In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about managing roles that you don’t have expertise in yourself, setting yourself up for success in the first 90 days of a new job, and thinking about what comes next after a career in product management.
Show Notes
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about:
Q: As a CPO, what should I think about when managing disciplines I’m not an expert in?
Q: Do you have any tips on how to set up good 30-60-90 day smart goals as a product manager for a mature startup?
Q: What advice do you have in evaluating next steps in moving on to a career after product management?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we're going to be talking about cultivating your skills as a product manager, and also how to grow in your product careers. So I've got three awesome questions that I'm about to answer.
And I just want to remind you that you can also get your questions answered if you submit them at dearmelissa.com. We go through the questions every week. We take the ones that fit our theme, and then we start to answer them. So if you have any questions you'd like to ask me, I would love to answer them on the show.
So please go to dearmelissa.com and submit all of those burning questions. So the first question is about moving into a CPO position, right up my alley. All right. They say, Dear Melissa, I'm currently moving into a CPO position where I'm also the co-founder. It will be the first time I have direct reports that aren't PMs, but also designers and engineers.
What should I think about when managing disciplines I'm not an expert in? Very good question. And I see this a lot. As you rise up into leadership levels of executive teams, you're going to have a lot more scope, which means you might be managing some functions that are not necessarily just product management related.
So when we usually design the CPO role or look at it, a lot of times we'll look for functional leads that you can put into place to help you with these areas. So you might have like a VP of product management reporting into you, a VP of design and a VP of engineering. Now that's great if it's where you scale, but since you said, I'm a co-founder, I'm assuming you're pretty small and you're going to start scaling later.
So something to look forward to in the future is probably getting those functional leads as a VP in for each one of those who can grow those different disciplines for you. In the meantime, you're going to want to start to think about how designers and engineers especially are graded for success and what are the different skills that they have to level up on? I think one of the hardest parts about managing a discipline that you're not an expert in is making sure that you understand how they can do their jobs, how you can judge them for success and how you can help people grow in their careers.
So I think it would probably behoove you to have at least a couple senior members of engineers and designers on the teams. And maybe you want to start to think about making that director level, maybe that mid manager level over the designers and the engineers, especially as somebody that can help them with their skills, right? You're not going to be able to help an engineer get better at coding, but who can you pair them with that does know how to code really well, that can help them with their skills and can help lead them there.
So when you're thinking about rounding out your team, definitely look for some senior members in the areas that you're not as strong at so that they can make sure that they're mentoring and coaching those people and they have an opportunity to learn at your company. Another thing that you're going to want to look at is career ladders, what people should be competent at. As a CPO, you're going to be responsible for making those things.
And it doesn't mean that you have to make them in isolation. I'd recommend talking to the engineers on your team, talking to designers about the different career levels, hearing about what they want to aspire to in the organization, what types of things they want to do when they lead. But you're going to have to do a lot of research and figuring out how to create good career paths for them and what has been done in other parts of the industry.
I'd also advise maybe seeking out mentors and designers in engineering land who have done this before, who can help you, who can advise for you. But I think the hardest part of this for sure is making sure that you understand what success looks like so that you can help them accordingly.
You can judge their progress accordingly in those different disciplines. That's going to be the trickiest part since you don't have firsthand knowledge of, you may have worked with them before, but you don't have firsthand knowledge of doing these actual jobs, right, of climbing up the ladder from like a staff engineer to a senior engineer to a CTO. And those are the types of things I think that are going to be the harder parts to actually fill in.
So recommendation, get a bunch of senior people in those areas on your team, start to think about how you can put that mid-manager level in there in the future, you know, as soon as you're ready. But I wouldn't just go for hiring a bunch of junior people because they're going to want somebody to learn from. And while the product managers can learn from you, the designers and the engineers won't have anybody to learn from if you're just hiring a bunch of people who are super fresh and new to the discipline.
So you're going to want to make sure that you do hire up in those positions for sure. Maybe try to find somebody that could potentially step into that director of design or director of engineering level.
And then also think about the specialties in each one of those areas and what you need. So not all designers are created equal. I used to be a UX designer myself and I will say, I am not the person that you wanted to hire for visual design. It's something I got better at as I grew in my career, but it was not something that I was good at at the beginning or even in the middle, I would say.
So I always paired better with somebody like a visual designer. So what do you need for your team when you think about designers? Do you need just UX designers because maybe it's just more backend related and it's about designing systems rather than designing workflows or things that people might interface with?
Do you need some visual designers? Do you need a jack of all trades type person, which I will say is incredibly hard to find. We talk about full stack engineers, which everybody knows it's very hard to find, but full stack designers are particularly hard to find too. So think about it. What spectrum of designers or user researchers do you actually need and how would you design your team around that?
