What does it mean to be a Technical PM (or TPM or PMT)?
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About us: Andrew (AM) and Chandrika (CM) met during their MBA program at MIT Sloan and connected over their passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management. AM currently works as a Product Manager at Moveworks and CM works as a Product Manager at DocuSign.
In this new series, we are covering our peers in PM roles across different organizations to give you a view into what various roles demand and which role is likely the best fit for you. For this post, we spoke to our friend Maor who is currently a Sr. Technical PM at Amazon Alexa Smart Home. Prior to this role, he was a Sr. Product Manager in Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on ElasticBlock Storage.
As a Sr. Technical Product Manager (PMT), Maor is focused on building strategic experiences for the Alexa Smart Home ecosystem across millions of customers and 3rd party developers. The role includes owning the product roadmap, working with software engineers, designers, and researchers. Maor’s focus is in the area of smart energy and figuring out how Alexa can intelligently help customers save on energy with a variety of connected IOT devices.
In this post, Maor reflects on his experiences at both Alexa and AWS.
How do you define the business objectives that you are working towards with your project?
There is a known saying at Amazon, you start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. Whether those are AWS customers (B2B- enterprises/startups) or Alexa customers (everyday consumers). It all comes down to bringing them on the Amazon Flywheel. Therefore, we strive to increase engagement by offering better prices and services. Each product has its own set of metrics to measure:
For Alexa, my primary metric is engagement. Examples for how to measure it can be Daily Active Usage (DAU) / Monthly Active Usage (MAU) and typical product analytics, such as resurrection, retention, and churn. To move this metric, we offer more integrations and more functionality to Alexa with a variety of connected devices.
For AWS, the primary metric is usage, which is strongly correlated to revenue or “pay what you use.” To move this metric, we offer more complementary products that work together nicely in the AWS ecosystem and competitive prices.
How do you go about defining requirements for your projects?
Customer obsession is at the heart defining requirements. I start with what is the customer problem I’m trying to solve? For example: reduce friction with Alexa / introducing a new capability. What is the impact? How many customers will use it? What are the customer segments?
Then comes the fun part of the famous PR/FAQ doc. The PR (press release, max 1 pager) is written as if you are reading an article on Wire magazine, introducing the new product or feature. The FAQ (Frequently asked questions, max 5 pages) would have questions that customers can be anticipated to have about the product, and straightforward answers. Along the process of writing a PR/FAQ doc I will touch base with multiple teams including legal (for privacy considerations), UX/UI, Marketing, research, and engineers.
How do you prioritize projects?
In Alexa, we leverage research and outcomes of surveys to segment and really understand how our customers behave and what they want. We start with an analysis of the entire engagement funnel and pin point where we can improve the user experience. Then we label the importance of each new feature into different categories:
Must-Be: features that are expected and when they are not, the product is considered incomplete
Performance Features: the better we get at providing them, the more the more delight the customer experiences
Attractive Features: unexpected, delightful features customers don’t expect to get from the product, but would really like if they did.
As an example for an attractive feature, we recently launched Hunches automatic actions. Customers already know they can use Alexa to interact with their smart home devices, now Alexa can be more proactive by automatically turning off lights or adjusting your smart thermostat when she has a hunch you are asleep or away from home.
Overall, who do you think will enjoy the role of a ‘Technical PM’?
Though not an absolute requirement, a PMT would benefit from already having direct engineering experience. If you don’t, that’s totally fine as long as you are ready to dive deep into the tech so that you can speak the language of the engineers alongside you. You want to be able to crisply translate technical requirements to non-tech audiences. You will enjoy this role if you are an adaptable person who can wear many different hats and love working cross-functionally. It is not rare on a single day to interact with engineers, UX designers, data science researchers, legal, marketing, and senior leadership. You should have strong communication skills and empathy for others in various roles.