Product: How I Work

For a new product area:

• Research market direction, organizational knowledge and hypotheses, customer opportunities (i.e. conduct user research), and product data
• Organize customer insights into an evergreen opportunity tree
• Map out a direction:
  • Why should/shouldn’t we invest in this area?
  • What end state are we targeting, for our customers and the business?
  • Which target audiences and opportunities should we address first and why?
  • How will we know we’re successful: what’s our North Star and supporting metrics?
  • What are some risks and assumptions we should account for when investing in this space? How can we manage and respond to this risk?
• Course-correct the vision & strategy as we learn more by shipping solutions and listening to customers

• Focus in on an area of the customer opportunity tree that I prioritized in vision/strategy setting
• Run some candidate opportunities-to-solve through the RICE prioritization framework
  • Often, I’ll modify this framework to suit the current realities of the organization
  • Frameworks are guides, not edicts. We might need to swap the order of initiatives. That’s expected, we just need to be able to articulate our choices.
• Validate the quarterly plan with partners and stakeholders (engineering partners, Sales, Support, leadership, etc.)
• Adjust plans based on any important insights gleaned from reviews

• Discovery: gather any additional customer insights and requirements need to crisp up our understanding of the opportunity space
• Solution refinement:
  • Create a stub PRD (product requirements doc) with the customer opportunity set and a plan for key success metrics
  • Run a cross-functional solution ideation session against our customer opportunities, and select a set of solutions/experiments
  • Build out the PRD with selected solutions, broken down into milestones of discrete, deliverable user value
• Design:
  • Work with designers on mocks and review engineers’ technical design docs
  • Validate the direction with customers. Which strategy to use depends on the project:
    • Showing design prototypes to hand-selected customers to validate functional requirements
    • Running an unmoderated usability study to see how successful and efficient users might be with a given task
    • Shipping betas quickly and learning from customers’ hands-on use
  • Collaborate with product marketing (PMM) on naming and framing
• Execution:
  • Craft a data/observability plan
  • Support engineers on any product/functionality questions; review pull requests
  • Coordinate with a docs writer on product documentation
  • Create a manual testing plan and test the feature along with other contributors
  • Help prioritize any issues uncovered
  • With engineering, confirm compliance with fundamentals (accessibility, security/privacy previews, SLO definition, etc.)
• Release:
  • Work with partners on a go-to-market strategy
  • With engineering and PMM, create Support training and Sales enablement materials
  • Implement any feedback mechanisms
  • Write public messaging (blog post, forum post)
  • Write SQL queries and confirm data dashboards are ready to go
  • Schedule a launch party and release the solution! Bonus points if we assign someone to pick some launch tunes 🎶
• Post-release:
  • Monitor customer feedback and prioritize any followups
  • Review progress against feature success metrics at regular intervals
  • Use the above insights to define next steps and iterate on the solution space