And again, I think it's a
really, really good framework. I often tell everyone on our team, like, we're going to be
really successful startup founders. Like, we're all going to
go and start our own new thing because that's the
way we operate right now. Today, we're going to talk
about the skills that a senior PM needs. We're going to share a bit
from our own experience here at Miro. And we're going to dive
into some actual examples of that on how we develop our own
craft to build product at Miro. Welcome to the Live at Miro channel. And let's get started. Hi, I'm Vihar. I'm
Senior Product Manager at Miro. And I work on async collaboration. Hey, I'm Fabian, lead
PM for the Miro AI strategy. I focus on accelerating
innovation workflows with the help of AI. Today, we were going to talk
about skills for senior product managers. I think we want to root
it really in the way we do things instead of just
listing down a couple of skills, but very much put it in
the context of our day to day work and also here at Miro. Great. Yeah. And so you and I were
chatting about this earlier. And the way we're thinking
about it is maybe two categories, like senior PM craft skills, like the craft of product
management that we think are important, and then more general skills too that are both needed to be
successful as a senior PM. I think the great thing about
Miro is you have a lot of accountability and ownership of your problem space. So our team owns the
async collaboration problem space. And myself as a PM is
one of the drivers of that. So there's a lot of accountability. And I like to think of
myself almost as like a mini CEO and the rest of my team as co-founders. And we're working on trying
to solve problems in this space. We have objectives that we set
to, we have targets that we want to hit. And ultimately, we're
working with our senior leadership, our board execs, who are investors. And again, I think it's a
really, really good framework. I often tell everyone on our team, we're going to be
really successful startup founders. We're all going to go
and start our own new thing because that's the
way we operate right now. We have specific goals. We sync with our leadership,
with other stakeholders very often. And we're just measured on
success, on how we're getting there or not. Just the ability to kind of
think of yourself more as a CEO, more of a director, running,
thinking about your own problem space and having the desire and
the accountability to own that, I think that's a skill set
that is, I think, very fundamental too. But I really like what you said. And there's like kind of these
different stages along that journey, right? Starting off really
understanding the problem space. I think as a PM, it's
obviously critical that we're comfortable talking to our
customers and we seek that dialogue, that conversation to understand
what are really the opportunities there, what are their pain points, but also not only for the
end user who uses Miro every day, but also from a buyer perspective, right? What is it that they want to achieve and why would they hire
Miro as the tool to get that done? One of the other skills
that I believe is really important for being a successful
senior product manager at Miro is a strong understanding
of working cross-functionally. And I think all PMs do work
cross-functionally with engineering, design, etc. But truly understanding the
day-to-day of your cross-functional peers is that can separate, I
think, more of a senior role versus not because for like a
really specific example, at Miro, we have a very
specific way of shipping code and engineers have to work on tickets and commit pull
requests, etc., etc., etc. And there are some
things that work well with that, there's pains with that too. And the fact that we as senior PMs, we understand that a little bit more, we can empathize with them more. We also have a little bit
understanding of what it takes to maybe ship a
small, medium, large feature or maybe if the feature interacts
with certain parts of the code base or not. Those are kind of like
maybe more technical things, right? And maybe not all PMs need to know that, but as more of a senior, you can kind of
understand back of the napkin estimates, you can communicate with
your engineers more efficiently. I think we have to
understand how they work, how do they do their
jobs, what their goals are and kind of use that to better calibrate. And that to me at
least leads to more efficiencies. Absolutely. And you've just
talked about like shipping there. And I think this is something
that I know both of us really believe in. And like, what is
the, like, always focusing on what is the smallest amount of investment that we can do to actually learn from
what we're putting out there as well, right? Because shipping
isn't, you put something out there and then everyone has access to it. It's very much like,
what is that first iteration which we can learn from, which we
can kind of understand the risks, etc. And the impact it has on our users, potentially even to a
very small cohort at first, to then learn, iterate and then
release to a larger audience as well. Or cut it. Never. Never release it.
