440: Skills that help product managers grow their careers – with Neha Bansal

Tools for planning and executing product projects

Today we are talking about the skills product managers need to grow their careers.

To help us, Neha Bansal  is with us. She is the Head of Merchant Growth and Monetization for Google’s B2B ecommerce business, where she is leading efforts to build the next $1B+ B2B business for the company. Before joining Google, Neha worked as a Management Consultant at Essex Product Consulting, where she helped organizations build products. Outside of her day job, she has guided many PdMs in reaching their career goals, and consequently, has good insights about the skills they need.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:10] What key topics do you discuss when you mentor product managers looking to further their careers?

First, how can product managers establish processes to enable their teams to succeed? Processes include forums to sync with different members of your team and other teams, forums to get leadership alignment, ensuring high quality of deliverables, and OKR planning.

Second is setting up the right funnels for access to users. I strongly believe that as a PdM, the biggest value you bring on your team is speaking to users and having a pulse of what your customers need.

Third is setting goals. I have often spoken with PdMs who say they don’t think their team understands what they want. I help them rethink what they want in a quantitative way to determine a metric that defines success.

[6:10] Tell us more about processes to help our teams succeed.

Typically, there are two big phases in bringing a product from vision to launch: planning and execution. Planning includes the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. How do you set the vision, strategy, and roadmap? At what cadence do you do that? Who are the right stakeholders and partners to work with as you are setting your vision, strategy, and roadmap? What would be some tools to do that? Those are all important processes to be intentional about.

At Google we do annual planning early in Q3 when I think through the vision and strategy for my product. We write a document that evolves over four to six weeks during which all of the leads from different teams contribute.

First, we go out and talk to customers. I talk to our customer support team and sales team to understand what challenges they have been facing. We keep a pulse of where the industry is headed and what headwinds we expect. We tap into all of that to write the vision document.

[8:27] What do you put into the product vision statement?

Typically we create a vision for the next three to five years. We break that down to where we see the product in five years, three years, and two years, and what we need to do to deliver on that vision.

The document includes at most two pages about the vision. The portion about strategy goes into more depth. This is where we think about how will we get to our vision. We start by looking at the data to substantiate why we think we can achieve that vision. We think about  our strengths, weaknesses, and competition. The strategy document provides North Star metrics. We describe the metric we care about, the target we want to achieve, where that metric is right now, and how much growth is expected each year.

Finally we write the roadmap for year one. The roadmap provides specific projects that will help us hit our North Star metrics.

[12:31] What tools do you use for planning and whom do you involve?

As a product manager, I bring together the team to have equal ownership of the planning.

I always do a two or three day offsite where I’ll bring the team together in person. We spend time understanding each other’s areas and then think about ideas.

There are a lot of workshopping techniques you could use to help people come up with ideas. One of my favorite ones is having people take one minute a...