Behind Every Great Product
How to become a great Product Manager, where’s the Series A market now, what makes a successful founder, jobs, funding rounds, and more
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Behind Every Great Product
Behind every great product, there is someone, usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly, that is playing a critical role. They usually have the title “product manager” but they might be a startup co-founder or the CEO, or they might be in another role on the team and stepped up because they saw the need. The title is not important; the work they do is.
Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
Behind every great product, there’s a great product manager. There’s a lot of confusion in the industry about what product managers do, with many voices that are often contradictory. So I invited nine product leaders from big tech and startups across the US, UK and Greece and asked them what makes a great product manager. A huge thank you to Maria Arnaoutaki (Group Product Manager, Spotify), Georgios Alexandros Balafoutis (Senior Product Manager, Microsoft), Thanos Bismpigiannis (Chief Product Officer, Rain Instant Pay), George Chatzieleftheriou (Senior Director of Product, Blueground), Jason Keramidas (VP Product, Brace), Manos Kyriakakis (Head of Product & Growth, Simpler.), Gerasimos Marketos (Director of Product, Hack The Box), Marily Nika (AI Product Lead, Meta) and Justin Vekinis (Senior Product Manager, Amazon). They were all willing to share their precious time, stories, and insights with me and I deeply appreciate it.
Let’s get to it!
Actionable Insights
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what you should know about how to become a better product manager.
Product management consists in discovering a product that’s valuable, viable, usable and feasible.
Behind great products, there are great product managers who obsess with problems, not solutions - the “whys” and the “whats”, not the “hows”. They constantly talk to and get insights from customers.
There’s no ideal background for getting into product management. Personality traits often matter more than particular professional or educational experiences.
Developing both hard and soft skills early on is critical in a product management career. From empathy, curiosity and communication skills to business and technical fundamentals, and more.
Focusing mostly on product delivery and maintaining the product backlog leads people to assume the role of a product owner or an agile project manager, instead of a product manager.
Great product managers set the direction of the product by understanding the market and the customers, outlining what success looks like, and prioritizing ruthlessly.
Great product managers protect their time and continue developing skills regardless of seniority and level. A product manager’s calendar speaks more truth than their to-do list.
Product sense can be developed through empathy for your customers and a deep understanding of the entire customer journey, along with a structured product development process from discovery all the way to user adoption and iteration.
There’s often a fine balance to be found between using data and following your intuition for product decisions.
The role of a Product Manager
As Marty Cagan described in his book Inspired, product management consists in discovering a product that’s valuable (customers buy or use), viable (solution works within the business and market constraints), usable (users figure out how to use) and feasible (engineers have the skills and technology to implement).
While at the same time, product designers ensure its utility, and engineers its feasibility. In order to do that, PMs provide in-depth knowledge to their teams about the constraints of the business (sales, marketing, legal, and so on), the market (competition and trends) and the users & customers (with data on how they engage with the product). Moreover, they track the industry trends and competitive landscape as these pertain to the product.
Then, product managers collaborate with product designers and engineers to discover effective solutions and work together to deliver them to the market. It’s important to note that product managers influence their teammates, as well as their colleagues, stakeholders and key executives, through the use of data and logic.
George Chatzieleftheriou, Senior Director of Product, Blueground
There’s often the misperception that product managers are here just to create roadmaps or write user stories. Yes, these are tools to help them communicate with the rest of the team and stakeholders, but the role involves much more than that. A product manager is a person with a deep understanding of the users' problems who works with a team to deliver the best possible solutions to those problems. I like the simplicity in Marty Cagan's definition where "the product manager defines what should be built". In that sense, a PM’s high-level responsibilities are:
Define a clear and meaningful product vision and product strategy.
Constantly strive to understand user needs and how these evolve.
Ensure that the team works on the right things - meaning they align with the product vision, strategy, user needs, and company goals.
Keep stakeholders updated on what the team builds and why, and communicate to them using terms they are familiar with, while at the same time balancing their needs with user needs.
Manos Kyriakakis, Head of Product & Growth, Simpler.
Getting into Product Management
There are many articles online that describe common backgrounds and skills product managers have. An engineering degree or MBA are the typical educational pedigrees mentioned, with none of those being a must. That’s because the role itself varies so much across companies and industries that there is no ideal background which ensures success or even a head start in product management.
