 Hey folks, my name is Sarah Handler and I am a product manager on Netflix's security engineering team. We are so excited to have you with us today for this panel discussion on product leadership. I'm joined by three amazing product leaders that would love to introduce you to you all. Kelly, why don't you kick us off? Hey Sarah, hello everyone. I'm Shelly Jarrett. I had product for Salesforce technology services, basically responsible for making sure technology services are running for Salesforce on Salesforce. I had product teams with about 60 plus people, so fun job there. And when I'm not working, I'm spending time with my 12-year-old son running my house and spending time in national parks. Amazing. Thanks for being here, Shelly. Nadim. Thanks Sarah. Hi everyone. I'm Nadim. My lead product for TripAdvisor on the content business. Content for TripAdvisor is basically anything user-facing that is not UGC. So you can think of that as articles, itineraries, recommendations, things like that. I've spent about 10 months at TripAdvisor, but before that my whole career has been in media. So I've worked at Viacom, YouTube, and Electronic Arts. And when I am not working, I enjoy spending time with my eight-month-old daughter, as well as playing video games, watching TV, hiking, and basically spending time with friends. Amazing. And Josh. Hey everyone. I'm Josh. I'm a Group Product Manager at Lassian working in JIRA software. My team covers a lot of things, but the ones that are very prominent and probably well known are the board and the backlog areas of the product. And when I am not working, I love being out in nature, whether it's hiking or skiing. And I apologize for taking this from the car, but I'm actually on a ski trip right now and don't have good Wi-Fi. So I had to get somewhere where I could have some connectivity. Amazing. Well, thank you for being with us today. We have a number of questions for these panelists, but we also want to hear from you. So please feel free to add some questions to the comments. Today we're going to start with a question for Josh. Josh, tell us a little bit about how you think about managing expectations with your team. Yeah. I think first and foremost, it's really important for everyone on the team to understand what they are driving towards. I think it is really easy for people to kind of implicitly in their head just fill in the vacuum of, like, non-information. So I think setting really clear expectations. And the more junior someone is on the team, I think it is more important to set that more clearly. I think as someone gets up in seniority, if you're managing, like, a staff or principal PM, like, you know, it's not that they don't have expectations, but there's a lot more that they understand that they are capable of kind of filling in the blanks and them filling in the blanks as value. So I think it kind of scales out from, like, an intern PM all the way up to that principal PM. I think the other part about it is making it very clear the expectations of those adjacent to them. So, hey, you're responsible for this part, but this other person that works in the area that's next to you is responsible for this. And there's, in my view, always going to be some amount of overlap, and that's okay, but you need people to be aware of that. Otherwise, it can be either too much clashing or gaps between them. And then I would say, and this depends more on the organization that works in a bunch of different companies, but sometimes it can be important to clarify, particularly when someone's new at the company, of just what the expectations of PM itself is. Like, PM is a pretty flexible role, and at different companies, for example, like, there might be more user research elements or more data analysis elements, and at some companies, there's a lot less of that. And so I think that's a key one to set not all the time, but is particularly important when someone's coming in from a different company. So, I will... Plenty more to say. That's kind of, I think, the ones that I think of the most in all the time. Definitely. That really resonates. Ndeem, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I pretty much agree with everything John said. I also think it's important to define roles well when you're creating a job description. I've seen a lot of scenarios where multiple PMs get hired into a team where the roles are a little bit fuzzy and it feels like PMs are kind of jostling for, like, what products they own. And that just results in a lot of conflict within a team. So I think it's something that I think not a lot of hiring managers spend a lot of time thinking about, but should probably spend more time thinking about it, because when a PM comes in with a very clear set of these are the things that I own and these are the things that I don't own, it becomes a lot easier for the team to gel and to be more effective. Definitely. We know that intentions can be good, but sometimes that does not happen ahead of time. Do you have any thoughts for teams that might be in that position where PMs are kind of jostling for scope or understanding their role? Yeah, I think it's really something that the manager needs to clear up, because at the end of the day, the manager is the person who put out the job description and they hired these people in and they probably had in their head a set of responsibilities for each of these folks. And so leaving it up to the PMs to kind of fight it out I think is never