“We work from the internet,” Darby Maloney, a product manager at Divvy, explained into her phone camera in a video taken in June 2022.
“So this is our office today,” her coworker chimes in, gesturing at the sunny, idyllic poolside where the two women were sitting on their laptops.
It’s a scene from one of a handful of ‘day in the life of a product manager’ TikToks that went viral last summer, prompting a wide range of reactions, from envy to confusion and, “Wait, what does a product manager do?”
Product managers are still a relatively new position in the tech world, but interest in the role is rising rapidly. According to a LinkedIn report, 43 percent of companies are hiring more product managers, with the interest in product management doubling between 2016 and 2021. Plus, with an average base salary of $117,409 in Austin, product management is a lucrative career.
Juan Yrigoyen, a head of product at Fortress’s Austin office, is a seasoned product manager who has seen the field evolve in its short life. According to Yrigoyen, some of the biggest changes in product management have come from the adaptation toward distributed product teams, such as the one Maloney posted about in her TikTok.
The other major trend he’s noticed? A massive increase in the data available to drive product decisions. Successful PMs need to understand how to prioritize relevant information and become more sophisticated in their analysis.
“We’ve gone from focusing on obtaining data in order to understand the product, to making sure we are using the right data and not being distracted by all of the noise,” said Yrigoyen.
To be successful, product leaders like Yrigoyen need to stay on top of trends and evolve with the circumstances. Built In Austin connected with Yrigoyen for more insight into the current trends driving the industry, and how his team is responding.
Fortress is a fintech company offering custody, payments, compliance and infrastructure solutions.
In your experience, how has the practice of product management evolved over the last few years?
Two very distinct changes are: the amount of data available and teams becoming distributed.
Each product has more data sources available every day. Having more information than ever changes our motivations. User understanding and critical thinking are key to selecting the most relevant data for the analysis.
Product teams are also becoming more distributed across regions and countries. As teams become distributed, gathering data from different stakeholders becomes more time-consuming and meeting times become more scarce. In order to adapt to the new environment, modern teams explicitly outline communication and decision-making frameworks that used to be implicitly understood. Although these new frameworks limit the tools available to move the product forward, such as through a quick in-person conversation, they do create more transparent and auditable decisions, which allow teams better long-term product development.
What kinds of technological or operational developments have driven or enabled those changes, and how has your team adopted them?
The amount of data available to product managers grows every day. The previous knowledge-creation model was to make a request from the analytics team and then wait for the answer. This old model is now creating bottlenecks and slowing development speed. The new model is to create self-service sources that individuals can access to do their own analysis. This new method is better because it allows PMs to eliminate unfeasible options with low-level analysis and only conduct sophisticated analysis when small variations change the final decision.
The new model is to create self-service sources that individuals can access to do their own analysis.”
Distributed teams have improved candidate quality because the talent pool is now wider. However, the remote environment has created new challenges in communication and decision-making. One approach to improve development speed in distributed teams is to migrate all information into asynchronous written documentation. These docs can track the features the team will develop and the decision-making frameworks that led the teams to those outcomes. It is essential that the PMs get into the habit of creating docs instead of hosting meetings and empowering employees to make decisions based only on the docs.
How does your team empower and encourage product professionals to explore new technologies and practices?
We encourage PMs to explore new technologies and practices by trusting them, being open to change and being willing to fail.
We believe that each individual in our team is an expert in their product area, both from the technological and operational perspectives. When they detect a pain point in the product development process, they are free to try out new solutions with the team without requiring previous approval because it can become a bottleneck for development. We expect them to shepherd the team through the new process and then gather feedback. If their solution solves the pain point, we will keep on using it with the team and consider how to expand it to other teams. If it didn’t, then we will try the next idea and iterate. Trying a new approach and failing does not reflect badly on the individual and is seen as a learning opportunity for everyone.
