Main Takeaways: - The best way to start developing your product sense is to think intentionally about your everyday product usage. - The only way to develop execution skills is by building, shipping, and iterating. And you don't have to know how to write code to build something! - Always try to tie the impact of a proposed feature or idea back to a top-line metric that the company cares about, whether it's active users, revenue, or something else that impacts the business.

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Practical Tips for Building PM Skills
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5. Some
Practical
Tips for
Building
PM Skills
Jonathan Tien
@ricefield

6. - Geared towards junior PMs and people
looking to break into product management
- Focused on giving you practical exercises
you can use to build skills
- Not meant to be comprehensive of all PM
skills, but serves as a starting point for
practicing some core skills
- Practicing these skills should not only
make you a better PM, but will also give
you ammunition/substance for
interviewing and networking
What this
presentation is
and what it is not

7. We’ll focus on 3 main skill areas:
01
Product Sense
02
Execution
03
Business Metrics

8. Product Sense
01
Curiosity, observation, empathy,
and reflection

9. I like Julie Zhuo’s (fmr. VP of Product
Design at FB) succinct definition:
What is Product Sense?

10. Think
intentionally
about your own
product usage
Tip #1

11. A simple exercise for thinking intentionally
Ask yourself:
● Which products do I love/use and why?
○ Conversely, which products do you avoid dislike/avoid using?
Then, write them down:
● Doing your best job to articulate what makes a product work for you (and
perhaps for others as well)
● If you can, try to keep a notebook with notes/observations that builds up over
time. You can later go back and reflect on your past observations
Lastly, share for feedback:
● I recently wrote several pages for myself on why Clubhouse is an addicting and
compelling experience, and shared it with my peers for feedback
● There will be some common threads, but some differing perspectives

12. Remember: Look past design aesthetics
An important part of product sense if not confusing aesthetics for good user
experience / product design.
Ask yourself:
● What products look/seem cool, but don’t have staying power? (i.e. you don’t
find yourself using or paying for).
○ Conversely, what are products that you use or get a lot of value out of despite not
being the most aesthetically pleasing?

13. Seek out people
with differing
product opinions
Tip #2

14. Broaden your scope
Most product thinkers start from their own experiences to develop their product
sense. However, over time it’s necessarily to look past your own biases and
preferences to broaden your user empathy.
Ask yourself:
● What are products that other people seem to love / use frequently but you
yourself don’t “get”?
○ Conversely, who are the people who don’t appreciate the same products or apps
that you do?
Then:
● Hypothesize why that might be—maybe you’re not the target audience? Or
maybe you’re missing something about the core experience
● Better yet, talk to / interview others who have differing viewpoints from you on
a given product and spend time reflecting on the points they make.

15. Constantly
Evaluate New
Products &
Features
Tip #3

16. Test yourself
Newly launched products & features give you an opportunity to calibrate your
product sense skills
When a new product or feature comes out, try asking yourself:
● Do I think this will work? Why or why not?
● Who’s the target audience? What’s the intended impact or outcome that the
maker is aiming for?
Then:
● Write down your observations or predictions
● Compare notes with friends, against commentary on Twitter, etc.
● Track or check back on that product or features trajectory in the coming weeks,
months, year. What did you get right? What did you not anticipate?

17. Execution
02
Attention-to-detail, tenacity,
“follows through”

18. Especially in the early stages of your
career, the most important of the product
manager is to ship product.
On its face it may seem simple, but when
it comes to execution, “the devil’s in the
details” (as they say).
When evaluating junior/entry-level PMs,
the biggest question I’m asking myself is
“can this person ship?”
Why Execution?

19. Build
& Ship
Tip #4

20. —The reader, probably
“But Jonathan, I don’t know how to code!”

21. Build (Anything) and Ship It!
That’s ok! You don’t have to know how to code in order to:
● Solve problems for users / customers
● Experiment with new ideas
● Ship something valuable
Some examples of things you can build without writing any code:
○ Mock up an interactive prototype in Figma
○ Build a website using Squarespace or Webflow
○ Automate a workflow using tools like Zapier, Airtable, etc.
○ Prototype a voice application using Voiceflow
○ Build an app prototype using a no-code tool like Bubble or Thunkable
○ Create a chatbot using Landbot
○ Could even be a doc or deck proposing a new product or feature!
○ ...