going to end well. It really is up to the manager to kind of set those expectations clearly. What I've had work in the past is to create a racy document, which is a list of different tasks or areas of expertise and then the people who are responsible, accountable, consulted and formed, and then just have a meeting where everyone sits down and talks about that. And that makes it very clear to people what each person is doing and what each person is responsible for. Definitely. We love a good racy. I think PMs can be the superpower of clarity and that's a very helpful tool. Now, you mentioned a little bit around if there's not clarity on who's doing what or what the PM role is, it can be a big challenge. And there's lots of challenges when it comes to driving impact for our product teams. And so I'm curious, I'll just toss it back to you, Josh. What's been the hardest challenge for you so far in driving impact for your product teams? Yeah, I'd say there's always lots of challenges, but the one that's been most consistent is when the team meaningfully changes what they're working on. Like they were working on one KR and now they have a different one in nature and there's just this kind of like, like, latency or almost like kind of like stickiness where people's mind is still on the other one. And you see this thing where people, they really understand that customer problem or sort of customer problems, they've empathized with it. You're now trying to move the team on to the next thing and people's minds just kind of almost go to repurposing. Like, oh, those problems that I heard about, like I can associate them with that new key result that we're trying to drive. And it takes quite a bit of mental energy for people to like shift their gears. And so I've seen this thing consistently over time where the more space you can create for people like so that they can kind of reset their brain, the better they are able to set themselves up for impact. Otherwise, you kind of end up with this like month or two with this kind of like awkward transition. And like the broader form of this, I would not say, is like overly narrow empathy where they're really set on set at creating impact for some set of users for some set of problem but not necessarily the right set of users, the broad enough set of users or the KR that we have at hand. Definitely. It is for many teams annual planning season, so I'm sure OKRs are top of mind. Shelly, I'm curious whether for you, OKRs have been a helpful tool in driving impact or do you see any challenges when it comes to articulating the outcomes that your teams are trying to drive? Yes, all the time, especially at your scale team and if you're working for product for an enterprise organization, like that's, I think a constant problem we are trying to solve. At Salesforce, what we have something, I don't know if you're familiar with this, we do more, right? That's annual planning similar to the goals that we set. It's our vision values and what are the objectives for the year and it's a constant, it's a live document, right? Dynamics, we are updating that. We use that. I think the biggest challenge we have when you scale themes is prioritization of work, right? Like there are so many stakeholders and you have this roadmap you want to do but there's things coming out from different directions. Now there's AI, right? JNAI, everybody wants to do JNAI but there are some mission critical stuff that we also need to do on the roadmap stuff that we plan for, stuff for user experience, for employee experience and other areas that the PMs have already kind of planned for the product. There's tech debt that comes in. So there's a whole slew of things that you constantly need to prioritize and drive and that's when it becomes harder to show impact and that's why I think the product role is so critical is staying focused on what matters most for that business, right? What is our main North Star? Are we driving towards it? Are we just running after the next shiny object? Is it going to get us closer? Like what is that North Star? And being sure to drive that impact. Of course that means sometimes dropping the roadmap, right? Like we were working on certain things before COVID and COVID hit and it's like, okay, now the strategy has changed the market has changed, right? Virtual collaboration work from anywhere is probably a priority in our digital marketing is even more important than anything else. So you have to shift your priorities and having a constant framework prioritization has been helpful for me as I scale my team. So definitely a big problem of using OKRs to drive impact, we do moms, whatever you may call it in your company enterprise but definitely we need to have those clear quarterly goals and making sure the teams are marching towards that and at the same time having that fine balance to be agile and they would start to use the quiet. You mentioned having to pivot which is something I think we all have to do especially over the last few years. That can be a very emotional team for PMs on your teams or the engineering teams and there's a lot of cost and existing work or people are really emotionally attached to a roadmap because they're so close to users, right? We want to do what's best for our users. How do you handle those situations where you're really having to lead your team in a new direction and there might be some resistance in this pivot? Yes, people not just PMs. We have our engineers, our delivery