Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
It's time for Dear Melissa.
We go into deep questions from our listeners every single week and you can submit yours at dearmelissacom.
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So let's dive in.
Dear Melissa, we recently grew our engineering team and are now able to reform into three squads.
One of the squads is more platform-based and I was moved to that squad because I am the most technical of all the product managers.
While it makes sense on paper, I am no longer doing end user product management, which is what I love doing.
Thankfully, the engineers that are on my team are incredible, experienced and, best of all, great peers to work with.
So I'm at least excited to learn and lean into the infrastructure and DevOps experience.
However, I'm a bit of a loss for understanding what the day to day should and could look like as a technical product manager.
To make sure I'm doing the best that I can in this role.
I know what it looks like for end user product management, but this feels foreign and no one on the team is able to give proper guidance.
Do you have any advice on this type of transition and role?
Alright, so platform product management is weird, because now you have to start to think about who your end user is, and your end user is the people internally.
So I actually worked on a lot of products in my early career that were not customer facing.
They were more internal for what we were doing.
And those are important as well.
And they tend to get neglected.
So this is an opportunity for you not to just prove that you could do great technical product management and learn from your peers, which is fantastic, but it's also an opportunity for you to get some goodwill, because you're helping the people who sit around you all day long and they're going to be very excited about that.
So you should get excited about that too.
So when you think about going into a back end team, that's more technical what you're doing is worrying still about the user experience, but the user experience from a workflow perspective of the people around you.
So you're going to want to get up to speed especially if you're working with DevOps or anything like that on how those people do their work.
Right.
How are the developers deploying?
What's frustrating about it?
Let me understand the back of the platform, these back end components.
And you want to get up to speed with that.
Most developers are happy to sit down with you and help explain that architecture and dive into that.
And I would try to get up to speed with some of those more technical terms.
So you want to understand things like what a platform is, how APIs work and how they're built, why APIs are powerful, how to read API documentation and get into those types of things.
You want to understand more about DevOps and how those things work as well.
And all more of this technical side of the world.
Stay with your developers.
Ask them what they do.
Watch them.
Watch their workflows.
Watch them go in and out of the different programs that they use.
Watch them go to deploy stuff.
See if they're using things like GitHub or something else for deployment pipelines.
They usually have a lot of models and a lot of schemas for those things as well.
Get your architectural diagrams.
Get your development pipeline diagrams.
Sometimes they live in programs.
Sometimes they live out in Google Docs.
Find out where all that lives and study up on that and then start to think about what you can do to make their lives better according to your remit, right?
So ideally you've got some kind of product strategy that's coming down to you.
Um, there's a reason you got moved to this.
Uh, this back end team.
Think of it like I am building the infrastructure and the thing that runs this company, right?
You're doing the engine of the car.
Nobody really looks at the engine unless you're like a car guy, right?
Just like our developers.
Nobody cares what's under the hood unless you're like really into those things.
But you need to make sure it's good so that it scales.
So you're going to worry now about things like scalability, load all of these more technical issues to make sure that your company could be successful and healthy as it goes.
Sounds like you have three squads now.
That's fantastic.
Hopefully, you get to 50, you get to 100.
It's your responsibility to work with the developers and make sure that that works well.
So you're going to want to care about those things.
You're going to want to care about architecture and scalability.
So that's what I would worry about getting up to speed on.
Now, as a product manager, that knowledge is new for you.
But what you do on a day to day basis is usually not that different.
You're going to go talk to your customers who are internal, right?
You're going to go talk to the CTO about their scalability options and what they're planning.
You still need to understand deeply the whole product strategy of the company.
You need to go and understand where you're going, how many customers you want to start onboarding, how you're going to scale, what types of products are coming up.
So now you're going to partner with the other two product managers on the other squads and try to understand what their roadmap looks like.
And when you're thinking about your roadmap, you want to make sure you're enabling the customer facing money making side of it.
So they're going to be out there thinking about what do we sell and then they have to come back to you and you're going to be saying how do i unlock that value through our platform?
How do i make sure that they can use the platform to build on top of it?
How can i make sure they can use these back ends to build on top of it to scale?
When you're thinking about a platform roadmap, you do have your own strategy, but it always follows a commercial facing strategy.
And then you put a lens on it to think about what amazing technology can we use to even like, amp up our commercial side of things?
Like there are areas when I can suggest to them that AI might be better, or different types of APIs that we can architecture in here can make this more scalable, more sustainable and even more powerful for our customers.
So you don't forget about the customers that are really paying you at the end of the day, but you're going to be working through other avenues to do that.
So that's the kind of mentality that you need to accept as a platform product manager.
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And I'll tell you this, Platform product management is extremely hard, like extremely hard.
And a lot of people get it wrong.
I've seen people go out there, build a whole strategy for their platform and never involve anybody else on the commercial side or the customer facing side or any of those other product managers. what happens is you spend millions and millions of dollars all of this time and you build this whole platform and nobody uses it and it breaks and things aren't scalable and people work around you and all of these things happen so you want to make sure that you're a high collaborator right you're going out there you're still building your strategy but you deeply understand where the business is going because that's important And you're bringing that into the technical side.
You are the voice of the business in the technical side and making sure that you can enable the sales.
You could still enable the things to be built on that side.
So you're the voice of reason that looks at all the cool things we could possibly do with tech and make sure that it's in service of the business growing.
And that's what a platform product manager does on a day to day basis.
So you're probably not going to be working with UX designers.
You're probably not going to be out talking to end user customers all the time, but you're still keeping a pulse on what's happening with the business.
You're translating that into tech and you're thinking about how we can do that with different components.
It's no longer workflows and UI, right?
Instead, it's back end components.
So same mentality, but thinking about how do we do that on the back end with my tools and your tools are now technical tools critically important.
We need a lot better platform product managers out there.
It is one of the biggest skill gaps I see.
So you are setting yourself up right now to be in high demand soon, because platforms are growing like crazy and we need great product managers there.
So best of luck.
I hope that helps with your question and I wish you the best of luck in helping your leadership see the light.
So if you have any other questions for me, go to DearMelissacom and I'll answer them on next Friday's episode.
We're looking forward to splitting out these Dear Melissa episodes, going forward, going a little bit more in detail, but we'll still have our guest episodes every Wednesday.
So make sure you like and subscribe so that you never miss one of these episodes.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another guest and I look forward to reading all your questions.
Go to ProductThinkingPodcast.com to submit them and to learn more.
