One-(Wo)Man Band 🥁: How to handle being the company’s first PM?

Notes from Product Tonic Unconference 2021

This topic is about sharing stories about how people started their Product Management journey — especially if they were the company’s first PM. How do you balance tactical and strategic tasks in a day? How do you manage your head space as you receive feedback from multiple channels?

Key insights:

• PMs are hired so that the founders can have someone fully-focused on how to grow the core service over time
• Don’t under-estimate trust. Take the time to go on 1:1 with inter-department team members
• Speak the language of the founders by having a deep understanding of the problem they want to solve
• Focus more time in developing the company’s BMC and confirming understanding with founders
• Be more explicit about what you focus as PM so that other tasks don’t derail or distract
• Do more customer chats — develop a feedback loop to continuously recruit customers

Tactical Tips:

• If the founders or top management are not too familiar about the frameworks that can be followed to develop a better Product development process, send them occasional e-mails that talk about these frameworks especially when they are being done by competitors. This will help make them listen and be interested in more models.
• Using the KANO model of prioritization will help bring perspective to the tasks from different channels and can help PMs (especially if they’re the only one in the organization) to prioritize features and asks.
• Being able to communicate “where we are in the company” as the Product Manager will earn you respect across the different departments in the company.

This is a summary reflection for Product Tonic Unconference 2021 that took place on 23 Oct 2021. The sessions were facilitated through Open Space Technology (OST) and was attended by over participants working in the Product space.

Special thanks to Ashley Uy for convening and sharing tactical tips & notes for this topic.