teams also really, really passionate about a certain technology or a certain solution. We are doing Slack. There's a lot of passion around Slack like how things should be done, how it should be rolled out. Everybody has ideas to solve towards that but it's again coming down to the prioritization and having everybody align on the business objectives and what is the adding value. In my team, we have a framework for prioritization of business value. It's a weighted scorecard that we all use and it starts from the PO which is at the pod level and then it goes up to a PM and then the product line and then the director and the group product manager. The similar framework when we weigh it based on what is the business objective? How much does it help save costs? How many users? Whatever the KPIs may be for that product, right? So you wait according to that and then you have objective discussion and then when you have that prioritization player with the team, it makes it very clear to stakeholders, to your business partners, to your team that's executing on that strategy and kind of helps get some of that emotion out of it. You're not personally attached to that objective but this is what it's helping us give value. Value could be in terms of money. Value could be in terms of users or growth, whatever that KPI may be but it gives us a scored mechanism or data-driven way of prioritizing work and having that alignment. So right now we are an org of about 700 to 800 engineers. So if you're talking about emotions, everybody feels certain, like emotionally we're attached about certain things we should do but having this framework right from the scrum team, right up to the software development group helps everybody align on that priority and all the themes, all the PMs are kind of understanding what you're working on for a similar fashion. Definitely. I think being clear on prioritization and how you are prioritizing is so important, right? And here in this role is making hard decisions and with that can come disagreements, right? It's not the most beautiful framework but you may have disagreements with your stakeholders on what direction we're heading. And Dima, I'd love to hear from you on how you've handled conflict with your stakeholders when you've disagreed on roadmap or prioritization decisions. Yeah, definitely. It's something that comes up often when you're making these kinds of decisions. I think the important thing to keep in mind is that different teams have different priorities and often those priorities will conflict. So for example, in my role as a trip advisor, I work with a lot of very traditional software teams like engineering, design, research, but I also work with a lot of creative teams like editorial, marketing, brand, et cetera. And the priorities for those teams are very different to the priorities of the engineering and design teams. Often the engineering teams care about LOE and scoping and roadmap and that kind of stuff whereas the creative teams care more about brand and what does this say about trip advisor and what's our voice and things like that and things can come into conflict. What I found helpful in those situations is really getting a really good handle on what each team cares about and what their goals are. And I do that through weekly and bi-weekly meetings with those teams where I really build empathy, I guess is the answer, building empathy with those teams. And then eventually when you have a roadmap that you know a team is going to disagree with or a feature that a team is going to disagree with, going to them early and just explaining to them why this is important to the business, why the decision was made and acknowledging that you know that they're going to disagree with the approach but here's why we're doing it. That tends to diffuse the situation. They're still going to have some pushback but they at least feel seen and heard and in my experience that's helping me get some pretty difficult projects pushed through. I'm curious you mentioned having these touchpoints with the individuals from your various stakeholder teams. I'm curious as you scale teams as you grow in your product leadership, how you've been able to maintain that? What does that look like when at a certain point you just run out of hours in the day to have these perhaps regular touchpoints with some of your stakeholders? How have you scaled that? Yeah, I think I've done two things. The first is to like have direct touchpoints with one or two folks per team and usually it's the people who I think are either the decision makers or are kind of like the more influential team members within that team and having that personal relationship has been helpful for two-way communication. I can communicate to them what I'm doing and what I'm thinking about and vice versa but also having a bigger forum where all the teams come together and share what they're doing. We used to have a weekly meeting where the general manager of the content business would organize a meeting that every single team that touches content meets every week to kind of share their updates, talk about what's coming up next and then other team members can kind of jump in and say, hey, I haven't heard about this, how are we handling this? Have you thought about this issue? Having those big forums really helps bring a lot of questions that you might not have thought of as you are thinking through a roadmap or thinking through a project. So I think it's a combination