Highlights from a Midwest Product Panel

I recently had the opportunity to co-organize a panel event with an awesome group of product people as part of The Forward Festival in Madison Wisconsin (can’t believe it is already the 10th anniversary of FF).

Our goal was to create a valuable and authentic conversational experience for “product curious” folk — BigCo leaders and startup CEOs who have heard about “modern” product management but not sure if/when they need it and people looking for a career shift. Our panelists were some of Madison’s most experienced product leaders. Big thanks to Ted Burns of Propeller Health, Kara Bubb of Mobile Doorman, Matt Kremer of Ionic, and Steve Staden of Wind River Financial for sharing their deep industry knowledge.

Below are some of the key insights, actionable tips, and inspirational advice that panelist shared categorized by question prompts that were asked by the panel facilitator (great job Ben Kojis). I also added a couple of links to topics to allow for deeper dive info. Hope you enjoy!

What do you view is the role of Product Management/what makes at good PM?

• Don’t need to have all the answers
• A good PM facilitates the magic that happens when a multidisciplinary team makes some things better than one individual could on their own
• They are the glue that hold it together AND they also need to jump in and fill gaps
• Must like to create and build things
• They are incredibly observant and curious about products that they use. They look for design/experience changes to products and ask why.
• “A good PM cares about the entire puzzle not just one piece of the puzzle”(meaning they have to collaboratively work across marketing, customer success, sales, dev, and design teams so all elements of the product experience fit together as a completed puzzle vs a bunch of independent pieces)
• PM and PO are different things.“There is a lot of confusion between Product Owner and Product Manager. One of the best definitions I’ve heard is that the PO is the role you play on a Scrum team but the PM is the job.” Here is a great article from Melissa Perri on this exact topic.

How has the PM role changed in last 5 years?

• Many people still confuse Project Management and Product Management. Project Management is a part of Product Management. “Project Management is resource management, Product Management is marshalling resources.”
• Product Manager roles are getting more technical especially with more API-based solutions
• It is way easier today to build instrumentation into products and this results in more data. As a result, there is an increasing need for Product Managers to distill insights from more quant data. With so much quant data there is also the need for PM’s to know how to blend/balance both quant and qual tactics and data.

What’s your approach for hiring and developing PMs?

• Can train for technical skill set (requirement gathering, backlog refinement etc), but hire for attitude and EQ (grit, resilience, facilitation, building rapport, influencing)
• “Tell me about your favorite product is a great interview question” (here is a list of other great interview questions sourced from top product and design leaders via First Round)
• “Hire Option C thinkers”. People who won’t just come up with the obvious solution all the time.
• Have a PM applicant work through a case study and present their recommendation in front of a group of people at your company as part of the interview process — look for attitude, problem solving skill set, prioritization/de-risking thought process, and how they react to feedback and questioning
• Don’t be afraid to identify good folks internally who are already exhibiting “product thinking…who’s my customer?, what problem are we solving?, how do we know we solved it?”)
• Recommend hiring a VP of Product as your first product hire (vs a junior hire). Early on this person will provide both product strategy and day to day tactical product management execution. As time goes on, the VP of Product will be able to hire and train strong additional PMs.