Entrepreneur Meetup: Product Management 101 University with Josh Siegel

On Thursday, October 18, SaaS professionals joined at ATDC for the Simply SaaS University: Product Management 101 class with Josh Siegel, Director of Product Management at Salesforce (Pardot). Josh comes from 20+ years of tech and joined us to help develop, motivate, and teach tactics to product builders, makers, and leaders.

What Do Product Managers Do?

They’re focused on Agile, Market and User Research, Go-to-Market strategy, and Pitch Decks. They help juggle all parts of the business and act as a guide to the Engineering/UX team, an advocate to the customer, a storyteller to the Execs, and an evangelist to the Marketing/Sales/Support teams.

As a Product Manager, you become the center of an ongoing conversation and that conversation evolves.

Agile Best Practices

Josh shared his tips on Agile and what he considers his best practices:

• Focus on epics and tie them into your story.
• Know every ticket. Explain why it’s important and how it fits into the bigger picture.
• Prioritize the backlog religiously.
• Take planning seriously as a forcing function.
• Really invest in Engineering team relationships.

“Agile is the worst form of Software Development, except for all the others.”

At the end of the day, Agile is really about communication and commitment. In the daily stand-ups you catch the little things that would go up in flames in 4 months, because they come up in casual conversation.

The Customer Experience

Customers are overlooked the most, and it’s the absolute most important part of the work. You as the Product Manager are an advocate for your customers. It’s about empathy — ask, “Who are you? Why do you do what you do?”

“What’s the biggest mistake a new entrepreneur can make? Not knowing who your customer is.”

When It Comes to Pitching…Tell a Story!

Josh’s storytelling best practices: know your goal, know their goal and how your story aligns, let the data tell the story, anticipate questions, have clear asks, build coalitions ahead of time, and have a test deck and iterate.

Go-to-Market: The Four P’s (Old and New)

The “old” four P’s marketing mix: Product, price, promotion, and place. The “new” four P’s: Pricing, positioning, packaging, and pitching.

Pricing and packaging are incredibly important for going to market. Details matter. Enable your sales team to be successful — you train the trainers, give them scripts, then incentives, then support, and then documentation.

Photos by Matt Conrad