Product Management 101 with Josh Siegel

University

Por Atlanta Ventures

18 de October de 2018

On Thursday, October 18 SaaS professionals joined at ATDC for the Simply SaaS University: Product Management 101 class with Josh Siegel, Director of Product Management at Salesforce (Pardot).

Josh comes from 20+ years of tech and joined us to help develop, motivate, and teach tactics to product builders, makers, and leaders.

Things we learned:

Product Management: What is it?
The anchor point at the center of the conversation
Product Manager: What does one actually do?
Agile, Market and User Research, Go-to-Market, and Pitch Decks
Pricing and Positioning Best Practices

Check out the video recap and our photo story below.

What do Project Managers do?

They're focused on Agile, Market and User Research, Go-to-Market strategy, and Pitch Decks. They help juggle all parts of the business and act as:

A guide to the Engineering/UX team
An advocate to the customer
A storyteller to the Execs
An evangelist to the Marketing/Sales/Support teams

As a Product Manager, you become the center of an ongoing conversation and that conversation evolves.

Agile Best Practies

Josh shared his tips on Agile and what he considers his best practices:

Focus on epics and tie them into your story.
Know every ticket. Explain why its important and how its fits into the bigger picture.
Prioritize the backlog religiously.
Take planning seriously as a forcing function.
Really invest in Engineering team relationships.

Agile is the worst form of Software Development, except for all the others.

(A take on Winston Churchill's famous quote.)

At the end of the day, Agile is really about communication and commitment. It might seem trivial, but in the daily stand-ups you catch the little things that would go up in flames in 4 months, because they come up in casual conversation.

The Customer Experience

Josh gave insight on the importance of your customers and engaging them. Customers are overlooked the most, and it's the absolute most important part of the work. It’s almost never urgent. You as the Product Manager are an advocate for your customers. It’s about empathy. Ask, “Who are you? Why do you do what you do?” After that, then you get back insights. It's about market research and user research.

Josh’s best practices for user experience research:

Write down your hypothesis
Know your goals and key product decisions
Focus on your target audience and scope
Have a method and research materials
Have an interview guide
Incorporate unaided and aided questions (don't lead!)
Shut up and LISTEN!

What's the biggest mistake a new entrepreneur can make?

Not knowing who your customer is.

When it comes to pitching...Tell a Story!

Josh's storytelling best practices:

Know your goal
Know their goal and how your story aligns
Let the data tell the story
Anticipate questions
Have clear asks
Build coalitions ahead of time
Have a test deck and iterate

Create value in the incremental steps, and learn along the way.

Go-To-Market: The Four P's (Old and New)

The “old” four P's marketing mix:

Product, price, promotion, and place

The “new” four P’s:

Pricing, positioning, packaging, and pitching

Pricing and packaging are incredibly important for going to market. Details matter.

Pricing...

What are you going to ask them to pay and are they getting what they’d like for it?

Positioning...

What is this thing and what mental space should it entail?

Packaging...

How are you going to offer different editions to different segments in order to get them real value?

Pitching...

It's sales! Enable your sales team to be successful. You train the trainers. You give them scripts, then incentives, then support, and then documentation.