So make sure that it's not just, Hey, we're just hiring general designers. It's fit for purpose for your company. And then the same for engineers, you know, how many backend, how many front end engineers, what types of specialties do you have an architect on your team that can help guide you as well about the architecture of the platform?
You didn't mention if you have a CTO or a VP of engineering, but I'm hoping you do. You have somebody that can lead that position for you because there's a lot of technical trade-offs you're probably going to have to make there as you start to scale your business. And as you start to figure out what you actually want to build and how you want to build it.
So that's kind of what I would think about the different types of positions you need, the different types of skill sets. I would look into competency matrix so that you actually have a career path for everybody there. But I think the key for you there too, is trying to hire in some kind of management position that will help your designers and your engineers grow, can oversee that, can give you advice on what to do there.
And then you can delegate some of that stuff to them while still overseeing the total path of the product and engineering organization. All right. Next question. Dear Melissa, I recently accepted a new role as a product manager for a mature startup. I'd like to agree on 30, 60, 90 days smart goals with my new managers so that we'll have alignment and clarity in how I can make the most impact.
Any tips on how to set up good goals? We'll be right back with that answer. So tune in. All right, we're back. So we're talking about 30, 60, 90 days smart goals as a product manager for a mature startup. So this is always a good way to think about it. How do I figure out how to have impact in 30 days?
What should I be doing in 60 days? What should I be doing in 90 days? So I think one of the things that we want to look at when setting goals is what do they need us for? Right? Like, why did they hire us in that mature startup? What are we overseeing and what are the goals of the company?
So I'd start by having a conversation with your manager about what do you need me to do? Right? The product that I'm overseeing, is it something new where we got to get it off the ground? Then maybe in the first 90 days, I'm looking to get a roadmap out there. I'm trying to figure out exactly what we're going to be building.
I'm scoping it down into an MVP. I'm trying to have some good impact on how we're going to put all those things together. Now if it's not a new product, maybe it's a product that's been struggling. It's got a lot of issues with it. It's old. It's clunky. We got to figure out how to actually fix it. Or it's not streamlined.
We have a lot of goals that we're not actually meeting. I try to figure out what are those goals. And when you're thinking about 30, 60, 90 days, you want to think about what are some quick wins that I can get in here to help establish myself at this company and in the good graces of my manager as well.
So what can I do that might help me win some credit here? Right?
That's a big part of starting a new job. You got to prove that you actually can do the job. And if you wait 90 days to actually show that, it may be too long. So you want to narrow down and start to think about what can I do that's easy, maybe something that's been bugging people for a while. Maybe there's a crazy bug that's been floating around.
I've worked at tons of places that had like these phantom bugs that nobody could figure out. And if somebody actually looked at them and took the time to actually see it, it would have been a huge win for the company. So maybe there's something like that. Maybe there's something that's been dragging out that has to do with your scope of the world that nobody has really looked at, but everybody would really appreciate it getting done.
Can you do that in the first 30 days? As you starting to think about 90 days, that's when you should probably formulate at least a strategy for where you want to go with your product, what you want to do with it. But I'd suggest along those 30, 60, 90 days, you're really figuring out who your stakeholders are, what's the lay of the land.
You're meeting with everybody who's actually been on the team before. You're figuring out the history of the product. And you're doing that so that whenever you do come out of those 90 days with the plan, people think that you actually have context, right? So what have you learned about our product?
What have you learned about where it's been or where it's struggling or who our customers are? That's a really big part of it. So I think for 30, 60, 90, you don't have to only think about delivering from a product perspective, like let's get these features out there. Although I would say if you can deliver a feature or something small or some kind of quick win in that time, that's going to be great because people are going to be very excited about that.
But a big thing about this too, is making sure that you get huge lay of the land, coming out of it with knowledge and demonstrating that you do have the knowledge and then trying to get to the goal of what you want to see. When I work with a lot of product leaders who come into organizations that don't have a roadmap, for instance, the first 90 days is spent building that roadmap.
That doesn't mean though, that they just go into a closet and then come out and say, Hey, okay, I've got like a roadmap, I spent 90 days doing this. Like that's a bad idea because you're not actually building the relationships you need to get the buy-in for the roadmap. So that's what the rest of the time is being spent on.
And you're also treating it like an experiment, right? Like you're showing people the roadmap, you're getting their opinions on it, you're refining it. And you're getting to a point where at the end of that 90 days, when you actually show it to people, you pretty much know most people are on board. It's not like a big bang reveal and it doesn't have to be, right?
