Jerin Stewart is a senior product manager at ATB Financial, here in Edmonton. Jerin and I met at the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) “How to make products customers love” workshop in November 2019. As part of my quest to learn more about the craft of product management and how other Saas companies do things, I’ve been talking to product people to learn from them. Below is a recent chat I had with Jerin, with many thanks for taking the time to talk to me!
Do you consider your product a Saas product?
It’s more of an internal product.
How do you define product management?
It’s trying to figure out what are your next best bets to achieve some sort of outcome: Whether it’s to get more customers or make more money, what is your next best option?
What is your particular approach to product management?
Starting from a desired outcome, aligning to that vision or strategy and building to that in its smallest pieces. Breaking a strategic objective into smaller objectives and key results (OKRs). Then to squad objectives or outcomes, map that to user value. Figure out where the meeting point between what our customers want and what our business needs. Work through problems to solve, metrics we need to solutions, and then delivering on that. Tech feasibility, demand, all the good SVPG questions and working with stakeholders to make it happen.
What’s your strong suit as a PM?
Light process, making something repeatable within certain boundaries. Application of that light process.
How do you know that you’re doing a good job?
Delighting customers, the team culture. A PM’s best contribution is to foster awesome team culture and psychological safety.
What’s your favourite part of being a product manager?
The amount of tools, techniques and concepts; the exposure you get to different domains; the amount of stuff you get to learn: broad spectrum of technology to consumer science to human psychology, understand the way people think, designing experiences, shaping the product, storytelling to picture things and relating it to something you know. Stuff that isn’t related to product but you have to know it. Communication!
How do you generally make decisions?
Try to use a framework, using the SVPG questions:
- value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
- usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
- feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
- business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business) Citation
Aligned with: Does this align to my strategy? Will this drive the numbers that I’m trying to push?
Trying to get into a mental model: Don’t make a decision unless you have no more than 70% of the info you need, and you don’t make it if you have any less than 40%.
Don’t make a decision unless you have no more than 70% of the info you need, and no less than 40%.
What are your favourite Product Management resources and tools?
- Content from SVPG, Marty Cagan
- Teresa Torres, because she’s centred around continuous discovery
- The Edmonton Product community
- Product School
What question do you wish I had asked you?
What has been fun about the journey so far is the chaotic nature of this discipline. There’s a clear path to get to developer and scrum master. Product manager, there’s a million different ways to get there and to execute it and it’s all based on your context. Until you get into it you can’t comprehend that it’s so open ended so: How does Product Management differ from other career paths?
Thank you so much for your time Jerin! This post is part of handful interviewing product managers at other companies in my quest to learn more about my profession.
Kate Moore Hermes 