What seems to be common among great product managers are certain personality traits. Product management is the perfect career for misfits, for those that didn’t belong. Those who couldn’t decide what to focus on during university or their first jobs, because they liked too many things or got easily bored. Actually, product managers enjoy this type of pluralism, instead of being intimidated or stressed by it. They are not scared of constant change; they thrive in it.
This is why you see product managers coming from diverse backgrounds and experiences: ex business analysts, consultants, engineers, marketeers, designers, etc. People that started their careers by specializing, but eventually felt the urge to find a role where they can work on the broader picture and where no second day is the same - that’s what product management is about.
Georgios Alexandros Balafoutis, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
There are many paths to product, but it helps to have at least some experience with the business/area you’re working in. For instance, working in some adjacent way to business leaders, such as business or finance analysts, and then transition into the role once you have a strong grasp on the way the business is run. Those that have worked directly within the operations can apply that business knowledge to help guide a product to success, because they understand how the inputs affect the outputs of the business and are aware of the company’s long-term vision.
While lots of attributes are important, I think number one is having curiosity. Every strong product manager I have seen has loved to learn - and not just within their space, but outside of their core area. Ultimately, a product manager’s job is to solve problems and being curious enables you to learn about solutions and applications from different areas that can inspire you to help solve problems with your own product. As someone who has transitioned to product/strategy, I’d recommend trying to learn as much about the business as possible - whether it’s during weekly reviews or through hands-on with the operations, just putting yourself in a position to learn and build trust with your leaders will help open a lot of doors for you and enable you to be successful if you choose to change to being a PM.
Justin Vekinis, Senior Product Manager, Amazon
Skills Product Managers need to develop early in their careers
There are certain hard and soft skills that are key for any product manager and I believe they are essential to develop early on. In the spectrum of hard skills:
Research & analysis. As a PM, you constantly research and analyze everything; users, competitors, product metrics.
Writing. You’ll write a lot to present your ideas, document how the product works, or even create user stories and pass them over to your development team.
Basic business concepts. Revenues, profits, budgeting, cashflows, P&L, and how these affect each other.
Technical skills. Having (at least) some basic understanding of technical concepts will allow you to communicate better with the rest of the tech team.
When it comes to soft skills:
Empathy. You need to empathize with your users, stakeholders, and colleagues, so that you have a deep understanding of their problems and concerns.
Analytical thinking. The ability to break down complex problems and concepts into smaller increments, in order to work through them.
Business acumen. This will help you find the right balance between solving your users' problems, while also hitting business objectives.
Be a great communicator. Every day, you talk with many people with different backgrounds and seniority levels, hence adjusting your approach to articulate your thoughts in a manner that’s understandable by everyone is critical.
Manos Kyriakakis, Head of Product & Growth, Simpler.
My advice for product managers starting up their careers would be to:
Gain domain knowledge to demonstrate a thorough understanding of customer needs, industry trends, etc. This will enable you to build products, which solve customer problems and identify market opportunities.
Obsess about problems, not solutions. Make sure you recognize the bigger picture, before working towards a solution. Ask key questions to understand the actual needs, evaluate workarounds and alternatives, consider the engineering effort, and then decide what’s the best solution. The same applies when pitching a product: focus on the problem and articulate how the product solves it and avoid just listing features and product specifications.
Develop prioritization skills to ensure your team always works on the highest priorities. It’s equally important to communicate the costs and benefits of every decision, as well as the thought process behind it and how these align with larger business goals. This way, even if people are unhappy, they will at least respect the way the decision was taken.
Master communication skills and be a great listener. This comes in different flavors. For instance: with customers to discover their goals, expectations, and feedback, with internal stakeholders to keep them informed and seek their input, with development teams to provide direction and guidance, but also understand their pain points and potential blockers.
Gerasimos Marketos, Director of Product, Hack The Box
Fallacies and common mistakes Product Managers make early in their careers
The following are based on my own experience and I wish someone had told me to avoid them at the beginning of my career:
Don’t rush a launch. All PMs want to launch features ASAP, and in fact, we PMs are often assessed by the number of launches we make, but that doesn’t mean that we should compromise the quality of a feature. Being able to balance quality vs quantity is really important.
