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Scott Williamson

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2024-02-21
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2024-02-21
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  1. “I think if you hand it off before then, it can be very problematic because these decisions, which ICP, what are we going to prioritize to build for them? What's the core user experience? These things are so central to a company, especially if it's a PLG company. Handing that off before that is fairly clear feels like a recipe for disaster because you're actually either going to want to still be super close to it and you're going to squeeze them out or you're going to delegate too early and you're going to have someone without the core context with founder making these critical decisions. I could get behind hiring a fairly junior PM maybe to do some of the core day-to-day backlog management maybe, but nothing more than that until you have decently repeatable product market.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “When you found repeatable product marker fit where you know the ICP, you've got decent retention and you've seen a repeatable ability to go acquire that target customer.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Told him to do, or what the CEO told him to do, or what $5 million customer told him to do. And you end up with a work product that ultimately misses the mark for progressive teams that do product well, they've changed in at the given PMs more time to be customer facing. They start with the problem rather than the solution or what internal people think you need. And they routinely connect the work you're trying to do in product to the business outcome you're trying to drive, which customer is going to use this. What action do we think? What's this going to change? If you operate that way, you get more outcome focused and a lot less output focused and I don't know maybe 20% of teams work this way. Still a minority.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I define the role as how the function between the outside world, the market itself, the customers, the competitive moves, technology changes, and then the company. You got engineers, marketers, salespeople. They all need both sides of that need to interact with your product. And so PM is the function that sits in between those external and internal worlds, sets direction, makes the priority calls, decides where this thing should go and what we should invest in and what ultimately what the user experience should be. Now, to do that well, you need about half your time to be out of the building. Most PMs spend about 95% of their time facing engineering and zero to five talking to customers and being out in the world. What that means is the work that they tier for engineers oftentimes very ill-informed. Maybe based on instinct or what the sales team.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Basic grids wouldn't have found repeatable product market fit. You know who your ideal customer profile is. You generally know the problems they need you to solve. You generally have confidence that your product experience can both attract and retain them at a reasonable, sustainable level. Once you get to that point, then you're going to need to start adding nodes under your PM machine. You're going to need to break up the product experience. You're going to need to be able to bring on individual PMs and designers and engineering managers to own pieces of it. And when you get to maybe when it's still 3 PMs, there's still not a big need for big structured process. But when you get up to 10 plus, you're only as good as sort of the average PM's performance. And if you don't think about the broader system that each one of these people are plugging into, you're going to get this huge variance in performance.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, if I think about my own career, I've been more of the later stage. Let's bring some science to this thing. Let's bring some rigor to how the PM job is. It's more of like thinking of your product team as the product because they have to go do the individual work versus if you're a very early stage, either founder or person who's come in to run it, a lot less data. Maybe it's just you. You got to be scrappier. You got to work on less data. You got to use your bet a lot.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is artistic quite creative. I think in most roles it's about half and half. Here, growth PM at Facebook, you got shit tons of data. The path for the product is pretty clear. You're mostly just running A-B tests. Maybe it's more like 80, 20, 90, 10 data to R. Here's a startup. You have very little data at your disposal. You're mostly working on early qualitative feedback, really deeply understanding a problem and then trying to go iterate your way into it. And that well like 20 data, 80 art. So that's how I think about that mix.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Let me explain. Let me explain. And there are certain roles where it's a different mix. I think for most roles, what I've come to learn is that if you have a systematic approach to how you capture inputs for product, do you do inner customer interviews in a systematic, thorough, professional way? Do you instrument your application in the right way to where you get the right kind of product usage data to answer real questions? Do you have the right KPI that connects what you're doing to the business outcome? These are just examples of sort of having a systematic mindset to how you go and you do the job and how you capture the inputs. But then you got to derive insights from it. You have to figure out where to take that data, how to turn that data into a user experience that actually solves the problem that you're tending to solve, that actually drives the business outcome you're trying to drive. I feel like that peaceability.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it depends on where you want to end. If you want to be a badass PM, I don't think you really need it. You can learn the skills that you need to learn through product focus training, through being in the right situation, through learning from Jedi Masters at your company. If you want to be a CPO, a VP, if you want to really connect the dowth between product as a function in the rest of the company, I do think it can have a long-term payoffs from that standpoint. So I think it can have return for people with a very long view, but in the short term, there may be a faster path to a really cool PM job.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Product at this particular company. And after a few years working very closely with the product team, he was finally able to kind of get in the door, get my first PM role. And then from there, it was up to the races because I had a very broad background up until that point. It was a role I was supposed to be doing. And so from there, have had an amazing career and product leadership at Wiley CA, San Julio, and GitLab.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, it was actually a long road to get him to product where I started my tech career in sales and spent four years doing that quickly into that role, learned that I was very excited about what the product people were doing. So I endeavored to position myself to get into the role. And among other things, there wasn't much product management content back in the day. So I decided to get an MBA with a management of technology specialization to prove to hiring managers that I was serious about getting into product and gain some experience that I hadn't really had having kind of a traditional business background. And unfortunately, when I came out of grad school, it was 03, sort of the nuclear winter tech. There had been a dot-com bust. And so I was still competing with people who were trained product managers. So I took a job in alliances, which sat very close to.”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “There's four buckets for an individual PM. One is around valid, I call it validation, customer interviewing, product usage data, kind of like gathering insights. Two is build, which is how well do you work with engineering. Can you make trade-offs? Can you tee it up form in a language they understand? Three, the business. Do you know which KP add is set? The thing you're working on is going to drive. And third is communication skills. You need to manage up to execs. You need talk to customers in their language. You need to speak to engineering in their language”

    2024-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: The Five Step Process to Hiring the Best Product People, The Four Core Skills the Best PMs Need to Have, The Two Product Documents that Drive World Class Product Teams & Why the Best PMs are Writers with Scott Williamson, Former CPO @ Gitlab · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source