Yeah, we do that a lot in Miro where we have experiments or internal releases that never,
never make it to our users. And I think there
again, like prioritization, right? It's like one of the key things
that we probably spend a lot of our time on. It's like, how do we
get everything onto a board, the opportunity
space, really map that out. But by what
criteria do we then understand which we should
experiment with first, right? What should we put out
there to really learn from? And I think I always think about it like, yes, there might be some
opportunities that may be interesting to our users, but any minute we
spend on that prohibits us from investing into
that true differentiating value that we could be building instead. Because it is true. Like it's about focus and where
you focus your energy on and in your time. That's I think another one that's
really interesting as a product manager. I think we love how we're going
from one to the next, but like focus. Yeah, bringing focus to the team. Focus to the team, focus to yourself, focus in
communicating that focus to everyone. Like, hey, our team is
focused on this right now and we're focused on this
specific initiative or this metric or this project for this reason. What we're singularly focused on
right now is getting our target audience, a set of users to make
their first recording and that's it. And so that's really again, powerful. I think again, really
important skill as a product manager, a senior product manager to
provide focus, provide justification why. It gives a lot of
power to our engineers and our designers because
they are all on board too. Because the goal is clear, right? It gives them again,
autonomy to think within what is the most impactful initiative they
could work on to achieve that goal. Yeah, and then one of the things
that Miro again, I think is a little bit, perhaps a bit different than maybe some other companies is
engineers really drive a lot. They can own projects, again,
depending on the team and product managers can be very hands-on down to
writing user stories, etc. But find it more
powerful if, you know, I'm helping set the strategy,
the vision, the justification, why we're going in a
different direction and then allowing those who are
the best at their craft engineers, who are going to be building to like
figure out the best way to solve that problem. And until you like have
that focus or you don't have it, then it's hard to like
reach the best outcome, you know. Miro has this incredible
community that's very engaged providing feedback to us
directly in our public forums. And I think it's exciting to have
such a like vocal community or user base. Right. At the same
time, that brings along the challenge is
like, who do you listen to? Right. It's a very
loud voice from our users. And we, of course, prioritize their
needs. But in addition to that, we also need to ensure that the product
kind of evolves strategically. And I think that's also something in
Miro, I think, that we need to understand is like, what is their
true goal they want to achieve? And how can we evolve the product to
get them there instead of building all the endless features that they're requesting? And I think from a senior PM
perspective, it's really important to understand the problem and the desires and the needs
separate and separate that from the solution you eventually then build to
really go way beyond of what's actually being requested and keep that
competitive edge to other companies who may be just listening to the feedback
and implementing that word for word. And you learn, right? I mean, this
is the aspect where, again, retrospectives, where I think something that's so
important is like the bias towards action. It isn't a science. So
therefore you can never be 100 percent sure on
what the right next step is. Sometimes you really just have to
take that leap of faith. You do as much as you can. And then you
take that, you learn from that. And through that, the
process, the machine itself gets better. And I think that's something that you
mentioned early on as well, as as senior PMs, we come with a
toolkit that we know we can rely on to help us
move this process along. We know essentially which tool to
use at the right time to facilitate the right conversation, achieve the right decision and align
stakeholders around that as well. Another sort of related thing I think
is important as a senior PM and again, maybe also more general skill is like
I don't even know how to describe it. It's like it's a bit of that tingling
spider sense you get like when something's going wrong or maybe course
correcting like what I'm doing is not working. So maybe you have data that's
showing it. Maybe you're using your emotional intelligence and reading the room,
getting feedback you're getting from users or from other leaders in
the company and just taking a step back and reevaluating
and like pivoting and changing. That's something that I've done a few
times, many times actually at Miro, it's like wait, like what I've been doing
the last few weeks is just not working. Like very specific example is when
we were building our recording solution I mentioned earlier and I
think we're deep in research. We're doing like over a month or so
plus research of really trying to identify the problem space,
really understand our users and frankly, we're just
kind of spinning our wheels. I think after a while
now I'm looking back at it. I think I remember that moment where I
just like took a step back and like just got some inputs from others
like, hey, like what do I do here? Like what do you think I should go? Someone came up with the idea like,
hey, like let's just do a design sprint. Like you have a lot of unknowns. A design sprint is like a five day
cycle of testing, prototyping an idea, getting it in front of users and
seeing if there's any validation. And that was like a big pivotal
moment in your project where, you know, we could pivot, we could try something out and
then from that point we sort of like hit like an exponential
like curve of productivity. But before that we're slugging along
and I think it just took me and a few others to take a step back and just
realize, wait, something's not working here. Why is it not working and re-evaluate Yeah. You know, I guess maybe that maybe
it's like a courage of like admitting that maybe you're wrong or like not being shy to
just change, you know, because like sometimes people can get very even doing
something a certain way for a long time. Yeah. You have a lot of
pride, you're invested in it, but you have to
kind of just like let it go. You know, we can be
very open and I think this is an important thing in
an organization like Miro. People need to know what you're doing
and where you're trying to go so that they can actually
proactively help you as well. Right. And I think as a senior PM
creating that brand around your team and helping everyone understand what you're doing
with your team and what you're responsible for is critical for people to come
to you, understand when there's overlap potentially alignment
between the initiatives that are needed. When they essentially need you to improve something instead of
doing it and doubling up themselves. But it's like breaking down of
silos and being a very visible person in the organization that
people know to go to is I think a critical aspect of a senior
PM in an organization like Miro. Right. Right. I think that was one other aspect as
well, which is like wearing many hats, right? In actually the design exercise that
we discussed in a different video, you already talked to both of our
exercises actually went through the whole journey where we
tried to make sense of a problem. Yeah.
