What it takes to become a top 1% PM

Ian McAllister is a senior director of product and tech at Uber and a former 12-year Amazon leader who also worked at Microsoft and Airbnb. The conversation covers his widely read post on what separates top 1% product managers, including the core skills new and senior PMs should prioritize, and the Amazon working-backwards process.

01Key learnings

• New PMs should focus first on communicating, prioritizing, and executing, since other skills grow in importance with seniority.
• Answer first and then explain; when asked a 'when' question, give a date, and grade yourself after feedback to improve communication.
• Prioritization is a core PM skill across themes, projects, sequencing, scope, and personal time, and it strongly multiplies impact.
• Trust is the currency of product leadership; build it by consistently setting expectations and meeting them, telling the truth, and owning mistakes.
• Think bigger than the initial idea by asking whether it could be more impactful, and view your ownership as extending to anything that affects customer success.
• Working backwards starts with the customer problem, not a solution; if you begin with 'we could combine these building blocks,' you are likely not working backwards.
• Use working-backwards documents like a press release, customer quote, and FAQ as tools to ground ideas in a problem and test for a legitimate plan to succeed.
• Teach the reasoning and mental model behind decisions, not just the decision, so people can apply the lesson and disagree and commit more effectively.

02Frameworks mentioned

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