Don’t micromanage. We all want a great product to get built, but that doesn’t mean you need to micromanage the team. Trust your stakeholders to do their jobs while making sure they have clear requirements and enough resources.
Don’t get discouraged when things don’t go well. Mistakes and launches you had to roll back are part of the game. Learn from your mistakes. Move on.
Don’t assume you “are getting the hang of it”. It will take a while before you find your own style as a PM, and that’s totally fine.
Marily Nika, AI Product Lead, Meta
Product management is not as cut-and-dry as other roles, so chances are PMs had different prior positions and experiences. A common mistake product managers make, early in their careers, is not adapting fast enough to the expectations of the role. To give two examples:
PMs with engineering background dictating how a feature should be implemented to the development team, instead of focusing on the “why” and “what”. This often results in a rocky relationship with the team.
PMs coming from account management, customer success, and similar roles rushing to meet customer requests, therefore building features based on customer wants instead of customer needs.
Another frequent fallacy especially of junior PMs is focusing more on product ownership activities and neglecting the product management side of the role. This could be a big challenge, especially in companies where PMs have to wear the PO hat (among others). Someone new to product may feel more comfortable working only with the development team and internal stakeholders, maintaining the team backlog, and executing an already-defined product vision. Successful PMs go a lot further and set the direction of the product by understanding the market and the customers, outlining what success looks like, and prioritizing ruthlessly.
Gerasimos Marketos, Director of Product, Hack The Box
Key areas to focus on regardless of level and seniority
Regardless of their level and seniority, all PMs should talk to and get insights from current and potential customers. From current customers, you learn about existing problems and needs, while from potential customers you discover new trends and opportunities. Having said that, directly talking with potential customers who are evaluating your product may be tricky - a few indirect ways to get your feedback is through win/loss reports from sales or joining calls with account executives.
There are two levels of product management professionals where the lack of customer feedback is more common:
Junior product managers: As a first-time PM, it's easy to misinterpret what the business and team need from you and fall into the trap of assuming the role of a product owner or an agile project manager - roles that focus more on execution rather than figuring out the customer problems you should focus on.
Product management leaders: At the opposite end, product management leaders may be tricked into believing they already know what they need to know: market problems, customer needs, and product trends. In our ever-changing economy, however, industry and market knowledge are becoming obsolete surprisingly fast, which is why staying in touch with customers is an absolute necessity to define product strategy and lead your team towards its goals.
Georgios Alexandros Balafoutis, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Product managers across levels should “look around corners”. I think this is the number one way a product manager can help drive their company forward and deliver great experiences for their customers. Also, it’s a big trust builder for someone inside a company. Because PMs are both close to the core business, but also need to step back and look at the vision of the company, they are well equipped to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their product, but even better equipped to see what customers may not even know that they want. When customer behaviour and trends start to shift, a great product manager should be able to look and anticipate what is coming and provide that outlook to guide the business for long-term success. Not just calling out the changing behaviour, but starting to lay out and visualise a solution for how to shape the product to capitalise on a trend to create an even better experience for customers.
Justin Vekinis, Senior Product Manager, Amazon
Learn how to code. Not because you will need to code on your day-to-day, but because you will need to understand what it takes to launch a digital product. It is important to empathize with your users, but even more so with your own team.
Give back to the community. The PM role is still being defined, shaped, molded. We all need to learn from each other, and collaborate in order to bring impactful products to life.
Marily Nika, AI Product Lead, Meta
What sets successful Product Managers apart from ones who plateau
The easy answer to this question would be their skills. The list ranges from subject matter expertise, to leadership, strategic mindset, great market knowledge, outstanding communication, innovativeness, strong research skills, and so on.
But, if I had to choose one word to describe what makes a great product manager, it would be: balanced. If you let your skills or focus overdevelop in one area and underdevelop in another, you risk setbacks for both your product and career. Balance plays an essential role across all areas of responsibility as a product manager.
To be a great PM you need to balance your tactical project-management side with your big-thinker strategic side. You’re required to be firm and say no when necessary to protect the product and company, even if doing so will make the team unhappy. While using every opportunity to build and strengthen the cohesion with your team.
