"You don't become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are."
Alex Hormozi
Hey people đ Andy in the house today. In this post, I reflect on my 3 years of PM experience and share all the mental models I have defined for myself in succeeding as a great PM. My mental model has 4 simple, but key areas:
Vision
Strategy
Design
Execution
Each of these 4 dimensions has its own depth, and I discuss each below and offer what I have learned over the years and what I am doing to grow strength in these areas.
Here is my reflection after 3 years of working at DocuSign:
Things I have been good atÂ
VisionÂ
Vision is the knack of seeing big untapped market opportunities. I was good at defining the lofty, seemingly unachievable vision from the get-go. I was quick to define untapped markets and brought a fresh perspective as soon as I joined my team here at DocuSign.Â
A sub-topic under the vision is leadership. I can have an amazing vision but if I canât get someone excited about it and embed the same vision in their minds, I wonât go very far.
I quickly realized that I needed clarity of thought, both while speaking and while writing to get my core team on board with my vision and then my extended and leadership teams.Â
As a new grad PM 3 years ago, I did throw out quite a few interesting vision ideas for the future of my product. All fizzled out except for one! My vision revolved around growth! Both user and usage, in turn, generate a new source of revenue for DocuSign.Â
I initially gained some momentum by articulating clearly my vision to my peer PMs and gaining their approval, quickly sold the idea to my design and engineering teams as it was something new and potentially impacting revenue numbers. The hardest sell was to my leadership, I spent over a month just refining the deck, getting better at my pitch, and simplifying my thought process. I was trying to simplify everything for my leadership to a YES or a NO decision. It turned out to be my first breakthrough at DocuSign! A great feeling as a new grad PM.Â
I now have gone through these cycles a few times over and feel super confident about tuning a small vision in my head to bring an army to build it.Â
ExecutionÂ
Execution not only means executing day-to-day activities, but it also means executing your carefully thought strategy.Â
I realized that I could build a great go-to-market strategy and if I canât rally my cross-functional team to make that a reality it is as good as as a bad strategy. This is the crux of execution, it extends far beyond Engineering teams and all the way to Sales to customer support.Â
There was this time when I had a great vision for exposing an API microservice that could generate $X M in revenue for DocuSign, I did all the right things from rallying my engineering team and building all the APIs, developer center documentation to enabling developer support teams. For 3 months, there were crickets! zero inquiries from customers, Sales didnât care very much either. I thought I was a master executor just by rallying my engineering team to build this solution. Boy was I wrong!Â
I almost questioned if there was any product market fit at all. It turns out that I was not enabling the right distribution channels, aligning incentives for Sales, and overall poor execution on the GTM side. As soon as I recognized this, I started aligning Sales incentives to customer value propositions and started quarterbacking Sales teams for prospective big customers. Results? In the next 1 year, we grew 70% in ARR.
I donât think PMs need to do this perpetually. I no longer involve myself too much in the process. It is a well-oiled machine. But I learned that execution is not just with your immediate engineering and design teams but more so with field enablement including Product Marketing, customer success, Sales, Onboarding, Customer support, etc.Â
What I am actively working on
DesignÂ
Designing an exceptional customer journey sits at the core of being a great Product Manager. I am a very visual person and can appreciate great design, but I am bad at designing myself. When I say design, not just the UI design but I am referring to the entire user journey. As an engineer turned PM, I probably have a bias to get to the solution as quickly as possible but not necessarily in the most delightful way.Â
This is an area that I am intentionally working on to build stronger muscle. In a feature that I was working on to import an address in a specific user flow, I did not consider how the flow might change based on which persona is importing the address. I completely missed it when I was considering the target persona for my feature. This is where my product designer is the saver of the day, he does a great job of laying out all the flows in a whiteboarding session and helps me think through the entire flow. By extension, I am also thinking about ways that a user might fail and how can we catch that and rectify it without the user's knowledge.
While this is an area I have certainly improved, I still have a long way to go in terms of changing how I think about UI design and mapping the customer journey out. I have started to think along the lines of experiences and scenarios rather than an ad-hoc feature.
StrategyÂ
Another area that I have not had great exposure to as an early career PM is owning the 3-5-year product strategy. However, I have started ramping up owning a good part in recent times. The kind of strategy I am referring to here is very different from your Go-To-Market strategy for a specific feature which I am pretty comfortable with. Developing a 3-5-year strategic roadmap requires domain expertise, deep customer insights, industry trends, data, and intuition. You donât need to have a plan that is carefully thought out but you need to know directionally where you will be by when and how to get there.Â
I was assisting my manager and the leads with specific parts of this long-term strategy, which was an amazing place to start. Now I have been involved in owning a good portion of this long-term 3-5 year product strategy.Â
Topics that span in the strategy are how to grow the revenue, what will we do and when to get to that checkpoint, is the market ready for such products, will we need incremental headcount to help us get there, what is the pricing power we have as a leader. What will we do if there is something unusual/ fundamentally disruptive phenomenon in the industry?Â
While these questions are only the tip of the iceberg, it gets incredibly hard to predict, especially the future, and have a plan for that. I have been trying to build this muscle not just for my product but also for my own life. I believe it is good to have a directional sense of where I am headed and how I will get there.Â
If you liked this post and want me to write more of these types of posts. Please like this post as a signal for me to get feedback.Â