Hadar Dor coaches PMs on the interview process. His core strengths include building high-functioning teams and product strategy. Here's his take on some fundamental PM skills.
An excellent PM takes a structured approach to grounding product problems in high-level goals and user needs. It's important to constantly come back to these, when prioritizing between a set of solutions.
A strong example of a product sense scenario is setting up the framework to bring a new design to life, or improve an existing product. To do this, you need to ask a question to kick things off.
What is the mission for the company, and how do I contribute to it?
Hadar points out that needs are different than problems. How can you add value beyond the current baseline? Is there a market that is addressing this need?
Once a user need is identified, think about how to measure success solving for that need, and how that ties back to the mission of the company. Would your users engage more? Would it make more money?
Hadar describes this as your North Star Metric.
Next, brainstorm solutions This can be a mix of short and long term solutions.
After some Ideas are documented, evaluate each one on level of effort (or cost) to implement vs. expected impact on the North Star Metric. It's usually best to choose a solution that has a high impact and low cost. This is often done via t-shirt sizing for simplicity (S/M/L).
The chosen selection should move the North Star metric, but since it may take a while to observe change, you need to identify proxy metrics that are more sensitive, where change is observable in a short time frame.
Success is measured via experimentation, often through A/B testing. Design a short experiment that you are confident will move the proxy metrics. Once your hypothesis is proven, you will win more resources for building a long-term solution.
Lastly, it's important to consider trade-offs and risks associated with your approach. Throughout your analysis, make sure to note any assumptions made, and be critical of your decisions.
Another vital skill for a PM is execution strategy. Execution involves identifying and prioritizing opportunities based on a set of constraints.
It's important to be agile by coming up with goals and metrics quickly, then knowing how to troubleshoot or pivot when new information like technical blockers are surfaced.
This should tie back to the company's mission, and implementation should move the North Start metric. Ultimately, as a PM, you need to deliver user value. Keep this in mind. Come up with proxy metrics, and proceed with designing an experiment. Note that proxy metrics can also be qualitative. It's also a good idea to monitor other metrics to ensure your experiment doesn't negatively impact other areas of the product.
Hadar's method of evaluating trade-offs is by plugging infinite into both options. By this he means imagine you only did one of the options forever - what would happen in the short term, vs, the long term? Then think about the common thread. Hadar gives an example.
"At Lyft, getting one more driver hour versus getting a rider to book one more ride both long-term optimize for most aggregate rides."
Some times you want to do both options, and the right balance to strike is one that leads to maximizing a common long-term goal.
For troubleshooting, Hadar suggests using an Ishikawa diagram. This helps identify potential factors causing an overall effect.
Explore the problem space by breaking it down into categories.
In a mock interview with Stephen Cognetta from Exponent, Hadar runs through these problem categories, probing with simple questions to help guide him to a solid conclusion.
These skills helped Hadar become a product leader, and they can help you too. Hadar now also runs a syndicate for investing in startups focused on SMB SaaS and marketplaces.