There is nothing special about a big bang reveal in product. I know it sounds good and it sounds like, Oh, look at all the great work I've done. But if nobody sees your progress along the way, that's usually where people start to go, Oh, I don't think this person is actually delivering or doing anything.
And then they start to make up stories in their head and they get really annoyed with you. So this is where you keep people in the loop, even if you can't deliver.
Now it says that you're a product manager and not a product leader. I don't know if you're responsible for the roadmap, but you could be responsible for a part of the product strategy and I would treat it the same way, right? What can you do to fix it, to learn about it, to pull some data on what the problems are?
How do you get up to speed on what your product actually does and then get up to speed on what the organization needs from you and what the goals are. So when you're crafting a smart goal, right, specific, measurable, actionable, it should be part in, you know, 30, 60, 90s. Sometimes it's just hard to have goals that are like all delivery related.
And I'd say that's, that's kind of impossible, but like, what can you make some of the smart goals to be around for quick wins? So for instance, like being able to release something that was a bug or an issue with it, or can you make the smart goals around learning based outcomes as well? Like by the end of 60 days, I will have identified the major issues of our product with data and I will have a, you know, a preliminary thought about which way to start, right?
What we should be looking at. At the end of the 90 days, I'll have a roadmap to go after those different things. That's the type of way that I would think about a smart goal if I were you in your position. But I think the key here is working with your manager to really figure out what are the goals of the company, right?
Like what do you need from me? And I would not hesitate to ask your manager that as well. Like what constitutes success for me? What do you think I need to do to be successful? What would you like to see me do in 30, 60, 90 days? And then you can negotiate it, right? You can say this is possible, that's not possible, but at least you understand in their heads, this is what my manager is, you know, grading me for success.
And I do think every manager when they hire somebody, they have something in their head that they expect them to do, right? Like I've never written a job description for a product manager without understanding that this is a place that they're going to be, or this is the help I need.
So you really need to understand that, you need to understand what their expectations are of you, not just proposing 30, 60, 90 days goals without any context on that. And that's a good conversation to have in general, right? Like what do you expect from me? And I think you shouldn't feel bad about asking your manager for feedback as well, right?
Saying, you know, am I on the right track as you go through this path? But a big thing is with a new job, stay visible in the organization, communicate your progress constantly with your stakeholders, build those relationships, because it's not just about the outcomes. It's also about the people management and the relationship building that you do in your first three months there, that really is going to set you up on the right foot and allow you to get things done.
So focus on that, especially don't get like sucked into delivery mode, do a little bit just to show people that you can do it, that you've actually been producing some outcomes, you know, producing some outputs as well. But then really focus on the people building relationship side of it so that everybody knows who you are, they know how you think, they know that you're actually on it. I cannot stress that enough.
So I hope that helps you when you're starting off and congratulations on your new role. That's really exciting. I'm excited to see more people moving into product management positions and, you know, starting at new companies. I think that's always fun. All right. And that brings me to our last question. Dear Melissa, thank you for this podcast. I took the Product Institute course years ago and it shaped the way I approach product and mentor product managers today.
However, I'm at an inflection point in my career. I'm ready for something more, but I'm feeling lost. My long-term career goal is to move into a COO role because I enjoy the combination of people, process and tools, but I've also considered product management consulting, continuing into a product leadership role or pivoting into business strategy and operations.
There's a lot of material on how to get into product, but I haven't found much about career paths after product. What advice do you have on evaluating next steps? Well, first off, thank you for the kind words. And I'm excited to have a question from an alumni of Product Institute. That's really exciting to hear how much you put that course into practice.
And I'm glad that the online school has really paid off for you. So that sounds great. When it comes to product management, a lot of times we don't talk about, hey, you don't have to just do product management, right? There's a lot of places that you could go with this. There's a lot of different things you could do.
I mean, I'm not a practicing product manager anymore.
I helped a lot of companies with it. Sometimes I go back in to play a hands-on kind of CPO role for a little bit, but a lot of my work has been through consulting and teaching over the last couple of years. And anytime I feel like I get rusty, that's where I start to look at, can I go in and actually be an operator?
So that's how I've kind of treated my career in the past. But I personally love bringing, you know, knowledge to people. And if you want to expand your career, there's other options that you can do too. A COO role is cool. I really enjoy that. I think product managers make great CEOs of software companies because product and business strategy are so intertwined.
I think you can make a great COO, especially if you like the people, processes and tools side of it. There's so much streamlining that you would need to do in an organization. You treat like your business as the product, right? Where you start to use the same type of mentality of breaking down problems, figuring out how to solve them, right?
But it's on a different scale.
