A Spotify product manager presented on navigating a career in product management. He discussed defining a clear product vision and strategy, effectively executing by communicating plans and using data-driven techniques, and common challenges like prioritization, managing teams, and gaining technical skills. The presentation emphasized the importance of understanding users and business needs to develop the right solutions and measure impact.

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7. Ashwin Asokan
TONIGHT’S SPEAKER

8. How to Navigate Being a
Product Manager
Ashwin Asokan
Product Manager @ Spotify
October 2018

9. Tonight’s Agenda
● My Background
● What is a Product Manager?
● Product Vision & Product Strategy
● Execute Effectively
● Common Challenges faced as a PM
● Q&A

10. My Road to PM
~4th Grade 2011 2012 2013 2018
First Product
Management
Experiences
Product
Analyst
Consultant
Mechanical
Engineering
Systems
Analyst
Product
Manager

11. What is a
Product
Manager?
“Understand our strategic and
competitive position. Set your
team's goals, success metrics and
roadmap to align with our mission
and drive maximum impact based
on data analysis, market research
and usability studies.”
-Lyft
- Draw insights and inspiration from
user research, trends in the market,
and direct feedback from artists,
managers labels and publishers to
define new strategies.
- Drive innovation, form product
hypotheses and create iterative
roadmaps based on qualitative and
quantitative feedback.
-Spotify
- Enable products and features
through a combination of new
development, iterating on current
features
- Talk to customers and prospects
often to understand what the market
wants, but also identify the unspoken,
unmet needs.
- Utilize data to help make informed
decisions and track progress
- Prioritize what must be done versus
what could be done
- Adobe
- Own your product, from vision to
delivery. You will maintain the roadmap
and ensure buy-in across the
organization
- Leverage qualitative and quantitative
data to prioritize new initiatives
- Ensure stakeholders are up to date on
new and upcoming features and the
outcomes of previous launches
- Bonobos
This role will be responsible for building
the highest quality experiences for users.
It requires a leader that is extremely data
driven and has proven experience in
making the complex simple and intuitive.
The leader must also be obsessively user
centric and able to demonstrate that they
have user centered principles in all of
their work.
- PIMCO

12. “Product Managers drive the vision, strategy,
design, and execution of their product”
-Sachin Rekhi

13. Product Vision
- Why does your team exist?
- What is the problem your team aims to solve?
- How will you make your world (or the world) be a better place?
- Who are your end users and how do you aim to impact them?
Product Vision is the motivation behind building your product

14. Product Strategy
- Product Strategy = How you reach that end Vision
- Business & User focused Strategy
- Technical Strategy
- Consider Overall Business Needs and Stakeholder Needs
- Continuous Roadmapping
- Measure Impact: How will we know if we are successful?
- What KPIs are we measuring against? Did we move the #’s with our rollout?
- Know what failure looks like!!!

16. Execute Effectively
● Communicate your Product Vision & Product Strategy to:
○ Your Stakeholders
○ Your Customers & End Users (when applicable)
○ Yourself & Your Team!
● Use Product Management techniques
○ OKR
○ Data Driven Design Decisions
○ User Feedback
○ A/B Testing
○ Measure Impact
○ Continuous Roadmapping
● Tweak It

17. Product
Development
Lifecycle

19. Challenge #1

20. Challenge #1: Prioritizing & When to Say No
- What makes this feature request more important than the others?
- Is this ask:
- Contributing to our product strategy & product vision?
- Impacting our end users?
- Critical to our impact on the business?
- Say yes if it makes sense!
Stick to your plan, your plan has a
Vision & Strategy behind it.

21. Challenge #2: Managing your team
● Drive your team towards achieving a common goal (the Vision)
● Make sure your team knows what you are doing and why
● Your team is your best asset
○ A good team has great team members
○ A great team has great team members that understand their mission
● Product Managers don’t manage people individually

22. Challenge #3: “I am not technical enough!”
● Don’t worry.
● Strengthen Knowledge
○ Know your market, competitors, and industry
○ Educate yourself on the technologies that you are working with
● Understand your technical landscape
○ Who are the other PMs & teams?
○ What systems are you and your team dependent on?
○ What system integrations exist within your purview
○ Who uses what system?
● Develop your relationships
○ Know your stakeholders, your end-users, and your customers

23. What You Ship Will Matter!
(and people will talk about it)

24. ashwin.asokan@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/ashwinasokan
bit.ly/talkbyashwin

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