The Contextual Product Manager

Steen is Head of Product Management at Atlassian. He was Google Drive's Group Product Manager, VP Product at Nitro after they acquired his startup Sensedoc. Before that he was co-founder of 5th Finger which actually got acquired (not once but) twice! by both Microsoft and Merkle. AND today we are talking All things Product Management.

In this video, I discover that our team is the only one not doing daily standups! Seriously, Richard explains the disciplines they use in a remote WFH world (Melbourne was locked down hard, hard, hard at the time of recording). So we discuss some of the challenges there.

The summary is:

- Airwallex form “squads” that are spear-headed with Product Manager, Designer and Lead Engineer

- There is an over-arching SME strategy.

- Quarterly and Annual OKRs trickle down through the organisation.

opportunity decision trees (Teresa Torres, see Opportunity Solution - - Trees for Product Teams to ideate potential solutions to OKRs”

- Triaging of solutions (see Don’t build shiny objects)

- Monday planning meetings – where broader goals for the week within sprints are agreed

- Daily standups (!)

For a blog post "Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource" where we discuss a missed opportunity in leveraging the direct contact with customer as a data point in product design decisions.

Google PM for Duo, Amit Jaiswal does a walkthrough of the importance of storytelling skills in Product Management: the audiences and the method.

There is right and wrong ways to roll out your OKRs. In this talk Sten covers some basics around setting the right objectives, right key results and what flows from that.

This section of a longer fireside covers:

- baggage BAs bring if they become product managers

- triads, tribes and durable teams

- is the structure a scaleup from how a startup should organize its team?

- why roadmaps suck and OKRs are a better organising principle

- what is a Product Council and how it maps to company strategy

In another snippet from the interview with Matt from Bonjoro we discuss why “Jobs to be done” (JTBD) is so important to them.

Bonjoro have a large inbound funnel of different triallers types – because their platform is horizontally applicable. However, they are optimizing for SaaS customers in Sales and Customer Service use-cases – they are high value and high conversion probability. He discusses the conundrum here.

It seems brutal but if Bonjoro try to craft onboarding for all users they will lose their valuable SaaS customers by diluting the flow.

The founder of Bonjoro digs in with me about the company journey, the user onboarding and his thoughts on Jobs-to-be-done and Product-Led-Growth.

Bonjoro lets SaaS companies boost customer engagement with perfectly timed personal videos with powerful integrations make it easy to convert your customers at the right part of the use journey - I think this is a product that will grow like crazy.

If you want the video check https://pointzi.com/blog

We crammed 100+ people into a fireside on Growth and Product with Jordan Lewis from Deputy. This is the full session recording including Q&A, if you want to see the video version of this check out this blog post and follow our newsletter. https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/03/02/the-truth-about-a-b-testing/

The video and transcript are at https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/02/12/product-led-growth-to-drive-down-your-cac/

I spoke to the Deputy Growth guys (Francois Bondiguel – Head of Growth and Jordan Lewis – Director of Growth) about their experience bringing the method into a fast growing startup where different stakeholders have different opinions on how to drive leads while driving down cost of acquisition.This is one of the main promises of the book: "How to Build a Product That Sells Itself".The point is that advertising is expensive, which means your CAC (Cost-of-Acquisition) is high. The promise is that if you design your product experience, then customers will:recruit customers,refer customers orthe product automatically draws other customers inand the product is so closely aligned to a users "Job-to-be-done" that the churn rate is low and people start to talk as a substitute for advertising.