Product Management 101 — by me, Fernanda Aguiar — Post 1: The Basics | by Fernanda Camilo Aguiar | May, 2024

Happy Tuesday, everyone! 🙂

This one feels more like a Monday after the Bank Holiday yesterday, but hopefully this will be useful for someone aiming to learn something new about Product Management and inspire them to kick start their week.

Having worked within financial services technology teams for the past 5 years and building digital strategies and product teams for both big banks and smaller fintech startups revolutionising pension and secondaries markets, I helped scale businesses in very different stages. I’ve also had to build teams that doubled sizes within months and had to adapt and test multiple times the many product management tools and ways of work.

To spare you of a very long article, I will split this post into 3 (so parts 2 and 3 will follow in the next weeks), with the 101 and ballpark of what, in my opinion, usually works in many different setups when it comes to Product Management — valuable lessons also if you’re looking to break into this career, to start with the right foot, learning from other mistakes and proven successful strategies.

So, first things first, today I will cover Business Context and the core of PM work. Post 2 will cover the technical stuff and Post 3 will finally cover Data, Sales and back to Business. Do stay tuned if you don’t get why this is part of my Product Management 101 briefing as I promise I will explain.

1. Business Context: It might sound obvious but when joining a product team for the first time, many PMs end up getting lost in endless backlogs of tasks and detailed technical problems which the team is probably facing at that moment.
   The one bad move you could do here is try to go through the details before getting the big picture — this could drag you down a black hole of things that seem more complicated than they should and the risk here is you’re solving super complex problems that don’t even relate to the business needs and what your company needs to change the bottom line.
   All of this to say, before anything: understand the business model, how your company makes money, what is your role within that, and how your team and your product relates to that — directly and indirectly, accounting cross-sell initiatives and the impact on other products and revenue streams too.
   This is not only important so you are intentional on your contributions, but also because as PM you are also most of the time the leader and responsible for dictating what the technology team will be doing, so understanding this well makes sure you are guiding all these people to what matters in the end of the day for the success of the company and product.
2. Meetings, Priorities and Product Management Tools: this is making sure you master the basics — and probably what most PMs spend more time doing as it’s the core of the job. So make sure you have organised processes to keep track of performance, have visibility and ownership of the backlog, segment problems and business needs the best way to split the tasks depending on the size of your team, are always flexible and prioritising according to business needs and customer feedback and communicate this well. As a rule of thumb, whenever possible, I always like to have Brainstorming/Problem Solving meetings when scoping a big problem with diverse teammates, have Task Refinements and Plannings synced with the Sprint frequency, Retrospectives and Follow-up plans, Business updates and results meetings, and then frequent 1–1 sessions to check in with people from your team.
   And last, but not least, create fun and bonding activities for your team to collaborate and get together more often.
   The frequency will always depend on the team size and composition but this is probably the ballpark of everything you should be doing.
   Even though this is not the focus here, I just want to reference my favourite feedback framework — Radical Candor — as I know it can be quite hard for people starting in these positions to give constructive feedback, but know that as PM, because you talk to most of the stakeholders involved in every process in your company, your feedback can be crucial as you have information not every person does.
   So don’t take that for granted and go past the discomfort of doing this for the sake of everyone. And finally, my favourite tools for the core of the job as a PM:
3. Sprint Management: Atlassian Jira
4. Analytics and Dashboards: Looker
5. CRM: Customer.io
6. Retrospective: EasyRetro
7. Brainstorming/Design/Wireframes: Figma
8. Files Organisation/Roadmap/Documentation: Notion
9. Team communication: Slack
10. Personal Organisation of Tasks: Todoist (Clickup is a good option too and can give good visualisation options, but I end up preferring Todoist in general for simplicity) Todoist ClickUp
11. Meetings: Zoom
12. Tracking: Segment

As always, please let me know about any feedback and do let me know if you use different tools and have tested things differently!

Cheers!!