Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more

Jackie Bavaro, author of Cracking the PM Interview and Cracking the PM Career and former first PM and head of product management at Asana, discusses her path into product and her eight years at Asana. The conversation covers her views on what product strategy is and how to build one, plus career advice on moving to senior PM, management tradeoffs, and early-career mistakes.

01Key learnings

• Ask your manager directly how to prepare for a future promotion, framing the goal in the future so the manager becomes an ally rather than a gatekeeper.
• Treat a strategy as three parts: a vision, a strategic framework with pillars and bets, and a backward-working roadmap used as a feasibility check.
• A roadmap in strategy is a sanity check, not a commitment; if it can't reach the vision in time, that signals bigger bets or more resources are needed.
• A good strategy connects high-level business goals down to specific features through explicit intermediate reasoning, and you find gaps by listening for confusion.
• Don't spend your first six months on strategy; focus on customers and data, then draft a strategy for your team after about six months.
• Repeated, values-laden disagreements over individual features usually signal a missing strategic principle; address that level instead of fighting feature by feature.
• Early in your career, deliver solid execution on scoped problems rather than inventing large solutions; trust earned that way unlocks bigger work later.
• Explore cross-applying strategic frameworks from other products, such as consistency versus comprehensiveness, to sharpen your own strategic thinking.

02Frameworks mentioned

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