Joel Liu's Library tagged Product →  View Popular, Search in Google

It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more

You don't say, "non-programmer equals -200k". You say, "What do they bring to the table? Oh, you have Bill Clinton on your team and you're trying to do a government services startup -- that's a pretty big plus, even if Bill isn't coding". "You're doing a Clicker like company and you have the ex-CEO of Comcast. Maybe a plus". "Doing financial services software, and you have the ex-head of IT from BofA... maybe useful, even if he is 'just' IT".

The core of the PM job in a company with direct sales is:

* Talking to customers

* Translating customer-ese into MRD-ese

* Negotiating with developers to translate the MRD into (a) a release schedule and (b) a product roadmap, both of which are commitments you'll be giving customers

* Being able to make a pretty roadmap slide deck and present it to (a) internal management and (b) customers

* Translating slide-deck-ese to marketing-ese (notably, being able to write any concept from use-case through engineering decision to value proposition in terms of "feature/function/benefit") so that marcom can commission sales collateral

* Working with sales to figure out what collateral is actually needed, and helping arrange for it to be created

* Tag-teaming on sales calls, both as a way to (a) talk to customers (see above) and (b) help account managers out

* Coordinating product packaging and pricing (note careful choice of words; product pricing is the deadly radioactive core of the startup money generator and is unlikely to be trusted wholesale to a front-line PM)

I list these not because I can hope to help you do the job better or to explain how to do these things, but instead because your interviewing strategy is very straightforward: take each of these tasks and devise 2-3 questions for your interviewer for each of them. You now have a small arsenal of questions; use them to keep control of the interview, while seeming extremely engaged with the job of product management. The answers to some of these questions may also clue you in to what your prospective employer is looking for in a PM.

Good "starter" questions (have 2 more detailed questions as backup) include things like:

"What's the process by which feature requests are qualified and then transformed into committed dates for customers?"

"Do you have a beta program? If so, how does it work, and what's the primary value to the company --- is it a prospecting tool, what percentage of your features and change requests originate in beta, and how do you qualify participants?"

"What's your most effective piece of sales collateral, and who wrote it, product management, marketing/communications, or an outside contractor?"