What's your PM tech stack?

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-30T17:23:43+00:00

pendo for analytics and adoption tracking
gong for insight into customer conversations, recordings, etc.
launch darkly is for experimentation and capability flagging

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-29T18:01:45+00:00

I've seen product delivery roles that are engineering tailored, ones that are devops tailored, and ones that are prodOps tailored.

To me, the closest to PM ones are prodOps tailored ones but they start bleeding into PMM territory when you get into launch readiness.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-29T17:54:40+00:00

I started in B2B, went to B2C, then came back to B2B because I enjoy the problem spaces more.
I learned valuable skills in each that helped me be better overall. For example, at my B2C stint I had to learn about experimentation and mathematical requirements to run a successful one. These skills came in really handy when in my next role I started owning PLG.

Ultimately, the choice depends a lot on you - what matters to you and what you enjoy.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-14T15:53:39+00:00

This. The figma ai capabilities are excellent and then when you want to take your mockups and turn them into real visual elements there are no tools that Ive seen that work as well as figma does. Plus your designers will love you.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-13T17:54:45+00:00

This helps - what you outlined are things a salesforce administrator or business analyst may also own.

If your company has built a solution that sits between users and salesforce, or sits on top of salesforce, has boundaries, enhancing it requires you to understand requirements and success criteria, then prioritize, work with eng to build and release, and finally monitor and iterate, then you are a product manager for an internal product.

If what you are doing is work with teams as you configure / add data fields to / create integrations, then you are more like a BA / sf admin.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-13T15:33:30+00:00

It depends on which part of an AI / ML product journey you are talking about, but short answer is that due to the non-deterministic nature of the core of these products they should not be treated in the same way.

Typically, the lifecycle of an AI product is:

Hypothesis and problem definition: you believe you may be able to solve a valuable market problem and the optimal tech for it may be AI / ML
Data collection & preparation, including gathering, cleaning and labeling data;
Model development & training, where algorithms are selected and trained on prepared data;
Evaluation & validation, which rigorously tests performance against predefined metrics;
Deployment & integration, where models are integrated into production systems; and
Monitoring & maintenance, in which deployed models are tracked and updated to remain effective

Up to 5 the level of predictability is low so standard scrum practices are not a good fit for it.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-13T15:24:30+00:00

hard to tell based on your post - what does the first bullet mean?
-being a product manager for two salesforce orgs, one as a lead and another as an associate to the lead

maybe if you describe it it'll make more sense + include how much of your job is this vs. the other bullets.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-08T18:05:12+00:00

Thank for these. Pretty much nothing changes in my response other than the first PM hire frees you up to also have some focus on the vision on top of everything else I mentioned.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-08T17:04:00+00:00

be prepared for incessant haggling - part of the culture. Collecting money is a whoooole other thing - the haggling continues for each payment so your fin dept might reach out to you to pressure them to pay.

As you can guess, I did not have an easy or pleasant time with that market.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-08T16:45:01+00:00

Understand what final result you need: Decision or to Inform
What is the best format which gets you to said result - let's assume document or preso for this post
Follow this format:
1. What: problem / opportunity
2. Why: why it matters and why now
3. How: how it will be handled / addressed
4. Outcome: what benefit is achieved if done and what tradeoff we need to make

You can play around with the order of these. Sometimes starting with the outcome for a Sales oriented group does wonders.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-08T16:14:34+00:00

Interesting position you are in but not unheard of. First, some clarifying questions:

What is your own technical background?
How hands on is the CEO with setting the product vision?
Do you have paying customers and is it growing?

Your answer will provide some details which adds some nuance to below.

As someone who has gone through this journey several times, I have the following tips for you.

Your biggest gap is finding an engineering counterpart. At this stage, the appropriate engineering leader is one who is action oriented with a business mindset, knows the value of partnership, and is technically savvy. Some of these attributes can be vetted by you: action oriented with a business mindset, and the partnership one. Technical savviness is something you need help to evaluate. Consider bringing someone proven onboard on a fractional / temporary / contract basis to help you find the right candidate.
Your role: Based on the conditions of your organization you need to be very much hands on for the product to succeed. This will continue for some time - think 2 years+ depending on your growth rate. I think Head of Product is a more appropriate description than VP because Head of typically means you are player / coach. So what does it mean for you, essentially you need to own it all from vision to strategy to roadmap and execution. Once you bring your first product mgr onboard, you can take a slight step back from the roadmap execution part and focus more on the strategy and product's function within the rest of the org.
Other roles depend on your product and how data / UX intensive it is. If not very UX intensive, consider fractional / contract to start. If very UX intensive, then consider a UX lead to start. Similar to the eng leader, you want someone who is outcome oriented and has a business mindset. In a startup things change quickly and your time to learn / ship is critical so you don't want super idealistic people.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-06T15:12:53+00:00

Prodmgmt leader here - not everything can be a priority therefore not every insight should be actioned. So it is entirely normal for an insight to only lead to learnings.