Lastly and that’s my favorite one, great product managers find the middle ground between trusting their gut and following the evidence. You need to develop a highly intuitive sense of what your product and the market need, along with gathering, analyzing, and applying data to support your ideas.
George Chatzieleftheriou, Senior Director of Product, Blueground
If I had to pick a list of the most important things great PMs do, these would be:
Delegate. Being hands-on and great at execution is a great start, but not sustainable as PMs grow professionally. Identifying areas of decision making that can be spread across their team counterparts and feeling comfortable to drop things, helps them maintain direction, but not get lost in the weeds.
Write and communicate clearly, succinctly and maintain the right context level for an audience.
Use tools and frameworks consciously. Great product managers know how to get creative when a previously successful process doesn’t seem right for a problem or team.
Keep up with their global industry and competitive trends. It’s easy to hyperfocus on a particular problem space you’re trying to solve, only to find out that it’s not really a problem for your users once you’re solved it.
Consciously put time aside to think (and develop themselves). They say that a PM’s calendar speaks more truth than their to-do list. Being reactive to every single thing on a daily basis steals precious time from deep thinking required for product strategy and vision. Learning to say “no” and setting boundaries are both key. There is this paradox that the more senior the PM the less they feel they need to spend time on personal growth, whereas in fact, the opposite is true.
Use a personal knowledge-management system. Capturing what matters and distilling information into insights, removes noise and provides a wider vision of product problems.
Maria Arnaoutaki, Group Product Manager, Spotify
How to develop product sense and consistently build product experiences with the intended impact
Product sense begins with developing empathy for your customers. What are their problems and priorities? How do they interact with your product? Every product manager needs to build their toolkit around interpreting and incorporating qualitative feedback and quantitative analysis into their decision making. Like any other skill, you become more capable over time and can more quickly and easily gain insights from the information at your disposal. Patterns and behavior types begin to emerge, across products and industries, and this builds the real foundations of product sense and the ability to find creative solutions to problems.
Initially, your focus is likely on a segment of functionality or a specific, limited scope of an overall product experience. As you move up the ladder and as you become more fluent, your sphere of ownership expands, requiring you to develop an understanding of overall systems and how the impact of a change/improvement in one area will affect the whole. Sometimes, solving an issue in your area will make life harder for someone else. A key difference that I see between junior and senior product managers is this ability to understand the larger ecosystem. Gaining an appreciation for the entire customer journey and how it is, ideally, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts also enables easier collaboration between product managers across different feature sets. One of my jobs as a product leader is facilitating conversations around how and where to make tradeoffs, so that my teams can co-identify solutions that improve the entire experience.
Jason Keramidas, VP Product, Brace
Launching a successful product is no easy feat. Doing that consistently through time is even harder. A lot of different factors, including pure luck, contribute to the success or failure of a product.
Shaping a product development process that consistently delivers successful results can benefit from a solid structure. As you launch more products or work on improving existing ones, you keep monitoring and improving on the different steps of the process that maximise the probability of success. This is not limited to the product delivery part of the product lifecycle. It is important to adopt such a structured approach end-to-end, from discovery all the way to user adoption and iteration.
When adopting a structured way of working towards product discovery, development and launch of your products, you have a clear view of the elements that are under your control. Streamlining these parts of the process reduces the corresponding risks, allowing you to put more effort and focus on the factors that are outside of your control.
As you move up in seniority, your role evolves. Instead of being the one at the centre of this process, you are now the one that coaches that person. Your focus now is not on the process for a single squad or product team, but on how the different product and non-product teams interact with each other to deliver the intended user impact across the entire product portfolio of the company.
Thanos Bismpigiannis, Chief Product Officer, Rain Instant Pay
There are a few key things that help you develop product sense:
Observe pain points you encounter. Every single daily frustration or problem you encounter might be a potential idea for a product or a business. Ask yourself, why is this painful? What type of problem is it? Are there other people like me that could be in a similar position? (Worth being aware of false consensus bias: just because you or your friends experience this problem, doesn’t equal critical mass).
Monitor product and tech trends. What are the biggest shifts that are happening right now? What kind of problems are people trying to solve?
