Viral Within Company Roadmaps

+ PM's Bright Future

In Today’s Newsletter:

1. PM’s Bright Future

2. The Keys to Mastering PM

3. Demographics ≠ Good Persona

4. 🔒 10 Tech Predictions for 2024

5. 🔒 Viral Within Company Roadmaps

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PM’s Bright Future

PMs future remains bright, despite all the doom and gloom.

Companies from Home Depot to Google aren't just spending money wily-nily.

Yes, there are some PMs who just aren't great.  

But, on average, PMs are returning back multiple-fold in their salary to their companies.

I know this sounds wrong when Brian Chesky is telling you he's "eliminated traditional product management" and Linear has 1 PM.

But the vast majority of fast-growing tech companies have PMs.

In something of a 5-10 engineers per PM ratio.

The fact is - and all good CTOs know this:

More than 10 engineers operating on their own tend to have less business impact than 10 operating with a PM.

Of course, there are some exceptions (like truly technical teams).

But, on the whole, it's true.

What a PM does is find out what's at the intersection of:

1. What's good for users

2. What's good for the business

3. What's achievable incrementally by the team

Most of the other ideas tend to violate one of these 3 principles.

1. What's good for users

You'd be surprised, but a lot of exec's ideas aren't good for users:

• Move a top free feature to paid
• Redesign the entire app in a new way
• Copy a competitors' latest feature "as an MVP"

Without PMs, individually charismatic executives end up swaying engineering groups.

What actually gets built becomes more a symptom of who's well-connected than what's good for users.

A good PM wrangles  the chaos and is the voice of the user.

2. What's good for the business

In design driven cultures like Airbnb, a shocking amount of product features have absolutely no impact.

Ronny Kohavi led A/B testing at Airbnb. Here's how their A/B test success rates compared:

• Airbnb: 8% succeeded
• Microsoft: 34% succeeded
• Amazon: 50% succeeded

That's pitiful performance.

Going by gut feel is fine up until a point.

But it means you're going to reduce your hit rate on moving forward the business. 

If you're trying to build a penny pinching machine in a competitive market like Amazon, that discipline is needed.

And PMs are the people held accountable for it.

3. What's achievable incrementally by the team

While our wildest dreams might be interesting...

They often take time and don't let us learn along the way.

PMs play the crucial role of helping chunk the work into manageable milestones.

"Now, what about all those layoffs?"

It's true. Not every PM is equal.  

There was some overhiring of PMs that was done in the 10-year bull market.

Product is the ultimate "long-term investment."

Product features can become the engine of your growth, but they usually take 6-12 months to fully impact.  

And PMs also take 6-12 months to fully ramp up.  

So PMs tend to have their impact 12-24 months after hire.

With the short-termism demanded by higher interest rates... Businesses had to cut these longer-term investments.

But PM's future is bright.

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The Keys to Mastering PM

Being an exceptional PM isn't just being good at one thing. It's >16, across these 4 areas:

When people ask me what skills should they work on... My first question is: what are you good and bad at?

Your superpowers are great things to rely on:

• Great at PRDs? Showcase them
• Fantastic at Strategy? Circulate widely
• Corporate Politics Mastermind? Network

Then, everything that's a weakness is something to work on. PMs can't really afford to be weak at any one thing.

Let's take an example in each category.

MAJOR OUTPUTS
↳ A PM that can't write great roadmaps isn't going inspire their team.

HARD SKILLS
↳ A PM that can't identify and validate risk every time will ship a lot of inconsequential stuff.

SOFT SKILLS
↳ A PM that can't say No to the CEO and execs will be liked come delivery time, and canned come results review time.

CAREER SKILLS
↳ A PM that doesn't know how to rise up the ladder can be the most impactful person in the company and stuck in their level.

Mastery of a successful PM career requires just that much breadth. You can't be weak in any of these 16 areas.

That’s why I wrote about them all.

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Demographics ≠ Good Persona

This is one of the most common mistakes product teams make.

→ "25-34 year-olds with >$150K household income"
→ "Gen Z teens who live on the coasts"
→ "Tier 1 city millennial Indian”

Sound familiar? That's how most teams define personas.

The problem is, demographics do not make a person.

Just think about "25-34 year-olds with >$150K household income" for a second.

You could:

• Never have logged into TikTok in your life
• Sometimes hear about TikTok from younger relatives
• Love TikTok and buy from the shop every other evening

Much better factors to define a persona for product teams are product usage related.

So, if you're a TikTok PM, personas might start with user states:

→ "Never Used"
→ "Abandoned"
→ "Impulse purchasers"

Then, you do more research on the types of people that these look like.

And you imbue those personas with a lot more definition.

Think:

a. Their job to be done
b. Whether their friends do it, or it's a solo pursuit
c. And, yes, those demographic characteristics I excoriated

Let's expand on "Impulse Purchasers" (high value).

After research, you might find:

• Job to be done is mindless entertainment after a long day
• It's actually not common in their social circle
• They tend to be 25-34 urban millennials

These can become the basis for your overall persona.

I find the best teams often give them names.

It might be "Joe the NYC Millenial."

Once you give a name and texture to these personas, teams can actually build for them.

Magic is unlocked.

Features go from being built for everyone, for being built for specific people.

For instance, for Joe the NYC Millenial, you might:

1. Help him onboard his friends with more local NYC content
2. Partner with the latest NYC fashion houses in the shop
3. Create filters that work well in the dark

Personas become the basis for a holistic product strategy.

But you need to abandon demographics to get there.

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10 Tech Predictions for 2024