So I think the key thing is no matter what you do, you have to figure out what are the gaps that I have in my knowledge. You know, I've been a product manager, never been a COO. What else do COOs do that I don't know about yet? Do I understand the financial implications of the business that I'll have to manage with the CFO?
Do I understand HR strategies for managing HR people? Do I understand operational logistics if I want to go to a company that has a large operations team? How do I work in the executive suite, right? There's tons of different things that you could do as a COO that are not just product related. And you might have the basic skill set of problem solving and diving into solutions and figuring out how to apply that to an organization.
You might have that part, but you might need to go into other adjacent roles for a while to get the other skills. So for instance, maybe you go into a chief of staff role for an executive for a CEO at a company and understand how they run the day to day.
You get to sit in on board meetings. You get to understand a little bit more about how the executive teams prep for boards. You get to see the CEO actually work with HR and try to figure out those struggles. You get to see them work with investors. This is going to give you a lot of insights into how a company runs.
Same for a COO, you could be a chief of staff to a COO and have the same type of experience. Maybe you need to go work for operations for a little bit. Maybe you need to figure out how to work for HR for a little bit. I would think about it as maybe to gain the skills that you need in order to make a little bit of a shift in your career, you need to go into a lateral move.
It's not going to be, I'm going to be VP of HR, right? That's not realistic. But how do you get the skills that you need to be an effective COO? And I'm not saying that you have to do all of these different roles. I'm just saying that you have to learn the skills. So where do you learn those skills?
How do you figure out what else a COO does? And how do you evaluate where your gaps are in knowledge? But that's not the only path, right?
You can be a CEO, you can be a COO, you do a lot of different things. You can get into business strategy and operations. I've worked with a lot of product leaders who go into more business strategy and operations. When you get to be a CPO of a large company, that's not just software, you're going to have a lot of stuff to do with business strategy and operations as well.
Like you're going to have to be figuring out with the leader of that, which way to go and how product intertwines with it. So there's some nuances there. But it's the same thing as figuring out what the COO, right? Like, how do I get the skills to move into that? And how do I find opportunities that allow me to actually look at that?
The other thing that you mentioned product management consulting, I mentioned a little bit at the beginning of this answer, that's a lot of what I've done for the last while. The thing to know about being a consultant that I think a lot of people take for granted is you will give advice and you will never be able to execute on it. So like my role is very much similar to, you know, a board member or advisor role.
I come in, I can tell people what to do, I can draw them a roadmap of what to do, but I'm not the one who's going to be executing on it. So they're either going to listen to me, or they're not going to listen to me. And some people just don't listen to me, right? Which baffles my mind, it's like, you hired me, but at the same time, that's the reality of consulting, right?
Sometimes people are not going to listen to you. So when you think about being a consultant, you have to have great influence, you have to be really clear with your intent, and you also have to understand the context of the company. As I, you know, grew in consulting, for sure, I started to think about what's actually possible to get done at these companies, right?
I come in when I was younger, guns blazing, thinking that we could change the world. And that's not realistic in every place. So how do you start from where they are? How do you gain the confidence of the leadership team so that they will actually put your messages into place, your activities that you're suggesting into place, your structures?
And then how do you make sure that it's very fine tuned for the company that you're working with? So there's a lot of different phases of product management consulting, there's a lot of different types of product management consultants. If you want to do the org design, setting up product organizations like I have, you know, it's a lot of figuring out the context of how these companies run, how do they think about software?
How do they really shape a product management organization around where they are now? And then how do they grow it in the future? If you want to come in and actually just be an intern product manager, you will be executing, but you're gonna have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed and being good at getting up to speed on where the product is, what the business is doing, you know, making friends with the rest of the team so that you can actually execute, working with leadership so that they feel confident in you.
So it's gonna be, you know, more of an intern product management execution role. But in an advisory type role, when you're doing consulting, it's all about really making sure that people feel confident about you influence, I'd work on those skills for sure. Right.
And also understanding all different types of orgs. You may have worked at a couple different orgs and then said, Hey, I think this can apply to everywhere. And I will tell you right now that it does not. Every type of company that I go into, I've had to fine tune things to match where they are and what they're doing and what their products look like.
And it's been fantastic because it gives you a very wide array of what product management looks like in all sorts of companies. I've done video game companies, I have done banks and insurance companies, and I've done SaaS products, and I've done startups, and I've done eCommerce, and I've, I've done all these different types of things. And there's patterns, but you have to tweak the patterns.
And I think if you're good at recognizing the patterns and tweaking it, that could be a really fun role for you. But a lot of this comes down to what you're passionate about, too. So how do you think about what you like doing? I love teaching. And that's why I got into teaching. And that's why I pretty much do this, I do the podcast, I do the book.