of like picking tactically who you want to speak to and have a one-to-one relationship versus having a larger forum where multiple stakeholders are present. Definitely. It sounds like a variety of tactics to reach your stakeholders. Do you have some ideas and experience in this realm as well you'd love to share? Yes. I think it also depends on the type of product you're doing. Like when you're in product for a smaller company or startup, it's, you know, you're wearing multiple hats and you're doing all these discussions. Sometimes it's working for bigger teams and it's like, how do you scale, how do you clone yourself, right? So if you are having this, you could be a great product manager yourself and run the sprint, but if it's a marathon, it's like, how do you have multiple versions of your similar sales, similar product managers? Of course, you want diversity as well of thought. But I started my product team. We were three product managers and we were a very small organization, but we went through this hyper growth phase where now, like, we went from 3 to 10 to 20 to 25 to 30. Now we are 60. So it was not overnight, but it's been a, like, you know, exponential growth, but it was like how do I replicate the same behavior? Like the feedback I got from my stakeholder and business partner, where it works, it works where they are really awesome people, but how do you have the same bar for everyone? How do you have same, you know, scales and rituals across the board? So those things become very important when you're thinking about scaling. Like, how do you have consistency? What are the rituals you want your team to follow? What are the agile practices you want your team to follow? So having that up front, so it's like when you go from one to two to three, start that practice and start putting those documents down, I think structure is very important and also being agile in that structure. I know framework sometimes it's like agile manifesto, say, it's interactions over people, be floral, but you also have to, as you grow as a product leader, especially in this topic, when you're talking about scaling teams, thinking about having those frameworks, those fly wheels that you can give, for example, so I took the best habits of some, what of some of my best PMs were doing. So, hey, this one runs productization very well, this one does customer engagements very well, this one has the task management which is Gira, the equivalent of Gira, George we have our own sales force tool that we use, but Gira and task management, right? How somebody is doing that well. Taking all of that and having a run book of, okay, these are 10 things that every PM needs to be doing on a constant basis and having that as a scorecard or as a fly wheel helps us maintain that bar, like everybody is running a prioritization session every month, everybody is updating the roadmap every month, everybody is updating their Gus in a similar fashion. So, yes, it leads to, like, we don't want to get into the how, we do want those teams to solve the how, but as you grow, thinking about that upfront in Bay, very helpful, like what are the practices and rituals you want your teams to follow? That's a great point on the rituals and having some consistency with them. You know, I think one thing that some folks joining us today may be wondering or maybe they're at this point in their career where they're moving from the individual contributor product role to formal product leadership and that can be a tough transition, right, because you're no longer just responsible for your own work, you're really responsible for your team and generally the product more broadly. Gosh, what sort of advice do you have for product people at that stage in their career where they're moving into product leadership? Yeah, absolutely. So as someone who has, you know, helped people on my team make that transition before, I think I would say please work with your existing manager to, like, get the reps in on the team that you're currently on. I think one of the best ways to get started is to basically be the pseudo-lead for, like, intern PMs or APMs or new grad PMs and take it as more than just a form of mentorship. So to kind of echo part of what Nadim said before, a big part of being a good PM leader is about setting up that scope of ownership about those streams and so that is something that I think as a senior ICPM that is going to move into leadership that you ought to be able to partner with your current lead and, like, take the point on that for an intern or an APM. I think that's one of the best ways to learn because it is something that is so different than IC work. The second piece of advice that I would give is understanding that at the end of the day you need to let people fail. It's really hard to stomach this sometimes and you need to understand in what situations and to what degree they can fail, right? You don't want them failing so bad that it's negatively impacting the business but they do need to be able to fail to the degree that they learn and there's no perfect answer to that. It depends on the situation but you need to keep that in mind because I can say as a new manager I certainly struggled with that many years ago. I've seen new managers struggle with it. I'm sure everyone else here has other great thoughts but those are the two that are just so different than being an IC. It's really important to internalize those. I love that call out on leaving space for failure