I did some user interviews. You actually did some research based on information that was
available via our community forums. Right. And then bringing it all the way up to actually making some
basic wireframes as well. And I think this is
also a senior PM trade as we don't have everything
at hand to do the perfect job. There is the moments when
we need to put on a different hat. We end up doing some SQL
queries to get to the right data. We end up doing some
wireframes to unblock the team. We may even dive deep into some
engineering discussions on how to kind of create the right platform also to be able
to then again represent the team externally. And I think it's
important that I think as a senior PM that we
are comfortable doing that. Yes. That we have done this
in our previous roles with other teams that we learned
from the designers how to do this. And then of course, this is often
more so a temporary need once your team has traction, once you receive the
investment, of course the team gets built out. But sometimes to get it to that
point, I think we have to wear many hats. One of the other skills that I think
is pretty important as a senior PM is being able to identify which frameworks or
ways of thinking and solving complex problems and breaking them into
smaller pieces and at any given time. And I think we talked about in the
previous video where we went over our business cases that we did for interviews and
those were basically the biggest problem. Right. And we're breaking it down from strategy, research, design,
implementation, etc, etc. And I think it's very
important to have the ability to know which framework to apply
at what time you are in the stage. Right. Like if you're in a strategy stage,
like maybe you need to focus on setting your vision and what's your team mission
and maybe some objectives you want to focus. Maybe if you're on more of a
research phase, you need to ideate. And then sometimes
you hop back and forth. Like it's not just
a linear like ABCDE flow. You don't just go from
strategy to ideation to design, deliver. It's not as beautiful as it's a mess. And certainly because
you should learn along the way. Absolutely. Absolutely. You're right. And so when you like hop back and
forth, I think it's important like, well, maybe you're building and then all of a
sudden you research or you learn something new. So like then what do
you what framework do you use? Are you going to use it? How might we framework? Are you going to use an
opportunity solution mapping tree? Are you going to be
using some other exercise or some other way for you
to make sense of that mess? Or is there something new that
you're bringing like your own framework? Maybe which is often like I know you
and I have we have our own ways of thinking of things and it's like kind of
a hodgepodge, a mix of everything. So now that we've talked about some of
the skills that we think are important to be senior PM at Miro's next question is
like how do you highlight them for a CV or your LinkedIn and how
does it how can you do it? So you can better land a job at
Miro or anywhere else that you're looking in. One of the things that I at least I
find very important and this might sound a bit bit simple, but it's
just be very, very specific on the job that
you're applying for everywhere. So usually all the jobs talk about
the responsibilities, the requirements, the responsibilities in a
bit about what the day to day is. So one, like make sure you're
applying to a position that you want that matches that because that's
probably what it's going to be like. If you don't like it,
you're not going to like your job. And two, like also like Miro,
especially senior PM's were kind of like expecting you to hit the ground front and you
have and to me it's like it's more of an excitement thing
rather than a stress thing. It's like it's great. It's like really from early on you're
going to be doing your monthly updates to the entire company to senior leadership, etc. You have that visibility from day one. So the expectation is you
can drive and deliver day one. So focus on the
skills that are noted in the JD. Make sure you highlight
those in your CV or your LinkedIn. And I'd say come very prepared to
the interview to discuss those, whether it's working collaboratively across
functions, whether it's influencing senior leaders. Maybe it's something more technical. Maybe it's like you're working
on a API based team or a back end team. Maybe you should highlight those
examples if you've worked more design based. I think it's just really important to
have examples prepared that are not only on your resume that match the job
description, but also like for the interview itself. I think that sets a great foundation
for the subsequent conversations to be based around that to be able
to bring them back up again, reference those data points
as conversation starters as well. I think it's really important to kind
of nail who you are as well because there's a human aspect of
interviewing that comes into this too. And we want to check. We have a very strict criteria. We look to see if
you're hitting the values that we have that
you can find on our website. We also look for technical and craft
document that's listed on the job description. But then also there's this other
aspect to your right of understanding kind of like who you are and what
value you bring to the company. Are you going to be able
to raise the bar as well because that's something that we
like to have as well from senior PMs. Can they raise the bar
and make everyone else better? And that brings us
to the end of today's video. We hope you like what we have
shared and please subscribe to our channel. We'll be sharing
more about what it's like inside Miro and how you
can grow your career in tech. Hope to catch you in the next video.
