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Mind the Product

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Synthesia becomes the UK’s largest AI product: Lessons for product teams

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Does product management only work for tech and startups?

B2B product management

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With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris' approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform. You can find him at ProductTank, or on twitter as @camassey.

Product Manager

Chris Massey

<p>In this November 2020 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtpcon/digital">#mtpcon Digital</a> session, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ibscribe">Ibrahim Bashir</a></span>, VP Product at <a href="https://www.box.com/en-gb/home">Box</a>, discusses different product management archetypes and when to bring each one into a team.</p>
<p>Watch the session in full, or read on for the highlights.</p>
<h2>Archetypes</h2>
<p>You end up defining how successful your product org will be at the point when you set it up, and you should set it up based on the intended outcomes. With that in mind, there are really 3 types of product managers:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">The person who starts the team</span>. Someone with no anxiety about being the first. Great at assessing the market, experimenting with different ideas &#8211; a 0-to-1 kind of person.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">A scaling person</span>. Somebody who, once an idea has achieved product/market fit and you need to rapidly capture more market, is an operator who can drive towards a North Star metric.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sustaining people</span>. We have a legitimate business, with a predictable, repeatable cadence. This person can operate in a “mind meld” with the customer, and make sure everything continues to run as expected.</li>
</ul>
<p>“Where is the product in its lifecycle, and what kind of product team does it need right now? Starting, Scaling or Sustaining?”</p>
<h2>Establish a Pipeline</h2>
<p>Once you’ve worked out what kind of team you need, how do you find these people? If you’re bootstrapping a product team, your organisation / product  / team is probably new, which means you’re starting from some kind of a blank slate. Fundamentally, at this point in the journey you want someone with a wide breadth of experience.</p>
<p>We all start by going after someone with a “perfect resume” &#8211; i.e. someone who has peaked. It’s really hard to find those people and convince them to join a new thing. Aim to find people who are showing the signs of being <span style="font-style: italic;">ready</span> to peak. If you can bring them onto your team, they’ll hopefully be achieving that peak while building your product. Ideally, look for “exponential” hires, who have a fantastic network to enable your second wave of hires, and look for hires who instinctively build bridges between functions and teams.</p>
<p>“You really want to find people who are on the cusp of doing something amazing, and then bring them over to your organisation, where they can do that amazing thing.”</p>
<p><img decoding="async" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ee72b716-5a29-4834-b686-9ddb925fe17e_Ibrahim20Bashir2.png" alt="" /></p>
<h2>Integration</h2>
<p>Start by “pre-socialising” the idea of hiring a product person &#8211; planting the seed of the idea with various teams, building expectations of “swim lanes” and clear lines of communication. You will be hiring a product person as part of a team, so it’s really important to make sure the whole team is aligned on who you’re hiring and why. Critically, rather than cookie-cutter hiring people who are the same “shape” in terms of their skills, think about balancing and complementing teams.</p>
<p>“The best way to set up a new product manager for success is to make sure they complement the team that is already in place. When I am hiring, I will prioritise competencies based on the existing skills in the team.”</p>
<h2>More on Hiring Great Product People</h2>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-secret-sauce-to-hiring-great-product-people-by-kate-leto/">The Secret Sauce to Hiring Great Product People by Kate Leto</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/hacking-the-hiring-process-alex-yang-max-bevan-on-the-product-experience/">Hacking The Hiring Process – Alex Yang &amp; Max Bevan on The Product Experience</a></span></li>
<li><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/hiring-and-developing-product-managers/">Hiring and Developing Product Managers</a></span></li>
</ul>

core/freeform

Making product magic with cross-functional collaboration by Ebi Atawodi

10 years Wiser: Lessons learned from scaling Wise by Nilan Peiris

Breaking down misconceptions to create healthier teams by Adrian Howard

Creating courageous product teams with Yi-Wei Ang

Mastering perspective – zoom in, zoom out as a product leader by Navya Rehani Gupta

Building healthy and high performing teams with West Monroe

The importance of psychological safety for remote teams by Diana Stepner

Common transformation pitfalls by Marty Cagan

Building a digital product organisation, brick by brick by Nils Michaelis

Product, dance, and pockets of brilliance by Pippa Topp

Bootstrapping a Product Team, by Ibrahim Bashir

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