Talk: Product Management for Engineers
Speakers directory
Speaker:
Denise Yu
Talk description
Title:
Product Management for Engineers
Short synopsis:
On agile software teams, the role of the product manager can vary wildly between organisations. Until I rotated into product management this year, I had no idea what my PM spent his time doing! In this talk, I'll demystify the day-to-day tactical activities of a PM, break down what it means to think about strategy and vision, and offer advice on how PMs can bring their teams along the product development journey, so that engineers aren't left in the dark.
Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):
This talk will be framed around my own learning journey when I was on my PM rotation. Here's a rough timeline of how the talk could go: 5 mins: How product managers literally fit into their teams? High-level overview of some team org models from Moo, Pivotal, ThoughtWorks, Spotify. There is no right or wrong model. You have to choose what works for you based on the skills you hire for, or the skills you're prepared to invest in levelling up, and other factors like your organisation's ability to adapt to cultural changes. 5 mins: Common misconceptions -- what is the PM *not*? The PM is not the CEO of the product; the role is ultimately an enablement role. It can seem hard to measure output in the same way you might measure designers and engineers, but some heuristics I use are questions like, "Can I walk up to anyone on this team and ask them what they're working on and why it matters to their product?" 10 mins: How do PMs spend time? Tactical vs. strategic PMing activities. Ideally, only 20% in tactical (writing stories, unblocking the team, weighing in on user experience questions, etc) - where the PM provides "decisions as a service" in order to unblock the team. Strategic is around collecting customer inputs, building relationships to expand the pool of user insights, prioritisation, roadmap-building, understanding revenue paths, advocating for the team to external stakeholders, all while *not* shielding the team. Also will tell about the failed experiment where I tried to divide responsibilities along tactical/strategic with another PM. 10 mins: Product development is a whole-team journey, PMs figure out where the north star is Will start with an analogy told to me by a PM friend: PMs might determine that "northeast" is the direction that would grow the product to highest impact, but should have no opinion on which roads we drive to get there, or perhaps even whether we end up in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. We'll know more information as we approach, and the PM's role is to continually set up the right feedback loops so we know we're on the right path. Part of this is knowing when to facilitate vs when to get hands-on - PMs have to be really strong facilitators, and as a rule of thumb you should work in the problem space so that engineers can creatively solve the problems. Also note to facilitators: I submitted one other talk and am equally happy to give either. This one is geared more towards junior-level PMs and non-PMs. I would welcome feedback on the level of PM experience you anticipate from attendees in the product management track.
Max size: 5000 chars
Tags:
Speaker directory:
Listed in directory
Not listed
Speakers directory