Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM

Maggie Crowley, VP of Product at Toast and former leader at Charlie Health, Drift, BevSpot and TripAdvisor, discusses what separates strong product managers. The conversation covers simplification and follow-through, a practical approach to writing product strategy and one-pagers, the long timeline to become skilled, how to break into PM, and the value of writing publicly.

01Key learnings

• Great PMs simplify relentlessly: find the one thing to do and stick with it long enough to actually finish it.
• Read your documents out loud and cut anything complicated; if you can say it in conversation, write it that way.
• Follow up on results after launches by setting calendar reminders to check metrics weeks and months later, and share what you learn.
• Write a strategy as a living shared doc: mission, landscape, current state, opportunity, challenges, solution, and plan, then invite critique from engineers and designers.
• Expect PM skill to take years of shipping and seeing the consequences of decisions, so staying in one product long enough to see multiple cycles pays off.
• Carry the water: do the unglamorous work like QA, sales calls, and customer implementation, since PMs are accountable for business outcomes no one else owns.
• Treat a strong PM title as the key to entering the field; take any PM role offered, then build a record of what you have shipped.
• Be wary of over-reliance on dashboards; talk to users to understand why metrics move, and sometimes just do the obviously better thing.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.