and kind of knowing for your team what is rubber and what is glass that if it drops will become a big problem. I'm curious on your teams that you have led how did you deal with that transition? I agree with what Josh said and I remember attending a talk by Ted Serendos where he basically said that from Netflix and he said that when he is thinking about how he lets his teams kind of work he generally agrees with 80% of what they do and then he disagrees with 20% of what they do but he generally lets them kind of do things their way and I think that's part of it. Failure is obviously a great way to learn and figure out what not to do and that becomes really important going forward but then touching on what Shelly said earlier it's like finding ways to clone yourself and kind of multiply your impact and that really comes from identifying what parts of your workload you can offload to someone else and that you're comfortable offloading and then what parts are so critical and have to be done correctly that you need to be involved and that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to do it yourself but at least have many touch points so maybe you give a critical task to someone you're working with but then you have weekly check-ins to ensure that they're on track and so it's a different form of prioritization versus features but prioritization in general is a PM scale and so I think identifying where you need to step in versus where you can let others lead is a really good scale. Definitely I know Shelly, you also have this experience of moving from these individual contributor roles into product leadership has your experience been the same or have there been other lessons that you've learned from that experience? No, I've had a very interesting experience I remember going through product school videos and stuff. I was an engineer, a software developer I see and I was like looking to get and like what is my next thing right like what is it that I enjoy I did software development, managed some teams there, I did architecture it was like okay I wasn't enjoying this hit on to product school, self-taught product and moved into product I found this team ground up I've had three promotions in four years now which Amy will tell us we might be recording this one but we'll check those facts later but it's not I think the mistake I was making was chasing titles and chasing like I have to be a manager I have to be a manager to do this right I have to get this title to do this job leadership is not about managing people I think that's a mistake we made leadership is strategic leadership it could be in different forms like Josh said it could be in mentoring and how do you not just stay in your swim lane but how are you looking at the product sweet holistically what is the business strategy are you helping contribute towards that I think sometimes people get so hung up on manager title and my swim lane like I get so many questions like oh I am going about and beyond in my job why am I not being promoted to manager why am I not getting a promotion it's like there are three pillars to growth right yes there is your performance but there is also potential and there's a business need like where is the business need for this people manager right like identify those and go chase those down so the biggest advice I give is treat your awesome product managers treat your career like a product I think about it that way like where are the areas what are the strategy where should you prioritize time what are the areas should lean in more some people do an awesome job of just refining and re-trading something but it's like that helped the business like how much revenue did that bring how many users what is the final impact on the new side of that so definitely treating your career like a product itself and the second biggest thing is ask if you don't ask the answer will always be no so ask how these conversations with your managers with your leaders in your organization like for me I'm always looking for awesome like leaders because I want to delegate and I have so many things on my plate I would love to have somebody who can come and help me and like same thing with my director they are always on the hunt for people managers who can come and lead teams I think we find very awesome ICPMs but that shift of treating even your teams like you think about product empathy having that you know design thing mindset is very very helpful I love your comment around basically PM in your career right treating that like a product and for all people leadership may not be for every PM but you can still be an incredibly effective product leader I think you know a number of the folks who can benefit from product school opportunities like this are really early in their career right maybe you're a fresh PM who just entered this field but you aspire to be an effective leader in your organization Josh I'd love to hear from you what sort of advice we give to those really early and career PMs about how they should be thinking about growing their leadership yeah I think one of the top things I would say here is listen a lot you're going to be increasingly pulled into meetings with more senior people listen to how the discussion flows about what people are asking and how people are answering I think one of the quite common kind of learning areas for more junior PMs as they're growing is how do you answer at the right level of of altitude it's very common for new rooms