Four Key Product Management Lessons from a Product Manager at Mailchimp

Whether you’re new to the product management field or a seasoned professional, it’s always valuable to learn from your peers’ lived experiences. From learning more about their career path to predicted trends to general tips and advice, there’s no shortage of lessons to be learned that can ultimately help you develop and become a better product expert yourself.

We recently sat down with four product experts and asked them about their experiences in this field. While you can watch the full hour-long interview here, this post breaks down four of the key lessons we learned from Kendrick Wang, product manager at Mailchimp.

We asked Kendrick to weigh in on four key questions:

1. What are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?
2. What are some trends you anticipate happening in the next several years?
3. What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?
4. What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

About Kendrick: Kendrick is a product manager at Mailchimp. Previously, he has worked for SaaS companies such as Dropbox and Apptimize. He enjoys enabling team members with data in order to drive decisions and build great products.

→WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

What do you think are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?

“So for me, numbers are a huge thing and the way I prove anything we’re going to build. It has to be built on data and very clearly called out assumptions and modeling. Even these days, it never ceases to surprise me how many people are not really data-fluent. It’s an issue because you always measure yourself on your own ruler. And if I’m measuring on a specific outcome, let’s say like user growth, and an executive is measuring on a different ruler motivated by a different KPI or incentive structure, it’s really hard to reconcile those things because you’re measuring things differently. It’s very unlikely that you’re going to agree on what you should do as a result of that. So a lot of times, it comes down to: How do I manage the expectations of somebody who’s measuring something completely differently from me and reconcile that with my own KPI?”

What are some product management trends you anticipate happening in the next 3-5 years for your particular industry?

“Data fluency again is really big. If you want to learn about machine learning, learning about A/B testing and SQL is a great way to intro into that because it teaches you the fundamentals machine learning is built on. I think that’s really a necessity. We’re moving more towards outcome-driven teams versus just shipping stuff. I think there’s going to be a pretty clear separation of “growth product managers.” Is it just normal product management? Because growth is focused on KPIs, it’s not just about boosting user numbers, it’s actually indexing on what’s going to move the metrics that are important to companies.”

What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?

“Whatever your process is, it’s not good enough, and you should do retros because you need regular feedback on what’s working and what doesn’t. You just have to constantly iterate and get feedback so that you can improve your processes. Because you’re never going to find the perfect fit. There is no tool out there that solves all your needs, and then you have to know when to cut off things you love too.”

What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

“We (at Mailchimp) have support insights analysts that are specifically the connection point between us and support, and they help us aggregate things. So, we actually went through all the feedback for a specific flow and we quantified the data. We also sat down with the user researcher and a designer, and we actually did rapid prototyping in front of a live customer. This is obviously pre-pandemic, but we were trying to redesign a specific flow and we actually just showed different prototypes and designed them as the customer was giving me feedback. Obviously, it’s not a scaled way to collect a ton of feedback, but since we were essentially starting from scratch, it was a great way for us to really quickly figure out what’s a better version of this flow. I also think that you can use salespeople to go learn about your product – these are the people that are just talking to customers. Every day you can sit-in on calls and you can quantify their win losses. There’s so many ways to leverage them, and a lot of people don’t think through that process or how to best utilize them.”

Download the eBook to read the interviews here or watch the full webinar here.