Develop hypotheses, not firm beliefs. That would allow you to leave room for experimentation and failure. Tweak, measure, learn is an excellent adjacent framework to that. Use insights as a sounding board to guide you.
Maria Arnaoutaki, Group Product Manager, Spotify
Finding the right balance between intuition and data
There is a famous quote from W. Edwards Deming: “In god we trust. All others bring data”. My engineering background frequently makes me lean towards hard facts and data when I need to make a decision. However, the reality is that many times the required data is not available, either because they cannot be obtained within reasonable time or budget, or because they don’t exist. In such cases, intuition is the only way forward. By thinking through a specific situation or plan, I try to make some fairly safe assumptions that can help me bridge any data gaps. Sometimes, this thinking process helps to identify adjacent factors that can be measured, allowing me to improve my understanding of the risks involved in my decision. In cases where data is scarce and the potential risk impact is significant, taking a more risk-based approach is prudent. Instead of making a single big decision, I try to make multiple smaller ones that allow me to gather data while taking action and adjust my follow up decisions accordingly.
Thanos Bismpigiannis, Chief Product Officer, Rain Instant Pay
More often than not, it comes down to whether you are iterating on something vs building something new. If you have an existing product and you are trying to move the needle in a particular direction, data analysis can be a great guide to understand where to focus your attention. When you are building something completely new, however, it is a very different story. It requires reading between the lines of what your customers say their pain points are and understanding what they really mean. In situations like these, I find it helpful to find analogous solutions in other industries. What does this problem remind me of? How have I seen it addressed before? What did I like or dislike about those experiences? As you move on in your career you will have more to draw on, but don’t sell your own experience as a digital consumer short. The key to making an intuitive decision is being clear on what you are going to measure and what “success” looks like. Without data to back you up, you need to put more effort into explaining why implementing a particular feature is going to positively affect the user experience.
Jason Keramidas, VP Product, Brace
Startup Jobs
Are you looking for your next career move? Check out 943 job openings from Greek startups hiring in Greece, abroad, and remotely.
News
Aisera raised $90m Series D to enhance employee and customer experiences with AI, led by Goldman Sachs and Thoma Bravo with participation from more leading investors.
Boulevard raised $70m Series C to help beauty and wellness salons with their bookings.
Flyway raised $10m in Seed and debt funding to help people co-own a second home, at a fraction of the price, and launched in the city of London.
Neurofenix announced a $7m Series A to revolutionise how neurological rehabilitation is delivered.
PD Neurotechnology raises €5m Series A led by CIC Capital Partners and BigPi Ventures, as well as through the online investing platform for startups, Seedblink.
Consolidation in the quick commerce market in Greece with Pop Market acquiring Ferto.
Startup Profiles
Better Origin, Moonshot, ScienceIO
Interesting Reads & Podcasts
A talk on anonymous credentials and decentralizing digital identities with privacy from Foteini Baldimtsi, Assistant Professor at George Mason University.
How to align corporate and product strategy from Babis Makrynikolas, VP Product & Pricing at Blueground, here.
The future of State Management in Vue.js by Fotis Adamakis, Senior Frontend Engineer at Glovo, here.
A post on how to measure in-app marketing success without an A/B testing framework from Matina Thomaidou, Director of Customer Success at Wappier.
Part1 of a short guide to creating and delivering efficient presentations from Vasso Kalaitzidou, Head of Category Management at Skroutz.
Where’s the Series A market now with John Vrionis, Partner at Unusual Ventures, here.
Article on Greek tech companies designing microchips for smartwatches produced by global electronics giants.
What makes a successful founder with Apostolos Apostolakis, Partner at VentureFriends, here.
Two surveys to take a look at and participate in if relevant: my colleague Sanne Goslinga kicked off the 2022 Greek Compensation Report and you can contribute here. LAUNCHub Ventures launched the State of CEE/SEE early-stage fundraising, where founders that have raised a funding round can anonymously participate here to help other founders know what to expect when planning their fundraising.
Events
“Lenny's Newsletter: Athens Meetup” on Sep 5
“PoW vs PoS” by Bitcoin & Blockchain Tech Meetup (Thessaloniki) on Sep 9
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Thanks for reading and see you in two weeks,
Alex