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Product Management at a large bank vs Business Analytics/S&O for FAANG? Recently started in the former role, but have interview calls for the latter just come up in my mailbox. Similar comp when adjusted for the different job locations. Can anyone help me with the Pros and Cons please. I know the roles are different, and so are the industries, need to understand difference career paths and difference in corporate cultures. JPMorgan Chase Google LinkedIn Citi
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What a great question. I’m looking forward to the discussion.
Rough out the plan like a wire framework, then package each area/phase out in modules, making it easier to repackage whenever needed. How that helps!
Embrace the fluidity. It's "refining" not going back to square one.
Focus on problems you want solved in terms of value: “Enable customers to create self-service reports on-demand” and prioritize. Break down what you may need to do that as pieces of your plan. Focus on the value and the outcome. The how can then adjust. If your success metrics don’t change (“reduce staff time generating manual reports by X”) then the how becomes a layer of granularity.
If another more important item to be solved comes along, you adjust the roadmap in terms of problems/opportunities to be addressed sooner and what problems/opportunities will shift.
Be firm on the direction and the customer, flexible on the solution. The point is to provide enough direction to motivate the team, while staying flexible on how you will do so. The reason why you need this is because equally demotivating is if they’re just building stuff for the sake of building stuff without know who what or why they are doing it. With this perspective it means you are also allowed to change your vision if you receive compelling enough evidence that says you should change, but in the absence of that compelling evidence, at least you have a plan.
To come up with the statement, there is usually a big picture customer problem that your product is trying to solve. So the formula you can use is something like this:
“to help [customer type] achieve [qualitative assessment]”.
So for example, for a budgeting tool it would be something like “to help every day savers, save for the future”; for a B2B business CX app: “to help marketers gain control over their customer journey”
With these statements you can have a million ways to accomplish how to get there, but it provides just enough vision and direction for people to understand what you’re aiming for. It also provides guardrails against going too off-strategy. For instance, the team working on the CX app know they’re not building a tool for support teams to improve CSAT because that’s not their remit.
The only final thing I would add is that your customer type should be an abstraction of homogenous behaviour. So for instance, if your product is used by enterprise marketers, designers, and mom-and-pop business owners, then how you describe the customer should be generalised enough encapsulate all of them - meaning you wrap them into an abstracted term like “business creatives”. The name doesn’t matter so much as the alignment on the homogenous behaviour that unites all of them.
Hope this helps!
A Product Vision is aspirational and about where you want to see the product in the future. It doesn’t have to be hard and fast or detailed on functions and features.
Top selling, most profitable accepted as the market leader, able to service both x revenue stream and y, Global, multilingual,
I believe Bill Gates once had a vision of a pc in every kitchen!
Read up on the Jobs to be Done Framework (JTBD). Be clear in the User outcomes you want to achieve (in terms of what the user would define as success). Visualize where you think you are succeeding today vs need to improve vs not addressing at all.
In my experience, your reality is no more than 24 months, but you should plan 5 years out. The 4th and 5th years can become productive if your project status remains relevant. I would plan stretch goals for those 4th and 5th years.