3 types of PM cultures ⭐️, Succeeding in B2B 💼, AI's impact on product management 🤖, Switching to PM 🔀
Weekly Roundup 11 🔁
👋 Hey, Sam here! Welcome back to the 🔁 Weekly Roundup edition 🔁 of The Product Trench. Each week, I curate deep dives, trends and resources related to product management and leadership.
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Happy Sunday everyone! 😎
It has been a good product content week, so let's just get to it.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
The 3 types of PM cultures — and how to spot them
How to make an internal switch as a Product Manager?
Stop the (goal) cascade madness
Focusing on time to value over time to market
The challenges and opportunities AI brings to Product Management
5 secrets to succeed as a B2B product manager
Elena's 2024 B2B product-led sales guide
The 3 types of PM cultures — and how to spot them (5 min video)
PM cultures are categorized into three types: PM dominated, PM guided, and PM serviced.
In PM dominated cultures, even low-competence PMs hold significant influence.
In PM guided cultures, only high-competence PMs wield influence, ensuring better decisions.
PM serviced cultures see PMs mainly supporting other dominant functions like engineering or sales, with little decision-making power.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Evaluate your company's PM culture to understand power dynamics and improve decision-making efficiency.
How to make an internal switch as a Product Manager? (5 min read)
Transitioning to a Product Manager role within your company involves adapting your existing skills while overcoming mindset shifts.
Marketing professionals must embrace continuous iteration.
UX designers need an end-to-end approach.
Engineers and QA must broaden their focus.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Proactively build relationships with product managers. Show initiative, curiosity, and a willingness to learn new domains and skills.
Stop the (goal) cascade madness (6 min read)
Goal cascades, while seemingly logical, often fail in practice. Effective goal-setting starts with front-line teams focusing on stable core metrics, which provide a consistent framework over time.
Temporary bet metrics can be used for specific initiatives but should be retired when no longer useful.
Cascading goals across multiple layers creates a misalignment between organizational objectives and team-level actions. Instead, organizations should simplify goals into two levels: high-level business metrics and actionable team metrics, avoiding unnecessary complexity and ensuring alignment with actual work.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Focus on stable core metrics at the team level and avoid deep, multi-layered goal cascades that don't reflect real, actionable work. Simplify to align directly with business-critical metrics.
Focusing on time to value over time to market: A strategy for developing successful products (6 min read)
Shifting focus from time to market (TTM) to time to value (TTV) enhances customer satisfaction and long-term success. TTV is about delivering meaningful, immediate value to customers, which builds trust, satisfaction, and long-term success. This approach involves deep product discovery, continuous customer feedback, and iterative improvements. It contrasts with TTM, which often prioritizes speed over quality, leading to rushed, less impactful releases that might not fully address customer needs.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Prioritize value over speed. Focus on delivering immediate and tangible user benefits to drive long-term product success and market differentiation.
The challenges and opportunities AI brings to Product Management (51 min video)
Janna Bastow shares her perspective on how AI is just another tool that can help product managers synthesize feedback and speed up certain aspects of their job.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: (1) The value of a roadmap is found in the process of creating it, not just the document itself. (2) AI can enhance product management by serving as a feedback tool and decision support, but human judgment remains essential. (3) Developing a culture that encourages employees to challenge ideas is critical for innovation. (4) Product managers must connect their work to revenue and ensure roadmaps align with company strategy.
5 secrets to succeed as a B2B product manager (6 min read)
Distinguish between customers and users.
Sales teams know the customer really well.
Get creative with experimentation.
Embrace the slow pace in B2B product management.
Revenue will always be a priority.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build strong relationships with both customers and users, leveraging sales team insights and creative testing methods to validate product decisions. Always keep revenue alignment in mind when planning your roadmap.
Elena's 2024 B2B Product-Led Sales Guide (10 min read)
The guide explains how to transition from product-led growth (PLG) to product-led sales (PLS) by effectively leveraging self-serve usage data to identify sales opportunities. It details strategies for scaling engagement with users who express interest ("hand-raisers") and differentiating product offerings to target ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and product-qualified accounts (PQAs). The focus is on using detailed product interaction data to tailor sales approaches, making them more precise and aligned with customer needs, ultimately driving growth and efficiency in B2B sales.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Use product interaction data to identify and engage potential customers, focusing on scaling interest-driven leads and customizing offerings for those who best fit your product.
👋 That's it for this week's edition. Thank you for reading, and enjoy your week.
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See you next time.
— Sam ✌️