Heading Product Management at a SAAS startup
There’s never a dull day when you’re Head of Product at a company, that’s for sure!
After having worked as a product leader in a large company (Adobe) and several mid-size companies in the US and India, it was a no-brainer for me to join a startup — Uniqode — as their Head of Product. The reasons I chose a startup are:
- Access to leadership — As a Product Leader, the only way to make higher stakes decisions is by working closely with leadership. As Head of Product, I report directly to founder which gives me a bird’s eye view of the workings of the company.
- Working across functions — Working with cross-functional leaders heading finance, marketing and sales is a rare opportunity to learn. I can directly see the impact of product decisions on sales, marketing funnel and financial metrics.
- Accelerated learning — Best learning comes from going outside one’s comfort zone. Joining another large company would have been an easy option for me, but the learning would have been limited. Joining a start-up has resulted in developing fresh perspectives on product management.
Some of the key focus areas for me — and for that matter any product management leader — after joining an organization are as follows:
- Ensure roadmap reflects company strategy
- Ensure the right decision framework is in place
- Drive business outcomes (revenue)
Let’s look at each of these 3 in detail
Ensure roadmap is aligned to company strategy
Product Managers control a large percentage of an organization’s bandwidth as they decide the roadmap that engineering and design teams will work on. It is therefore absolutely essential that the roadmap is highly aligned with an organization’s strategy and goals. Otherwise, the company will not be moving in the right direction.
As a product leader, it is absolutely crucial for me to ensure everyone in the product development team understands the company’s strategy, goals and OKRs. This means having strategic tradeoff discussions with founders, getting buy-in on the high level strategic themes and goals and working with individual Product Managers in converting these into roadmap items.
Communicating strategy, goals and roadmap rationale to each and every team member is also crucial. This is done through all-hands as well as through individual product managers who cascade this to each operating squad.
Fostering a culture of what I call “ruthless prioritization” also means saying “no” to a number of seemingly important and trendy features. While it is easy to fall into the trap of implementing every feature request, I expect every Product Manager to clearly articulate to the team why a feature is on the roadmap and how it contributes to the company goals.
Ensure the right decision framework is in place
There’s an old saying that Product Managers are CEOs of their products. While the reality is much more nuanced, it is no secret that Product Managers make crucial product decisions everyday that impact customer acquisition, expansion and engagement.
Many of the decisions that a PM makes are also non-reversible like foundational UI based on which many other features will be built in the future. Amazon classifies these non-reversible consequential decisions as Type 1 decisions which require data analysis and group input.
Of course, teams must be empowered to make a majority of the decisions themselves, as they have fine-grained knowledge of product dependencies and user behavior. Hence it is important to have a clear definition on what decisions the team is empowered to make and what decisions require approval. A decision framework can be used to classify decisions into categories and introduce an approval matrix.
It is important to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to decision framework. For example, the decision making for user-centered product companies must be highly decentralized whereas the decision making in a company which follows a product portfolio strategy must be centralized.
Drive business outcomes (revenue)
It is very important for Product Managers to stay focused on driving business outcomes. This ensures that the roadmap is aligned to tangible revenue metrics.
At Uniqode, the Product team is responsible for expansion revenue. While revenue is an output metric, it is equally important to focus on identifying and driving key input metrics (like activation and engagement) that influence the output metric.
Metrics driven product management is often classified as “Growth Product Management” and is traditionally accomplished by growth squads which are separate from the product squads. But at Uniqode, we decided to combine Growth and Product work into the same squad similar to Skyscanner. This requires blending different mindsets, risk-appetites and working styles, but if successful, can feed a virtuous cycle of learning and reinforcement.