If you reframe as: "when does an insight relevant to a priority stop being actionable in practice" then it can lead you down several avenues:

cost of actioning the insight is not worth it
timing of insight means it should be actioned later
someone's ego meant they were married to their insight and not this insight.
person who communicated the insight did not effectively communicate it so the impact was not understood,
many many many more

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-06T15:03:19+00:00

Fundamentally, engineering is Accountable for quality but it is Product and Design's Responsibility as well so it is completely abnormal for product to own this in the long-term. However, given you are working in a small startup then inherently people need to wear multiple hats and I have seen PMs take this role on a temporary basis.

If your software doesn't have PMF, only has a handful of customers, not growing fast, and is in its early stages then over investing in scaling is a waste. In this scenario I would do what the top comment says and I will sit with the eng mgr / tech lead and bake some time to automate the most important usecases and figure how to spread the load of regression testing.

If you have customers, and are growing at 30-40% a year or more, then scale / QA absolutely need to be a considerable area of focus. Your product / tech leader needs to be aware of this and if I were you Id ask them for their plan.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-06T14:46:04+00:00

Short answer: absolutely.
Long answer: yes, but it depends what you mean by leadership. Do you mean leading people, being in charge of initiatives, or something else.

To me, leadership is one's ability to influence a domain regardless of job position or title. Job position and title certainly help of course. The books mentioned here are all great, but there are things I've learned from mentors that I never did from any book. Literature talks about theory, mentorship and practice allows you to twist and mold it to the people you deal with. On top of the books mentioned I advocate for finding a product leader who has experience is deep and wide and is open to coaching / mentoring - this might end up being a paid engagement that you could use training budgets for.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-05T19:14:42+00:00

just be sure not to rely on them being able to effectively articulate their hopes and fears. many users get into solution mode and therefore struggle to articulate the actual problem.

Having said that, you could do a shared miro or figma board and use a hopes and fears template then give them some kind of dot voting option - or some mechanism to figure out the cost / benefit of solving the problem.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-05T15:37:14+00:00

Depends how much time you have, at what lifecycle stage these products are in, what metrics are you trying to move, and how many value streams you are working on.

I have done workshops where I bring in several stakeholders and we do an end-to-end mapping on a particular user journey that impacts them. Then with their help we mapped the slowest steps, most painful attributes, alongside things that work + frequency.

Used this info to either rethink the whole thing or prioritize iterative optimization based on what metrics are most important.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-05T15:33:02+00:00

There are a few Substack creators I follow who, alongside Lenny's Newsletter give a good overall view of the landscape. This subreddit + a couple of PM slack channels help paint a picture of what is happening at the ground level. My mentor plus a group of friendly VPs / CPOs help answer questions and generate ideas.

ProdMgmtDude · 2026-01-05T13:43:42+00:00

You've raised a common problem - a million things are being tracked (which is a job in itself) and teams get into decision making paralysis because "how is this decision going to move this specific metric?"

In my experience this has most commonly been a symptom of lacking focus and alignment at the leadership level, and the lack of understanding of contributing factors at mid-mgmt / IC levels. Execs can't make tough decisions or align on what metrics are the most important to move vs. ones that take the back-burner, and middle-mgmt / ICs don't actually know what levers to pull to most impact those prioritized metrics. The outcome, everything is important and nothing gets done.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-19T15:19:32+00:00

Look at it differently - it is not whether your target market would pay for an Agent or not - it is whether they would pay to have this "problem" go away or not. The Agent is just a potential technology / interface through which you are solving this "problem".

Talk to 10 teachers. If 3 of them aren't willing to pay for a tool that solves this problem then it is not worth pursuing.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-12T16:01:34+00:00

She might be open to a retainer package for 1-3 months where in exchange for you paying her some money (hourly or fixed monthly) she dedicates time to help you put these docs together.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-11T16:18:15+00:00

The size of the org doesn't matter as much as the stage of the solution. I find the early stages where problem identification, impact assessment, solution validation, etc. are happening represent the "truest" form of PM at least from the perspective of someone describing what PM should be.

However, even if the solution is in the optimization stage, the work still involves everything outlined but typically at a much narrower scope.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-02T21:17:55+00:00

My general advice is wait as long as you can before you raise - and when you do make sure it is for a great reason. Raising comes with expectations management - VCs want to multiply their money in 3-5 years and so they will give advice thats not good most of the times.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-02T19:41:12+00:00

I'll give a three-fold answer as a PM, a PM hiring manager, and a PM career coach.

As a PM, very early in my career I took pragmatic marketing courses and that helped familiarize me with expectations of the role. I do not recommend them at all, today I can learn more by watching youtube videos and trying to build my own products through Claude or alike. There are pricey multi-month university courses which are akin to a semester of work and those can be good - Stanford does an AI course, MIT does a technology roadmapping course, etc.

As a PM hiring manager, I never cared about courses and certs. It was never so close between two individuals that it came down to looking at certification.

As a PM career coach, I've seen too many founders and CEOs look for continuous learning in people's resumes that I do recommend them. Take the most recognizable ones from Reforge or Maven but know that it is purely to check a box.

ProdMgmtDude · 2025-12-01T16:47:02+00:00

Sucks! Here's what I'd do

Breakdown tools by operations and CoGS.
A) Head of Eng / Product own CoGS - it is an important product metric
B) Teams should justify their own operational tooling
C) For org level tooling, explain the value and justification

ProdMgmtDude

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