Ravi Mehta: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, final topic, product management competencies. So this is a post you wrote a while ago. It's the post I've shared most of your many writings online, and I'm going to pull up this image on my screen. So another plug to check it out on YouTube or Spotify. Can you talk about what this is and why it's important for PMs to think of their career in this view and in general just understand what the components of a great PM are? Yeah, definitely. So we developed this at Tripadvisor. When I joined Tripadvisor, the company was newly public and as part of being a newly public company and wanted to grow different teams really quickly including the product team. And what we were finding is that hiring a product out of industry, and at the time we were based in Boston. So hiring a really good experience PM in Boston was taking between three and six months, and that just was too long to reach the sort of growth goals that we wanted to hit from a team perspective and a headcount perspective. And so the head of product there came up with this program called the product rotational program, where we would hire people directly out of business school and out of undergrad into their first product role regardless of whether or not they had prior product experience. And they would go through two years of rotations. So four six-month rotations where they would be able to focus on teams that are zero to one teams or growth teams or infrastructure teams. So the goal was in about two years to get a person to be able to experience various different parts of product management and have them come out with the skills to be a senior and effective product manager. And so as part of that, we really needed to define very clearly what is product management and how do we help people identify the skills that they need to be an effective product manager and give them a plan so that they can grow those skills. And so that's how this framework initially came to be. The framework consists of 12 competencies in four different areas. These competencies I think are the same for APMs as they are for CPOs, and I can talk a little bit about how they change as a person gets more senior. But these 12 areas are equally important regardless of where you are within your product management journey. The specifics might change, but the overlying structure remains the same. The first thing that's really important is product execution. So PMs need to be able to work with their teams to build product, and that breaks down into three sub-competencies. The first is functional specification. So that's the ability to work with your team to define what is the PRD or the functional specification that defines what you want to build. The second thing is product delivery, which is the ability to work with engineering and design and the other teams to take that specification and turn it into working product. And the third piece, which I've changed from quality assurance is now product quality, is making sure that what you build is high quality, not just from a technical perspective, but also from a design perspective, a usability perspective and a business perspective. And so ultimately that's the foundation of being a successful product manager is being able to execute. And that's as true for an APM as it is for a VP or a CPO. An APM is going to think about product execution in terms of their day-to-day individual contribution. oduct manager is being able to execute. And that's as true for an APM as it is for a VP or a CPO. An APM is going to think about product execution in terms of their day-to-day individual contribution. But a CPO is going to think about product execution in terms of the systems that they create to enable teams to define really good specifications, to deliver products really effectively, to execute flawlessly and to deliver products that have a very high bar of quality. The second area is customer insight. So in addition to being able to build products, you need to understand customers so you can figure out what to build. The three subcomponents here are fluency with data, which is the ability to use all of the data at your fingertips to make decisions about what customers need. The second one is voice of the customer, which is the ability to have the conversations with the customer so that the product manager can be the advocate for the customer throughout the entire company as well as the advocate within the product. The third is user experience design. And so this goes back to our earlier conversation about wireframes. I think a fundamental part of being a really good product manager is the ability to think about the user experience in a very detailed way to make sure that you're not just defining functionality, but you're really clearly understanding how that functionality turns into user experience. And this is very explicitly user experience design and not user interface design because the experience of your product may vary. If you're building APIs, then your experience is actually the API spec. If you're building ML models, then your experience might be the training models or the other systems that you're using to identify the effectiveness of those training models. So this can be a skill that you can think about really broadly across a lot of different product roles. The third piece is product strategy, and that breaks down into three things. The first one is being able to own business outcomes. So it's really important to move away from thinking about product as shipping features to driving business outcomes. And so this competency is about understanding how does your product or the features that you're working on plug into the business and drive value for the business. The next competency is product vision and road mapping. So that's the ability to take the individual pieces of work that you're doing for a product and put those together into a coherent vision and roadmap that allows you to build towards the product strategy and the company strategy over time. The third one is strategic impact. You're just like product road mapping as a sequence of features. I think about strategic impact as a sequence of business outcomes. So initially [inaudible 01:00:08] really focused on owning business outcomes and delivering business outcomes. But ultimately what's really important is does that sequence of business outcomes move the strategy forward and help you deliver impact on that strategy? And then the fourth and final piece is all about leadership. So it's influencing people.…

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