3 Key Qualities for a Successful Product Manager: Dmitry Orlov, Senior Product Manager

We continue our series of articles about 3 key qualities for a successful product manager according to Riker. In the first part, we talked with Anton Danilov, a group product manager, and in the second , with Yury Golikov, director of engineering. Today we'll talk with Dmitry Orlov, who is responsible for mobile applications for Wrike for iOS and Android.

- Hi, Dim! Tell me, please, how long have you been working at Wrike? And how many years in general do you work as a product?

- Hello! I’ve been in Wrike for two and a half years, working as a product around 8 years old, and before Wrike I worked in Zvooq and in Yandex.

- As part of my interview series, I ask about the main qualities of the product manager. Already talked to Yura and Anton: they distinguish expertise, a sense of taste and ownership. And in your opinion, what qualities should have a cool product manager?

- Three things come to my mind: systems thinking, curiosity and communication. The product has only two responsibilities - to make decisions and communicate them to people so that they understand and do the right things - these are two very large parts. Half the time you spend on the first, half on the second, somewhere on the second even more. It is important not just to inform, but to check that all these issues are resolved competently.

If we talk about the first quality - systemic thinking, then, of course, there are principles that can be applied depending on the context, the company, the market situation and the product itself.

The solution must be complete, as you need to be able to see the situation from above: understand what forces are in the market, realize what will happen over time, including the actions of all competitors and, finally, figure out what you will do later, where you want to be with your product and present the path to this vision.

There is another extreme in which you can be - in a situation of high level of uncertainty. In this case, you are moving forward in small steps, all the time looking back to understand what the team has achieved in a short iteration. You work with analytics, with research - with qualitative and quantitative, you constantly collect data to fuel your decision.

Product always balances between these two extremes, and system thinking is needed to understand how to develop a product and how your every action will affect future history.

Here it is important to have a deep understanding of not only your microscale product, but also a holistic understanding of the market for which this product works. This is system thinking.

- By the way, you are the first among interviewees who mentioned system thinking. And tell me more about curiosity and communication?

- Curiosity is also an important quality, as you, as a product manager, constantly need to challenge your decision and take an interest in what happens in the domain of the product you are doing, well, and in related things.

With regard to communication, it is, to a greater extent, associated with the second part of the product I mentioned. You interact with a large number of stakeholders, and the team consists of different people who have different roles. You never manage people in the literal sense, the specialists from your team are not your subordinates, you work on the same team. At the same time, they all expect from you that you will explain that their work is not meaningless: they expect confidence and leadership from you, even though you are thinking in different planes.

It turns out such a symbiosis: you think more like a systemic person, and the team is focused on details, and, different experts - on different details. But at any time there may be difficulties in communication. It is not enough for you to take only an intuitively correct decision, your task is to clearly convey it to people. This is a communication skill that comes with experience: it helps to understand how to work with the team at each stage, at which the problem is dealt with, how to make them understand what to do, and do the right things.

- You said that the product manager is not a manager. Relatively speaking, if you have a final vision of the final result, then your task is to bring this vision to the team, right?

- In most cases, yes. It is important for people to know that what they are doing is right, it is beneficial. The task of the product is to bring this vision to the team, because sometimes the work goes at an insane pace and there is no time to think about the correctness. But in most cases this is a mandatory story. This is where the communication skill helps: you need to present a vision, convey the meaning of the team’s work, and without competent communication it’s difficult.

- As part of your role in Wrike, how do you work with other teams, considering that you are making a mobile product? What is the process of informing other teams about their plans and a given development vector? And how is communication with other stakeholders generally built?

- Communication outside the team with other stakeholders can be very different, depending on the product, team, company and so on. For example, in Wrike, communication takes place at different levels - with other product teams, with a product director who determines the vision of the entire product, with customer service specialists, with marketing.

In our case, interaction with the marketing team is not as close as in other companies, but at the same time, marketing is very dependent on what happens in the product. For example, there is the concept of "unit economy". This is such a framework that allows you to look at the optimization of the sales funnel within the product, mainly the client. The funnel consists of two parts - there is a marketing (all communications that occur before contact with the product) and a product component (everything that happens from the first contact and before the purchase). Marketing is responsible for its part, and the product team for its own. Our common task is to optimize the funnel along with marketing simultaneously from two sides.

In Wrike, many teams are highly interconnected. I do mobile apps, and many teams influence us. When they change something, we immediately change the logic of the application, and there is a need to instantly respond. We always follow the changes in Wrike. Fortunately, we have a lot of events when all the teams share plans with each other, so I have the opportunity to pick up something that, in my opinion, will affect us.

We have a common product strategy, which consists of high-level points, and all teams think about how they can contribute to each of the points - in collaboration or independently. We do not have a chaotic movement, each team has a separate trajectory, but we all work together on the same goals, so we interact a lot. Here the OKR planning system helps us well.

- To what extent does the product role have, according to your assessment, a lot of creative freedom?

- Freedom can be at completely different levels of abstraction. There are high-level solutions that determine the directions in which we strategically move: our plans for the year or for several years ahead. And there are other levels, including low, for example, how exactly the feature works.

Influence at the strategic level, of course. We do not have a random movement, we always move in one particular direction. Sometimes, of course, there is an opportunity to change something in its segment or to offer something that will become part of the strategy. That is, we are, in principle, free in this, but there are also limitations. At the micro level, it all depends on us, as they are waiting for the growth of the product from the product manager.

It seems to me that in the IT industry there is no other way. Growth is always expressed by specific metrics, and they can be very different, depending on what our team and the company as a whole are focused on. But no one dictates a product decision. Rather, they expect him to come up with solutions that will help achieve growth in certain indicators. And then there is a creative freedom that allows you to do anything. Often, it is not easy: you are looking for a solution, trying all sorts of different things, remembering to keep track of your competitors, and the market remains your main critic. You can not do anything, you must do what the market takes and what will give the maximum return.

- Do not miss Dmitry Orlov's speech at the Product Sense conference on April 15