I love seeing people learn something and then apply it and say, oh, it made my job better. And that's why I gravitated towards this type of role for myself. I love watching people learn. And I love, also, to me, it's very interesting to refine how I explain things and how I teach things. That makes me excited.
So what makes you excited? What do you get super pumped for? Is it helping people learn and grow? Is it execution oriented where you like to get things out the door? Is it leadership oriented where you like to basically put a large organization or a large amount of people in motion towards a goal? Is it an analytical type thing where you just like having the answer?
There's all these different ways that you can try to figure out. You get pumped, right? Like you get motivation and whatever path you take, whether it's product management related or not, I think that's key, right? I think there's so many different places you could go.
There's so many things you could do if you gain the skill sets in those area. But the biggest thing is figuring out what motivates you. What gets you up in the morning? What gets you excited about things? Like what do you just love doing? And then I would gravitate towards a role that would let you do that, evaluate what are the different skill sets that I need to be able to do that, and then go learn them, right?
Go take the roles, go try things, go hone your skills. And it doesn't have to necessarily be just through your job. I started teaching when I was a full-time product manager. And the only reason I did it was because my boss was like, hey, I've never seen anybody do product management the way that you do it.
I haven't seen them run these experimentation things. I haven't run these experiments. I haven't seen them like crunch these numbers in this data. You should teach this. And I said, oh, that's interesting. I never like thought of myself as a teacher. Maybe I'll give it a try. And with his encouragement, I started just doing night classes on Skillshare.
This was a thing in New York City. If you didn't know what Skillshare was, it's an online class thing, these days, kind of like a Udemy. But Skillshare used to be an in-person thing in New York City and other cities as well, where you could just put it online and say, I'm teaching this class, and then people would pay like 20 bucks and show up.
And I started doing it there. And I was like, man, I really love explaining how I do these things to other people. And I really love that they would go, oh, I'm going to go try that. And they'd come back and give me some advice on it, like this worked, that didn't work. Or I had this crazy aha moment, and it made my life so much better.
And that is where I got started with a lot of what I do now, which is all the teaching stuff. But that's what you have to look for, right? Like, what is the opportunity for me to try these skills, stretch these skills? And it doesn't necessarily just have to be in a full-time role, like you can look at it outside.
Maybe you're starting a side project, or you have friends with startup where you can, you know, participate a little bit in there, or you can take a class.
How do you gain those skills? Maybe take somebody for lunch in your organization and say, teach me more about HR or these other functions, right? I don't think it has to be a linear path. And I don't think anybody's career probably is a linear path. It's pretty rare to see those these days. So I'd say like, really think about what makes you happy.
What have you wanted to try? And try it. You might hate it. And then in that case, try to do it in a low-risk way so that you don't spend all your day hating your job, right? But how do you try some of these things? See if you like it, figure out what motivates you and try to craft your position or your trajectory in order to keep doing what you love, right?
Where do you thrive? And what are you? Oh, awesome. What are you good at? Right? I would not advise trying to think of a career path as something that you're really bad at. So it has to be motivation and then strengths. What are you good at? What do you rock like nobody else rocks? Maybe it's your analytical skills.
Maybe it's your people skills.
Take that into consideration when you're thinking about next steps. But I'd say the sky's the limit for product managers. We have a pretty broad skillset. We are analytical. We do a lot of user research. You have a lot of influence. If you're a good product manager, you're pretty good at being a people person, which is great and getting influence and buy-in.
That's going to take you far in whatever you're going to do. But think about that. Think about what am I really good at? What motivates me? What do I love? And then try to figure out what skills you need to learn to move into something that you might be interested in. And I hope that helps. All right.
That is the end of our career talk today on product management. Again, remember, we're doing these every other week. So we need questions. Everybody submit your questions. Go to DearMelissa.com. I love getting questions and I love being able to answer them in a way where everybody can hear the answers.
It's fun to hear what's on your mind. And it doesn't have to be, you know, a super general question. Maybe you've got like a specific problem you're dealing with.
Maybe you've got a tricky person in your organization. You can't figure out how to win them over. I like those types of questions. Let's give me some background. Submit your questions. I'm excited to answer them here. And make sure that you stay tuned next week for our next episode with our guest. We do every other week. We have our wonderful guests on. If you have not heard already, we just had Gib Biddle on the podcast, who was the VP of product at Netflix while it was scaling. And we just did one on Agile with Jeff Patton too. So go back and check those out. I hope you enjoy them. And then stay tuned next week for our latest episode.