you're talking about like a specific feature but kind of to Shelly's point before about like the strategic aspect is get comfortable with answering more abstractly there needs to be a concrete piece there but it does not mean that you're always talking like the feature level the spec level which is really important when you're getting started so that's I think piece number one I would give the piece I would really give here is understand the different audiences like you should already have experience with that when you talk to engineers versus designers can be very different when you are spending more time with more senior folks in the organization their minds are often occupied by very different spaces and understanding how to communicate this basically the same set of things to very different groups is important it should be a skill that you develop but now you need to deploy it in a different way that's really good advice I think we have time for one more question today so our final question for today for our panelists that we have is around what sort of strategies we have as you scale your product management team so I'd love to hear from the team what strategies have you used to successfully maintain team cohesion and alignment as your team has scaled yeah my position is interesting because my last two jobs have been fully virtual in the sense that like I don't think I've actually met sorry my last three jobs have been fully virtual I haven't met anyone in person in my last three jobs and I think that's becoming more and more common and it becomes really hard to kind of build team cohesion team spirit when you're not seeing people on a daily basis getting lunch with them hanging out with them in the hallway so one thing that I found has been really helpful is obviously having the occasional onsite where people fly in get to meet each other have social events but then just having like a weekly 30 minute like social session where you log on with the team members you're not talking about work or just talking about your personal life and it sounds really simple but it's added like a lot of dimension to like your relationships with other other team members and I feel like it's made people more collaborative it's made people more likely to ask for help or be vulnerable and it's one of those things that you lose in a fully virtual environment so a bit unique to maybe these fully virtual roles I think but it's something that's worked really well for me definitely yeah I think the virtual world that we live in with many jobs is not going back so learning how to thrive within that is important. Shelly, what about you? I think you might be muted Sorry Yes we have similar challenges we have virtual teams we have hybrid teams we have global teams we have teams in India Dublin all across the world and as we are scaling this is definitely something that we want to keep in mind so having shared vision and values I think that goes a long way and constantly reiterating that that's not something that's for the world but you know operationalizing those and having those regular check points one-on-ones meetings, gatherings having those offline conversations and I'll go back to my rituals again having those constant rituals and everybody knows what the ritual means everybody knows what and when to expect it plan for it and if you know we have a similar ritual follow right from like the SVP down to the management organization so we have that shared culture of similar visions and anyone you interact to in our team will be like you know having those same leadership qualities so I think that goes a long way in kind of investing time in your values and visions and operationalizing those I love that focus on values and the rituals Josh our last comment for today what do you think about this in terms of maintaining team cohesion? Yes someone who also works in a totally remote company I have to echo everyone of getting people together occasionally is really essential like I think everything else has to layer on top of like it is really hard if you have not actually seen someone in the flesh there's just this trust like instinctive trust it does not mean you need to do it daily or weekly or monthly but at some rate I think another part about it is really leaning into really with global teams asynchronous communication and making that valued I think that like I'm based in New Zealand despite the accent we've got people in Australia we've got people in the US that we regularly work with that spans a ton of time zones and if but most of the teams in Australia and so it's very easy for synchronous communication to become like treated as more more the way of working and it's really important to impress upon people that like that's a way to work but you need to give asynchronous communication over slack with long delays or like comments and confluence docs and you need to really normalize that and so I make a point for example even though I could jump on a zoom call with someone engaging in communications that are for example more friendly for someone on the east coast of the US and the east coast of Australia to be having that kind of asynchronous communication and I think that that that leveling of it is really important to creating cohesion that's a great point yes async communication is super critical thank you to all of our panelists for this amazing insight and product leadership and I appreciate everyone tuning in today have a good one thanks for