What is your process?

sitkiewiczkasia·Oct 21, 2019

Hello! My name is Kasia Sitkiewicz and I am a Sr. PM at Github managing Billing & Payments and Subscription flows. I was wondering if you can share your Product Management process that you follow and works for you? Different orgs or teams have a different processes so I would love to hear how do you operate as a PM?

kuan·Oct 22, 2019

Following this thread – would love to hear how other PMs work. What's your process, Kasia?

dianasaur323·Oct 28, 2019

Hey Kasia! So great to meet you - I'm Diana Hsieh, I cover Product at an open-source startup (TimescaleDB), so similar in that we are both selling to developers. Hmm... in terms of process... I cover several different engineering teams, and the process I use for each team is different since I think the personalities and the maturity of the product impact process overall. For teams that touch the UI/UX, I tend to have much more constant check-ins. I use Asana for small bug fixes, and I have a larger roadmap that I'm working towards. Every 2 weeks (a sprint), we go through the to-dos and make sure they still map to the roadmap. This product doesn't have many users yet, so I spend the majority of my time project managing and thinking ahead in terms of what we need as a feature set in the future. For teams that are more back-end oriented, these teams typically have longer sprints and it's less necessary as a PM to get involved in the actual implementation. So, I still have regular check-ins with the team, but it's more to make sure that things are going as planned and to answer any UX questions as the features are being developed. For products already in use, I talk to users all the time, and use that to map the go forward roadmap. I'm probably one cycle ahead of the engineers in terms of roadmap planning. It's hard to not spend too much of your time in execution mode, so in my to do list, I actually mark off time to talk to users and think strategy, just to make sure I forget. Have you found any strategies that work well?

sitkiewiczkasia·Oct 28, 2019

Thanks, Diana! Nice to meet you too! Thank you for sharing your process. I am constantly looking for improvements to my existing flows! Here are some steps that I follow when managing my projects:1. Identify and Learn about different problems 2. Review the problems with UX, Tech leads and other stakeholders to make decisions on how to solve it3. Prioritize the work based on the scale, effort, business needs, etc and create Roadmap4. Socialize the projects with the impacted teams5. Execute the work6. Test it7. Monitor test8. Full-scale it if a winner9. Roll-back if losses reported10. Continue monitoring and reporting-> Move on to the next projects :)What I find very helpful is to have regular meetings with the team, managers, and stakeholders. It helps to be on the same page with the people I work with.

dianasaur323·Oct 29, 2019

110% agree on having regular meetings. One thing I struggle with sometimes is that as a PM, everyone expects you to know what the status is, and they assume that they don't need to keep track of status as well. I've found the only way to get around this is to have these constant meetings and follow up with emails / take-aways. I'm actually kind of liking Asana recently for tracking front-end work.