on the Give Smart video project, this happened very naturally (itâs important to be genuine) but I built very strong, one-on-one relationships with each of my teammates on the project and throughout the organization. I came to understand how important the project was for the person given all the other work they have going on. You have to remember, just because you are working 100% on something, doesnât mean everyone else is. So you have to understand the full set of projects someone has on their plate so you can help them prioritize. I came to understand their likes, dislikes, what motivates them, what frustrates them. Having a really comprehensive understanding of the âJohn the whole person / professionalâ not just âJohn the PR expert I need something fromâ is the only way to be successful in âInfluencing Without Authority.â You canât just think about whatâs in it for you all the time. Whatâs in it for them? What do they need? What do they want to learn? Having this mindset is key to being successful in a working relationship where the person you need something from doesnât have to do it.Â
Overinvest in communication: Whenever I join a new team, I overinvest in communication at the beginning. This isnât because Iâm trying to micromanage the situation. Itâs because Iâm trying to sync up our brains. I want to understand my team memberâs thought processes, biases, values, and expertise. I want to get to a point where I can anticipate what each team memberâs stance would be on a particular decision or what area of the decision they would definitely want to weigh in on. I get to this point by constantly asking âWhy?â This way, I can understand their points-of-view and if they happen to not be in the room at some decision-point, I can still represent their thoughts and advocate for them. This does two things -- it builds trust between me and my teammates, and at the same time it increases efficiency on the backend. Trust amongst teammates, I believe, leads to faster, better results. To illustrate, if John is going into a meeting with Jen about X decision, and I know John knows how I think and the calls Iâd make, I donât need to be in the meeting, and I can repurpose my time in a way that would better benefit the teamâs needs.Â
In your opinion, what does it mean for a PM to be analytically skilled?Â
Given a problem, can they (a) understand the problem? Can they (b) ask questions that have simple data answers that lead you down the path of being able to solve that problem? (That includes asking for simple metrics, quick metrics.) And finally, can they (c) generate a clear hypothesis beforehand?
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