product management

“The one liner here is we saw a dramatic transformation in the marketing function where it moved from being very gut driven to being data driven. Hence our investments in companies like exact target and Marketo and Omniture. We believe the same thing is now hap…”

“You, as a venture capitalist, get to see the entire industry and all of the companies that surround your portfolio companies. You're probably better, or should be better, at understanding competitive dynamics and how the shape of the market is developing overa…”

“The Playbook for product management is very similar to early stage BC. The ability to understand a market and where opportunity might exist because of a problem. How many of those people or enterprises have that problem? What are the current solutions they're …”

“You know, one of the funny things about product management is that it gets built up on the quote unquote best practices of product over time. And so, you know, everything ends up being an iteration on top of the thing that came before. And that can lead you to…”

“And I think at the sustain and grow kind of like this large scale billion user products, of course, you have to have a lot more disciplined left brain analytical approach to it. But at the solve stage, you got to have that nonlinear thinking.”

“I would love to see more folks transition into product management from other disciplines like customer success and support product marketing. I think this sort of diversity of thought and experience and background that a team can really learn from folks who co…”

“I actually think product is a hundred percent science and zero percent art, which I know is going to upset some people.”

“You can't sit in a classroom learning how to do product. You have to build.”

“You have a lot of people who are coming to product to make decisions. I don't think to think of those as the right product people. I think it's inherently in the love of building and trying to create change.”

“Most product organizations, the PMs feel like their primary team is going to be the engineers and designers that they've worked with. Those are the people they work with every day that they have the closest connection to.”

“Most people don't have, like, the hunger and the curiosity to keep going, because it's a thankless job in a lot of ways. You think you're going to be the rock star, you're the roadie.”

“You ask them where their biggest impact was, right? And if it has nothing to do with product, You know, if it's like calming down an angry customer, but it has nothing to do with the value, the, you know, so you just tease it out, and then interrogate from the…”

“When you're gonna change target and people have been working their ass off to build something meaningful to the old target, you just have to give it the morning cycle, you know? You have to be empathetic and human because you need them to come along with you o…”

“That's great if you're doing something incremental. If you're like, let's grow revenue 10% on a product that has product market fit. Yeah, you can be, you can have no emotion then. A lot of the job is not about speccing the product and building the product. A …”

“Oftentimes just PM spend way too much time In the office, and I think that that's just a huge downside for your team.”

“Product management, broadly, should play a much less significant role than it does as a default in most software development companies.”

“Our product org got much too large, and I've learned that having more engineers is better than having more people in product.”

“If I was advising a young person where to go, if you wanted to found a company in two or three years, I'd say product, not engineering.”

“I feel like it's this sexy, trendy job in tech that has an allure because, you know, it's known to sometimes be high paying. And I guess it's like, I try to weed out people who might only be interested in product management because of reasons like that.”

“No, I think it's really oftentimes valuable to bring in folks from a different perspective, to bring in folks from a different perspective, to think through from a first principle point of view, or, you know, by leaning on the expertise, that unique perspectiv…”

“I think it's a very underrated aspect of great PM and great product development is this act of breaking things down into small chunks so that you don't overcomplicate what you ship.”

“Mostly what I'm testing for is how you do product and how you think, and that's relatively domain agnostic. I tend not to hire for domain if I don't have to”

“I can imagine this triple roll down the line where they're doing PM, design, and engineering with the help of AI.”

“I'd like to pose a non-technical scenario that they haven't worked in before and actually isn't what we do either. Because I don't want them to, A, rely on the jargon that they learned in their last job, and I don't want to also sort of penalize them for askin…”

“Probably 6040 more art than science. I think there is an art in diagnosis and science in how to execute, and I think the art of being a product person is, can you identify what scenario you're in?”

“In product management, one of the things I find is there's so much work that happens to describe all of the permutations of the problem when you realize, like, 80% of those are not relevant, or at least not relevant now.”

“And I think AI completely collapses that cycle and accelerates a lot of the upfront up funnel work where, where again, you can just do, you can build a prototype and you can show that to customers and like the PM and the designer might just work collaborativel…”

“I think maybe, maybe the generalized version of that is do more PM start in prototyping land than they do in strictly design land? And I think the answer to that is yes.”

“The, one of the most valuable things you have is your ability to code if you're an engineer, let's say, and I wish I stuck to it more. But I think it's super important to stick to that at least because it's much better with vibe coding or whatever now.”

“A PM is really great at motivating something incredibly boring as existential, and so whenever I'm interviewing PMs, you know, I just ask, okay, well, what are some projects you've led, and whatever, and if they can't make it sound interesting to me, no matter…”

“I see PM as, think of it as like a hire of last resort. And so I don't think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn't be the default.”

“I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep, thoughtful analysis over how something works at Mc…”

“I came from product, and in product you have to be very careful, meaning every decision you make, it's forever. You take the most expensive resource of a company, engineering time. You put it on building something. You put that something into your product. Now…”