Hi all! I’m connecting with product managers to understand more about the space. I make 30-60 minute interviews as part of some discovery research I am doing for a side project. I did an interview of a product manager in an enterprise and learnt quite a lot. Here are a few truths and titbits from it.
* Product management is a high velocity communication game. You are constantly working with customers, customer success managers, sales engineers, CXOs, marketing team, sales people etc.
* You can easily have a 1000 open tickets. You need to stay on top of which are in progress and what are the priorities.
* The customer may communicate with multiple people in your organization but ultimately it is your responsibility to ensure that their priorities are taken into consideration and addressed.
* Slack, Outlook in Office 365, Jira, and Zendesk are the goto tools
Here is the interview https://prodjeeves.com/transitioning-into-product-owner-role-interview/
I want to hear what the community says. What would you like to hear?
What would you like to ask other product managers? If you have some questions, let me know.
Otoh, I am also trying to understand the space. If you can spend sometime for an interview, please let me know. I would be glad to.
I'd ask them what PMs do in their organization, what POs do, and what the difference is in their mind. Ask what level of detail they operate at, what they delegate to others, and what types of things are expected to be passed up to their boss.
You also might get interesting perspectives if you explore outside the software industry. Product managers exist in all kinds of companies, with the same overall goal to understand the market and produce the correct product under the correct business model. But the day-to-day of a software PM is vastly different than the day-to-day of a PM that produces retail goods, for example.