Podcast Summary
Setting a Product Vision and Maintaining Product Quality: Insights from a Product Management Expert: A strong product vision is essential for setting effective goals and ensuring team alignment. Strong customer understanding also plays a key role in product management and can be achieved through user research tools like Dovetail.
Nickey Skarstad has worked as a director of product management at several large companies, including Airbnb and Duolingo.She shares insights in this podcast on how to effectively set a product vision that translates into goals, how to ensure that teams are aligned and focused, and how to maintain product quality.Additionally, she emphasizes the importance of strong customer understanding in product management and offers a suite of user research tools from Dovetail to help teams identify themes, patterns, and insights in customer interviews.
The Importance of Prioritizing Product Quality and Consumer Experience: Putting the end consumer experience at the top of priorities and ensuring high product quality is crucial for success in product management, as learned from experiences at Etsy and Airbnb.
Nickey Skarstad started her career as a product manager at Etsy, where she worked for seven years on the seller side, helping sellers grow their businesses.She later moved to Airbnb and joined the experiences team, where she helped the team figure out how to achieve product-market fit and scale the product.She learned a lot from both experiences, but one of the key takeaways was that product quality and the end consumer experience should always be the top priority.At Airbnb, they never shipped a product unless it was of high quality and all the edge cases had been thought through.
Airbnb's Obsession with Customer Experience: Airbnb prioritizes the quality of customer experience over growth metrics by setting a top-line goal of a high review rate. They coach and educate hosts, test the product themselves, and motivate teams to improve the product.
Airbnb's success is attributed to its obsession with the end consumer experience.For example, in the early days of its experiences product, Airbnb used a review rate as its top-line goal, ensuring that every person who booked actually had a good experience.By balancing or conflate quality metrics with growth metrics, the company's north star was the quality of the customer's experience.The team operationalized this goal by coaching and educating hosts and discussing this goal in all meetings.To ensure quality, they also dogfooded and tested the product themselves.Making autonomous teams and pushing them to use the product firsthand are other ways to motivate teams to improve the product.
Balancing Growth with Quality: Metrics for Marketplace Success: To maintain success in a marketplace, companies must prioritize product quality by using metrics like five-star experiences and first sale within a certain time frame. Balancing growth with ensuring quality experiences is crucial for long-term success.
Product quality is crucial for maintaining long-term success in a marketplace.Metrics like percentage of five-star experiences and first sale within a certain time frame can help companies understand and improve product quality.For example, at Etsy, they realized that opening up more shops did not necessarily mean successful sellers, and instead focused on getting new sellers to make their first sale within seven days.Similarly, at Airbnb, they counted new supply growth as new listings with at least one booking.Balancing growth with ensuring quality experiences is the key to success in a marketplace.
Finding Your Fit: Advice from a Product Manager: Prioritize what gives you energy in a job search. Use the red, yellow, green method to determine if a company or job is a fit. Look for jobs that make you feel excited and enjoy.
Nickey Skarstad, a product manager, shares her experiences of working at different companies, including Shopify and Duolingo.She advises people to prioritize what gives them energy in their job, especially in a post-COVID world.When considering whether a job or company is a fit, Skarstad suggests going through your calendar and changing the colors of meetings to red, yellow, and green.If most of them are red or yellow, it may be an indication that the job isn't the right fit for you.Prioritizing what gives you energy can help you find a job that you enjoy and feel excited about.
Understanding Your Passions as a Product Person: Product management can vary greatly from company to company, so it's important to evaluate what aspects of the job excite you the most. Find your passion and prioritize it when considering future career opportunities.
To optimize your career as a product person, it's important to understand your own passions and what aspects of the job give you energy.Each company's product organization and day-to-day job as a product manager can be very different, so it's crucial to think through what the work looks like, the process, the end consumer, and what you'll be doing every day.By getting clarity on these factors and figuring out what you love most about the job, it becomes easier to determine where you should go next.Companies like Shopify are great places to work in order to learn how to PM and understand complex systems, but it's important to remember what aspects of the job energize you the most, whether it's zero to one early stage product development or building a community.
