Gabrielle Bufrem - Confessions Of A First Head Of Product (Turing Fest 2022)

The Head of Product role is alluring in many ways - it was Gabrielle's dream job when she was a PM and it is the dream role of many product people. In this talk, Gabrielle shares her assumptions about the role and which assumptions she learned are right, wrong, and which ones are very wrong. This talk walks through learnings as a Head of Product, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned while building great products and, most importantly, great teams.

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Transcript

1. Confessions of a first head of product
2. 8 lessons learned So that you don’t make the same mistakes I did
3. Hi! My name is Gabi Product Manager → Senior Product Manager → Group Product Manager → Head of Product During my free time I’m a vacation surfer, coffee snob, foodie, and I also love to travel! Grab me for a during the conference and let’s keep the conversation going @gbufremsays
4. Lesson #1: Everything will be broken
5. Lesson #2: A lot of people won’t understand what you do
6. Design Engineering Product Magic ✨ Represents the business Represents the customer Represents the technology
7. What does a Head of Product do? • Sets the vision for the product • Works on how we get there • Grows the product team
8. VISION BUSINESS GOALS OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS STRATEGY
9. VISION This is hard... Where we are now
10. Lesson #3: You coming in = people having less control. People don’t like that
11. Lesson #4: The best onboarding is talking to your customers
12. Lesson #5: There is a weight to what you say and you can’t take that away
13. Lesson #6: You need to get people comfortable with building the thing that works for now - not the best thing Now Next Much later
14. Lesson #7: Your hopes of process will clash with the level of scrappiness required
15. Lesson #8: Making suboptimal decisions trying to save money will cost you so much money
16. Recap • Everything will be broken • A lot of people won’t know what you do • You coming in = people having less control. People don’t like that • The best onboarding is talking to your customers • There’s a weight to what you say and you can’t take that away • You need to get people comfortable with building the thing that works for now - not the best thing • Your hopes for process will clash with the level of scrappiness required • Making suboptimal decisions trying to save money will cost you so much money 💔 🤨 😤 󰬷 🚲 󰝯 🏝 🤑 @gbufremsays