Hello everyone my name is Kenton Kivestu. I'm an ex-Googler, an ex-BCG
consultant and the founder of RocketBlocks - an online platform that helps
candidates prepare for interviews. In this RocketBlocks mini lesson I'm
really excited because we're sitting down with Bill Ferrell who is a former
Google product manager, he did a stint at NASA early in his career, he is a Y
Combinator backed founder, and he's currently the CTO and co-founder of a
company called the Outcome Machines. So Bill really has done it all and in this
conversation about product management were going to talk about the craft of
product management, we're gonna talk about the skills that are needed to
succeed, and walk through some common product scenarios and see how Bill would
respond to them. So let's go ahead and jump in.
Okay so let's start by talking about the craft of product management. And can you
tell me a little bit - when you think about the day-to-day of a product
manager at a big tech company like Google - what does that look like? What
type of tasks and work are you doing? Great, yes. The first thing that comes to
mind I think is thinking about the customer, but actually I'll expand
that and say the customers. So you have of course the customer of your actual
product but then as a product manager I like to think about the different people
that I work with as my customer in some sense. So in the day-to-day work of being
a product manager it's managing my customers or managing my work product
for those customers, and then maybe managing some people who probably don't
report to me, but that might think of me as a customer and I need something from
them. So who are these normal customers that I'm thinking about? Again I'll start
with the actual customer of your product. I think that in a normal day or normal
week I'm spending some amount of time trying to talk to or hear from directly
or indirectly some of our customers. Directly that might be a sales call that
I get to join, or it might be jumping into some support emails or something
like that and talking to customers that way. Indirectly it might be that there's
an aggregation of "hey, here are the common issues that the sales team or
support team is handling for your product" and oh, ok, was an uptick or a normal
level of people with billing problems or
getting started problems where we have X number of created
accounts, but they haven't done the first thing - they haven't actually created a
campaign, or they haven't actually gone to the next screen in the app, or
something like that. So those are your real customers. And then - or your real end
customer. Then there's the customers inside the organization which might be
your engineering team. They might be looking to you for guidance as to
the focus is, what problems or real problems versus just bugs that aren't
happening that frequently. Or they may be reliant on you to help get a release
ready where there's a bunch of steps that need to be gone through before in
some sense the product is released, right? So you can think about that as well
maybe we need to have support materials ready, we're going to need to have a
launch blog post - those are always fun & popular. We might need to have a website
if we don't already have one, or we might need to update the website with new
materials related to showing off the awesome new features that we have
included. It might need designs whether that's for the product itself if you're
more in the like development phase so that could be relating to designers. And
then there's other customers in some sense like lawyers where maybe there's
some change that you're making, whether it's in a single country or multiple
countries if you're at a big tech company, and you need sign-off before
you're gonna make some change and make sure that that is a viable change to
make across all of the different regions. And with the new privacy laws there's
always something new in some sense to talk to the lawyers about and make sure
that you're doing the right thing, but from a legal standpoint, even if you
already know that you're doing the right thing from the human standpoint. But if
we bring it back up to like well what does a day look like? I like to try to
divide the week up into days of course and thinking about each day is a
different customer where that's my primary focus or that's the primary
meeting that I'm gonna have. Maybe Monday's engineering, Tuesdays I'm
working with the designers, Wednesdays I'm meeting with sales and support,
Thursdays everyone else, and then Fridays might be more of a planning or strategy
day. I'm thinking longer-term whether that's a couple weeks out a couple
months out the quarter the year in terms of goals like that.
Great. I hope you enjoyed this snippet of my conversation with Bill Ferrell. We've
got a ton of great content coming out on both the consulting and the product
management career path on a weekly basis, so if you haven't subscribed yet already
there is a big button on screen right now. Go ahead and click that and that
means you'll get everything that we put out as soon as it arrives. Thank you so
much for watching, and have a great day!