Lessons In Product Management

Validating Solutions At Scale featuring Felix Watson Jr. - Product Manager @ Microsoft

Listen Later

If you're trying to break into Product Management, sign up for the April Cohort of Jae Taylor's PM Career Accelerator today! 

On today's episode, I got to chat with Felix Watson Jr., Product Manager at Microsoft. With Microsoft's products being used by so many companies, I was curious to hear how Felix approached validating solutions at Scale, and he was kind enough to join the pod to discuss. And as an added bonus, Felix shared some killer advice for engineers looking to transition into Product as well as how Product Managers can work more effectively with their engineering counterparts.

Here's what we discussed:

  • Felix started his career in computer engineering
  • 5 years into his engineering career, Felix discovered Product Management
  • The use case that sparked Felix's fire for Product and his desire to transition
  • The path Felix took to make that leap from Engineer to Product
  • Felix's first role as a PM for Microsoft with the Dynamics 365 product
  • Now Felix works on the Azure team, supporting the support engineers with internal and customer-facing tools
  • Felix's advice for transitioning into Product and how you don't necessarily need side projects to prove your abilities
  • The ultimate example of leading by influence
  • How important it is for engineers to understand the customer and the use cases (the "why") behind what you're working on
  • The best insights come from qualitative research, which doesn't scale, but you can use quant data to validate the scale of the qual insight
  • How Felix systematically leverages customers to ensure they're solving the right problem in the right way
  • Why Felix didn't focus on industry-specific solutions rather on a horizontal solution to meet the scale and variety of customers Microsoft serves
  • The risks of trying to validate solutions at scale
  • What Felix would have done differently in validating qual insights with quant data
  • How important it is to define success metrics upfront to know whether your effort was a success or failure


    • ...more
    View all episodesView all episodes
    Download on the App Store
    Lessons In Product ManagementBy Path2Product
    • 5
    • 5
    • 5
    • 5
    • 5

    5

    26 ratings

    More shows like Lessons In Product Management

    View all
    WSJ Tech News Briefing by The Wall Street Journal

    WSJ Tech News Briefing

    1,642 Listeners

    Stuff You Should Know by iHeartPodcasts

    Stuff You Should Know

    77,717 Listeners

    Freakonomics Radio by Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

    Freakonomics Radio

    32,087 Listeners

    Hidden Brain by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

    Hidden Brain

    43,347 Listeners

    The Bill Simmons Podcast by The Ringer

    The Bill Simmons Podcast

    30,016 Listeners

    Lage der Nation - der Politik-Podcast aus Berlin by Philip Banse & Ulf Buermeyer

    Lage der Nation - der Politik-Podcast aus Berlin

    221 Listeners

    Cold Call by HBR Presents / Brian Kenny

    Cold Call

    195 Listeners

    The Daily by The New York Times

    The Daily

    110,802 Listeners

    The Product Podcast by Product School

    The Product Podcast

    167 Listeners

    Darknet Diaries by Jack Rhysider

    Darknet Diaries

    7,917 Listeners

    The Product Experience by Mind the Product

    The Product Experience

    34 Listeners

    Product Thinking by Melissa Perri

    Product Thinking

    142 Listeners

    The Rest Is Politics by Goalhanger

    The Rest Is Politics

    3,027 Listeners

    This Day in AI Podcast by Michael Sharkey, Chris Sharkey

    This Day in AI Podcast

    200 Listeners

    Product Therapy by SVPG

    Product Therapy

    10 Listeners