Korea IT Times sat down to have interview with Web3 Product Executive, Employment Expert, and Creator of Product Management Exercises, Bijan Shahrokhi. We talked about why the role of Product Manager is the most important function in a company to deliver successful products and services that align with customers’ expectations and needs. Product Management Exercises prepares candidates for interviews at top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Airbnb.
Bijan Shahrokhi is a Web3 product management executive with 10+ years of experience in building disruptive technologies in fintech. He has worked with startups and large tech companies as a product manager. The last web3 project he launched as Head of Product was Mina Protocol, which was valued at $3B by the market.
The following are interview questions and answers with Bijan Shahrokhi.
The value of product managers for early-stage startups and SMBs for solving immediate pain points for the customer user experience.
Let me start off by saying that product management becomes an art rather than a science for early-stage startups and SMBs. Intuition, insight, and industry experience play big roles since you're not relying on numbers so much.
Not only are you trying to solve the immediate pain points for users, but you also have to make sure that the pain point applies to your target users so you are sure that there's a need for the product you're creating.
What product managers need to do is make sure that they are validating their biggest assumptions as soon as possible. Product managers have to be very clear with what their hypothesis is. They also have to make sure that their criteria for success or failure are defined.
When working with early-stage startups and SMBs, it will be almost similar to inventing something or trying to give birth to something that did not exist before. It's quite challenging and very different from product management for larger companies that have mature products. It makes much more sense to follow conventional product management methodologies when the product is more mature.
It has been said many times that a PM is like the glue that sticks a team together. In startups and SMBs, PMs are the glue that sticks the whole company together. The CEO is doing CEO responsibilities while the product manager is responsible for everything else in the organization, including building a product that people want.
Why he believes PM is the only way to measure the team’s progress in achieving objectives.
In most cases, a product manager is the main person within a company that has the most detailed view of what is happening in the real world.
Some members of the organization may not have the same view because they are focused on the respective responsibilities that do not require them to take a closer look. For example, a CEO may have more of his or her attention on raising funding or managing the financials. On the other hand, a product manager has to:
* Be aware of what people want
* Know what solution the main stakeholders are envisioning
* Know how to build the product
* Understand how hard it is to build the product (identifying limitations)
* Know how users are responding to the product
* Know how to measure success accurately
Product managers (PM) have to take all these moving parts into consideration and try to come up with an overall judgment. This task is not easy at all, but product managers have the ability and the skill to tackle these responsibilities. On top of that, PMs can do this because they understand all of the aspects listed above.
Why Product Managers will become even more important as Web3 technologies take hold.
Currently, we have this underlying problem with Web3. When you look at the adoption curve, it is pretty low. It is still so hard for an average person who does not understand or is not familiar with Web3 to interact with Web3.
Compare that to Web2 where all one has to do is open a browser and type the URL. And, this is common in all websites, languages, computers, etc. That is not the case with Web3 at all.
You will have to spend probably hundreds of hours to understand how to use it. This is where product managers come in. PMs understand the user side, which is very important in building something that delivers the ideal user experience.
What is missing in the industry right now is the lack of product management best practices. It all goes back to the act of building, building, and building without thinking about the underlying pain points that are being solved. In this particular case, it is censorship resistance and being trustless. How can a PM work on these without compromising user convenience?
We need to think about how to bring the benefits of Web3 while addressing the concerns of all the stakeholders involved. That is the PM's job.
The importance of PMs in virtual and hybrid remote workspaces.
As we move to a world where remote work is possible and more feasible, it is only a matter of time before a virtual work environment is created. It is highly likely that many companies will not be considering going back to physical workplaces. Moving forward, the future of the workplace is moving from remote to virtual. And, we need product managers to design that kind of work environment.
What types of needs should be anticipated in this new workplace environment? How can we keep a team in the virtual workspace reductive? It is these kinds of things that a product manager will have to address.
Why the role of Product Manager is the most important function in a company to deliver successful products and services that align with customers’ expectations and needs.
Product Managers are the people who best understand the needs of the customer. They are also the best ones that can solve issues that may arise when new needs emerge.
It is a PM's job to review and gather data, communicate with different stakeholders, ensure that everyone is on the same page, prioritize what needs to be done, and so on.
In many cases, the issues and pain points have already been identified. Or sometimes, the technologies are already established but many companies don't know how to leverage these in the context of users.
That is why the role of a product manager is vital. They are the ones who make sense out of all the organized chaos involved in ensuring the success of a product.
