Johann Lau

As a Product Manager, my primary responsibility is to ensure that the team(s) I support are delivering the right features and products. To get this right, you need to have a deep understanding of 1) your customers and what they're trying to accomplish, 2) the characteristics of your business and what it takes to keep the lights on and grow, and 3) technology and the capabilities of your teams. Day to day, I spend a lot of time with customers, to understand how they use our products (and other products), to develop an intuition for what they need and what will bring them the most value. I also spend a lot of time with engineering teams, to translate customer needs into clear product and feature requirements, so they know what to build how customers will use our products.

Having a science/engineering background is very helpful here, even though I don't do any engineering myself (though, I used to!). Finally, I think a lot about numbers and measurement, to make sure that we are monitoring all of the appropriate business and operational metrics - not just revenue and cost, but things like error rates, latency, and other things that help us understand the health of our business and how well we're satisfying customer needs. Most commonly, the problem solving that I do involves weighing trade-offs between imperfect options - there is rarely a "perfect" solution. This often has a heavy mathematical component that involves modeling the problem and performing some analysis.