Functional vs. General Manager Organizational Structures for Product Teams: Choose the organizational structure that fits your product's unique business needs and stage of the company. Consider the right type of people needed for success and ensure the team has the autonomy and resources necessary for effective product development.
When structuring a product team, there are two main organizational modes: functional and general manager (GM).The functional structure works well for bigger organizations with new or developing product managers who need support and development.The GM structure is ideal for new business opportunities that require autonomy and independent funding.The choice between the two models should depend on the product's unique business needs, stage of the company, and the right type of people needed for success.It is important to think holistically about building the right product development process across different functions and to ensure the team has autonomy and necessary resources.
Leveraging Unit's Banking-as-a-Service API for Fast Launches: Embedding banking into your product can help you stand out from competitors, while Unit's API enables quick launch of accounts, cards, and payments. Strong leadership is crucial for effective strategy and decision-making, with insights gathered from across the organization.
Building banking into a product can add differentiation and help acquire, retain, and monetize customers.Unit is the market leader in banking as a service, offering an API to empower companies to launch accounts, cards, payments, and lending in just a few weeks.To ensure effective high-level vision and strategy, it is important to involve the team and leadership to ensure buy-in and access to organizational context.Good product work is often not democratic, but having one clear leader responsible for decision-making is essential.Talking to people across the organization, including the CEO, can also provide valuable insights and ensure resource allocation for success.
The Vision Mission Strategy Pyramid: Creating a roadmap for your business goals.: Start with a long-term vision and break it down into specific short-term goals. Involve your team in brainstorming, collaborate remotely with online tools like Miro and FigJam to create a clear plan.
The vision mission strategy pyramid is a framework for creating a plan for your business or organization.It starts with the long-term vision and works down to specific objectives that need to be achieved in the short term.This pyramid helps you think about your goals from the top down and get clearer as you go down.It is essential to involve your team in visioning exercises and brainstorming sessions to get a cross-functional perspective.You can use online tools like Miro or FigJam to collaborate remotely and create a clear plan that everyone can refer to.By following this framework, you can create a roadmap to achieve your vision and objectives.
Strategic Planning with OKRs and Leadership Review: In brainstorming, focus on grouping ideas into similar concepts. Good OKRs help set quarterly goals for long-term plans. Leadership review ensures alignment with company goals.
When brainstorming, it's important to focus on synthesizing ideas and grouping them into similar concepts.Building a clear vision isn't necessary during brainstorming sessions, as it's more important to come up with ideas and get feedback before finalizing anything.Good OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help teams to articulate their strategies and connect them to specific features that need to be built.It's important to set quarterly OKRs that can add the most impact to the long term plan, and there should be a leadership review to ensure everything is aligned with the company's goals.
The Importance of Goal Frameworks, Empathetic Product Management, and Standards for Business: A shared goal framework helps businesses of all sizes. One-way vs. two-way door decision making can aid in critical long-term decisions, while standards for good experiences improve business. Empathetic product management ensures a successful strategy.
Having some sort of goal framework that is shared across functions is useful for every business, no matter the size or scale.Although OKRs might not be the best for every team, having a process to bring your strategy down into smaller actionable steps can help you achieve your goals.A good product manager (PM) is empathetic and makes sure they're hearing why their team maybe doesn't like their strategy or think that's a bad OKR.Using the concept of one-way versus two-way door decision making can also help teams make critical long-term decisions.Finally, creating standards for what a good experience is can help form and improve your business.
Consider the impact of reversibility when making decisions for a product or marketplace. Use second-order thinking and avoid causing problems for users to ensure success.: When making decisions, consider whether they can easily be reversed or modified. Think beyond the immediate impact and learn from experience and resources to avoid causing problems for users and ensure success.
