P2P Roundtable with Dave Rodger
A post-mortem covering org structures, the rarest PM attribute, important PM skills
The Boston P2P Pod spent some time with Dave Rodger, VP of Product @PatientPing to learn from his experience from growing and leading product + engineering teams from Spotify to TripAdvisor to a number of startups in the Boston area. Here’s what we learned…
Allegiances to the team over the discipline
Taking a page from Spotify’s squad model, product team members should have allegiances to their team and problem rather than the discipline they belong to. Autonomy and independence is maximized when teams have their own problem and ability to self-organize + tackle it.
This overarching framework rests on a number of important qualifying prerequisites:
- Individuals aren’t pigeon-holed into the “skillset” that necessarily brought them onto the team initially to allow the creation of hybrid responsibilities and “as-needed” team dynamic
- Management’s responsibility is more about setting up the team for success rather than optimizing the performance of the discipline
- Task management day-to-day is managed by the team (not by the VP of engineering or a dev manager)
- “Success” for these teams shouldn’t be top-down from management but a balance between bottom-up needs/goals and top-down support
Business Outcomes over Features
One strong sign of product maturity is the ability to talk about the product in terms of measurable business outcomes as opposed to features. It’s natural, especially for early PMs, to be sometimes hyperfocused on shipping features. Learning how to articulate value without restating the feature definition and use case is a skill that is built up over time.
One tactical way to look at this is to gut check one’s roadmap: it shouldn’t be a set of features but a set of outcomes that need to be achieved. As a smaller but non-trivial edge case: sometimes you need to use proxy metrics to measure outcomes that are defined over a year. However, PMs shouldn’t sit around waiting for a year-long experiment to finish if there are week-to-week proxies that can be used to help make pivots earlier.
Important PM skills for the next 5 years
Data as a product.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the future and knowing how to leverage those technologies and how to productize the data that powers them is quickly becoming an essential PM skill.
Speaking the Language of Data.
With the increased usage of data in both product development and decision-making, PMs that can manipulate, analyze, and craft a narrative around data will empower their orgs and products. Knowing how to best collaborate with data scientists and product analysts throughout the product development process will become an even more important skill.
Articulating business impact through metrics.
Proving the business impact of product-feature work in measurable ways is a crucial skill for both consumer and enterprise product managers. Does your feature move the needle on key business metrics? Knowing what to measure and how to measure is a strong differentiator between an early PM and a more senior PM.
Intuition for Things You Can’t Measure.
A product can’t track towards success without metrics, but it’s just as dangerous to over focus on things that are easily measurable. Don’t fall prey to the Streetlight effect by developing insights only where it’s easy to see. Make sure you’re not over-rotated on local maxima (e.g., optimizing revenue-for-click) at the expense of less tangible longer-term goals (e.g., platform experience and lifetime value)