22. Seek Feedback
and a Develop a
Thick Skin
Tip #5

23. Ship → Seek Feedback → Iterate → Repeat
Execution is an iterative process. Shipping something is just the first step—after
that comes feedback, learning, and iteration.
Remember:
● No one gets it right on the first try. Don’t wait until your work is perfect
before showing it / seeking feedback. The longer you wait, the more
opportunities for learning and iteration you miss out on.
● Develop a thick skin. Product management is a job that requires a low ego.
You will make bad decisions, have terrible ideas, get it wrong, etc. The best
executors actively seek feedback/criticism and use it to learn and iterate.
● This will help you set clear goals, force you to think hard about
pivots/changes, help you get comfortable making trade offs, and avoid
getting too attached to your early decisions.

24. Business Metrics
03
Reasoning, Critical Thinking,
Objectivity

25. Fundamentally, the product management
role is a business one, and ultimately PMs
are evaluated on their ability to drive
business impact.
Understanding and reasoning through
business metrics effectively is a key skill
for PMs to be able to evaluate, frame, and
prioritize their product work.
What does it mean to be
good at “business
metrics”?

26. Assess Impact of
New Features /
Feature Ideas
Tip #6

27. Assess impact of proposed features
● The most common mistake I see when I review PM applications is that
candidates will propose a feature, and when asked what metrics/KPIs they
would use to evaluate its success they give some variation of “how many
users use this feature / click this button, etc.”
● A feature isn’t successful if a lot of people use it. It Is successful if it drives a
positive business outcome for the company
Next time you see a new feature or have an idea for a feature, ask yourself:
● What impact on the company’s business would this feature have?
● What metrics would best capture that impact?
● What degree of impact would make this feature worth investing time and
energy to design and build?

28. Draw Metric /
KPI Trees
Tip #7

29. Draw Metric Trees
Ok so, I’ll readily admit that it’s not easy to simply “assess the business impact of
features” a priori. A really practical way to get a handle on business metrics for a
feature or products is draw metric trees (or KPI trees).
This is a simple exercise, where you pick 1-2 top line metrics that are obviously
important to a company. Usually something like “active users” and “revenue”
Then for each metric, break it down into components. Active users is affected by
new signups and retention of current users. Revenue is affected by things like
conversion rate and value of each transaction. Each of those metrics can be further
broken down in various ways.
From there you can determine which features, work streams, teams might map to
each metric. One PM might focus on improving conversion rate, another might work
on increasing the average value of each transaction.

30. A hypothetical KPI tree. A good exercise here would be to ask yourself, what metrics feed into “user acquisition”
and “user retention”?

31. Protip: Research Company Financial Statements
If you feel stuck on drawing a metric/KPI tree, the first thing to do is always to read
up on a company’s financial statements. You’ll quickly see what metrics they track
and report to investors. That will tell you a lot about where they invest their product /
eng resources and what they are focused on as a company.
For public companies, find their investor relations site and read their quarterly or
annual investor presentations/
For private companies, it can be a little trickier, but you can look at what numbers
they report to the press, or look at what their competitors report as a reference point.

32. Remember! There’s multiple “right” answers
There’s no single “right” way to draw a metric/KPI tree. As you practice drawing
metric/KPI trees and compare notes with others, you’ll discover new ways to frame
under what drives growth in certain metrics.
Exploring different ways to draw a metric tree is great way to think about product
development and strategy.

33. Thinking
Through
Prioritization &
Tradeoffs
Tip #8

34. “Why don’t / haven’t they done [X]?”
Like anyone, you’ve probably asked yourself more than once “why hasn’t [famous,
well-funded company] done [XYZ] yet?”
If you understand a company’s metric/KPI tree, then you will have a framework for
reasoning through why their decision to not do [XYZ] might make sense or not.
Some things to think about as you frame a given feature or product
improvement within a company or product’s metric tree:
● Sometimes, things you impact you / you care about as a user do not align
neatly with a company’s priorities or impact a business metric they care about.
● Sometimes, there is a positive business impact (upside) in the change, but it
creates a tradeoff in another metric the company is not willing to accept
● Sometimes there is positive impact (upside) in the change, but it is not
significant enough to justify prioritizing investment.

35. Stuff I Didn’t Have
Time to Cover
Read Ben
Thompson’s
Stratechery
Strategy
Mock up your own
product ideas
Design
Sense
Learn to code
Technical
Skills
Practice writing,
making decks, and
public speaking
Communication

36. CREDITS: This presentation template was created
by Slidesgo, including icons by Flaticon, and
infographics & images by Freepik
Thanks for
listening!
Jonathan Tien
Senior Product Manager, Reddit
@ricefield

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