When making decisions for a product or marketplace, it's important to consider whether it's a "one way door" or a "two way door" decision.A one way door decision is difficult to change later and will have a big impact on the entire system, while a two way door decision can be reversed or modified more easily.To make better decisions, it's important to practice second order thinking, which involves considering the potential consequences of a decision beyond the immediate impact.This can be learned through experience and by reading resources such as the book Thinking in Systems.Ultimately, making careful decisions is important to avoid causing problems for users and ensuring the success of the product.
The Importance of Second Order Thinking for Product Teams: Second order thinking helps product teams save time and money by building a clear vision and strategy for the long term. By considering the impacts of decisions beyond the immediate ones, teams can avoid distractions and stay focused on the strategic plan.
Second order thinking is an important exercise for product teams to save time and money.It helps to build a clear vision and strategy for the long term.Team members should focus on the impacts of their decisions beyond the immediate ones.Shopify, for example, uses first principles to align teams early on and avoid heartache later.Forcing team members to think in terms of second order effects can be operationalized by including it in spec-ed templates or having thoughtful discussions around it.Product requirements documents are a good place to write out first principles, which can be debated before diving into the work of building.Finally, staying on plan with the strategy requires avoiding distractions and shiny objects.
The Importance of Quick Feedback Loops in Product Management: Use tools like Loom and regular team meetings to keep everyone on the same page and excited about the product vision. Have a central moment for product reviews to gather feedback from different areas and move forward with the right ideas.
As a product manager, it's important to keep the feedback loop quick and tight with your team in order to keep everyone excited and bought into the vision and strategy.One way to do this is by using tools like Loom to provide updates on feedback and changes in a timely manner.It's also important to have regular team meetings to constantly check in on goals and ensure everyone is on the same page.When it comes to product reviews, it's crucial to have a central moment where feedback from different areas is shared with the whole team, rather than in a vacuum.This helps ensure a strategic check-in process to move forward with the right ideas.
Efficient cross-functional meetings for successful product launches.: Having clear pre-reads and three check-in moments (first principles, approach, ready-to-ship) are crucial for aligning goals and feedback in cross-functional meetings. Remote product management requires intentional communication and trust-building.
Nickey Skarstad, a product leader, advises having cross-functional meetings with clear pre-reads to align on meeting goals, whether it's to give feedback or to approve a product for launch.In a perfect world, there should be three check-in moments: the first principles check-in, the approach check-in, and the ready-to-ship check-in.While smaller teams may not require formal meetings, larger organizations benefit from having a clear process for scheduling and attending these cross-functional meetings.Additionally, Nickey shares insights on remote product management, such as being more intentional about communication and building trust with the team.
Adapting to the New Normal: Project Management in a Remote Environment: Communication is key in a remote work environment. Project managers should utilize new tools and technologies to facilitate effective collaboration and ensure clear communication with team members.
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way people work, especially for project managers.With the loss of in-person meetings and communication, new tools and technologies have emerged such as Slack, Miro, and FigJam, which allow for asynchronous communication and virtual whiteboarding.It's crucial for teams to adjust and find new ways of working together effectively in a remote environment.It's important to be strategic and considerate when communicating with team members and not rely solely on Zoom meetings.As a project manager, learning to adapt to new technology and communicate clearly is essential for success in the new remote work environment.
The essential role of consumerism in building the right product and messaging: To succeed as a product manager, it’s important to be a consumer and follow people who are in tune with the culture. Understanding the zeitgeist and sharing stories through platforms like TikTok can help build the right product.
To be a successful product manager, it's important to be a consumer and try out new products.Following people who are plugged into the cultural zeitgeist, not just tech people, also helps in building the right product and acing product marketing and messaging.Nickey Skarstad recommends following Anne Helen Petersen, who is well-connected to the larger cultural zeitgeist.Being able to understand the moment in which a product is being shipped is key to building the right thing.Skarstad also encourages sharing stories about building products through platforms like TikTok and newsletters.
