What makes a good Product Manager — from Uber’s first Head of Product
When Mina Radhakrishnan joined Uber in 2011 as their 20th employee, none of her friends had heard of the startup. When she left Uber at the end of 2014, Uber was a different beast — she had spent 3 years as the Head of Product, had grown the startup to a globally recognisable brand, and her product team alone had 20+ members. Outside of Uber, Mina has also worked at Goldman Sachs in New York, and as a Product Manager for Google and ModCloth. She now lives in Sydney and has founded her own startup :Different. We spoke to her about building strong products, the qualities of good product managers, and her learnings from Uber’s early days.
Good product managers
What qualities make a strong product manager? How do these qualities change depending on the technology/product the PM is working with?
The biggest quality is your inquisitiveness and curiosity. The single most important question PMs ask is “Why?”
- PMs (Product Managers) need to be able to explain and understand the “why” behind a product or decision. PMs need to determine what it is they’re proposing, why it matters, and how it’s going to be successful. Remember that you are essentially solving a problem — and you need to communicate to your team why this particular problem is of importance, compared to the hundreds of other things that the team could be working on. Being a PM requires you to exercise leadership without authority.
- PMs also need to have strong analytical skills. Strong product managers use a rigorous framework to analyse a problem and need to be able to approach it from different angles. Whether it’s a change in aesthetic appeal or an improvement in technical efficiency, there’s a wide range of perspectives that Product Managers need to understand about the product and company’s’ vision.
- PMs should have sound technical knowledge. Do you need a computer science degree? No. But since you’ll work alongside engineering and design teams, you’ll need to speak their language. You need to know how to talk about priorities with your team, how to drill down and ask your team why something will take this amount of time/effort, and explain to them why something is a higher/lower priority. If you don’t understand the different levels of technical depth, then you won’t be able to help the tech teams prioritise or strategise.
- Finally, PMs need to have product vision and market vision- you need to understand what the product can and should do in the broader market, as well as the different shifts in market and customer needs and how it will position your product and company in the future.
Since you’re working across so many areas and teams in the company, do you find yourself having to be diplomatic?
Diplomacy is important. At the end of the day, you are trying to get something done — and as a PM, it’s always about “how do I get everyone else to follow along with how I envisage it?”. Nobody needs to do what a PM says, so you’ll definitely need a bit of conviction and persuasiveness in order to argue your case and be able to manage the people and products you’re working with.
The nature of larger tech companies (like Atlassian, Google, and Uber) means you also need to drive consensus at multiple levels. You’ll need to have a certain level of ‘organisational savviness’ to navigate and progress into more senior roles i.e. learning how to manage people above and below you.
How does the role of a PM change depending on whether you’re in a big tech company or a startup?
Different companies will value skills differently (e.g. technical, analytical, organisational). If your company’s product is centred around an API, you’ll need to have more technical knowledge because software is the bread and butter of the company. If you work in company with a product built for social media you might need to have strong marketing and design skills; you also need to develop organisational skills as the startup grows to a bigger company. In essence the role of the PM can be really different depending on company size and company product.
You need to be strong across all of them (perspectives) in order to make a good PM.
One question I get from a lot of juniors is, “should I be a PM at an early stage company or a Google or Facebook?”. I think it’s really powerful to be at a big company because you have the mentorship, skills, and discipline that you wouldn’t get elsewhere. If you started your PM career at Google for example, there are plenty of resources and mentorship to train any junior up. Importantly you also get a lot of value at seeing how a successful product/company operates at the macro level in order to carry those skills to a startup and make a big difference.
Startups can be fun too, you just have to make something happen. It’s also important to note that the habits that you develop at a startup won’t always help you as the company scales if you’ve never had experience working in a bigger company. That’s not to say it’s impossible, it’s just easier to learn useful skills at a larger tech company first.
It’s good to gain experience from a big tech company — use that knowledge and apply it to a startup much later in life.
Building good products
You’ve spoken about “designing for flexibility” as a core product principle of your time at Uber. How should other startups follow this principle from Uber?
The reality is, most startup companies are not going to succeed. You are constantly prioritising different things and when building a product you can do it the ‘quick and dirty’ way or you can follow the “long and stale” path and take the time to build it out properly with your ‘north star’ in mind (the “north star” is the long-term vision for your product).
But you also have to keep in mind that your startup has to be around long enough for the “north star” to matter. The decision boils down to:
- Should you do things the quick and dirty way? Build something minimally viable, launch to market to test it, and see whether it’s worthwhile to focus on it more extensively, OR
- Do you take the longer stale route. You’ll build out properly the critical aspects of the product and delay the launch and testing.
In the first case, the drawback is that if your product is successful — you won’t have the resources and capacity to build things out and accommodate the influx of growth and usage, or you’ll need to slow growth momentum down and spend a great deal of resources rebuilding elements of your product that you hadn’t built out properly. In the second scenario, if you move too slowly and miss your market-timing and/or burn through your money, then whatever you’ve built thus far will have no impact at all. This is the constant battle that you have as a startup and as a PM.
The keys is to evaluate on the quick and dirty and say “let’s build a minimum viable product and set time aside in future to build it properly”. Often you build up heaps of tech debt and it takes a lot longer later to reverse the effect.
What was one of the hardest choices you’ve had to make as a PM and what do you think it taught you about building products?
The challenging thing about being a PM is to always be ruthlessly prioritising. When resources are scarce and time is limited, you’ll have to say a hundred “Nos” to your team before you get to a “Yes”. This is more or less your role as a PM — you’re the person who understands the ‘big picture’ context while most other people in the team may see smaller opportunities that may only make minute contributions to the company’s overall vision.
The hardest part about being a PM is having to find a balance between knocking back people’s well-meaning suggestions whilst also successfully persuading people to get on your side and understand the end-decision and thought process you’ve gone through. The way to do this is to show team members in a simple way, what your product roadmap is and why it matters to the users and company at large. At the end of the day everyone works in a company because they want to contribute to the overall success of the company, so it’s important as a PM to outline that what you are proposing is in everyone’s interest.
Uber’s early days
What was the biggest learning from your time at the early Uber?
There’s one thing that’s stuck with me, and I personally learnt this from Travis Kalanick (founder of Uber):
You never ask the question, “Can it be done?” You should always ask the question, “How can it be done?”
When you ask yourself this question, it will change the context of everything you do. If you ask your team “can it be done?” you’ll find that people are not quite engaged in the problem-solving aspect of the challenge. Some people might be over-confident and say “well of course!” without having properly considered the implications — others might be sheepish and jump to saying ”no” because it’s not a priority to them.
But if you approach a problem with an expectation that you will be able to achieve it you start thinking about it more deeply, about how you can introduce a solution. You’ll begin to realise how tough it might be and start to think of better ways to reach the same outcome. At the same time you’ll also unite your team around the problem and get them excited if you approach it as though you are actually committing resources to solve it.
Importantly, at Uber we always looked at every problem with an opportunistic point of view: “How might we” solve this or produce this and we tried not to say “no” to an idea right away.
This piece was written by Clinton Chan — Textbook Ventures organises startup events, writes newsletters, and shares tech jobs for student entrepreneurs across NSW.
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