Kat Zivanovich is a Senior Product Manager at Shopify. I met Kat while I was working at Clearly. She was working at Huge, and we worked on a project together. She is actually one of the people who got me interested in product management!
Do you consider your product a Saas product?
I work on a website that’s primarily focused on marketing a product, so no.
If you’ve product managed for other products, how does Saas product management differ from other products?
My first role in product was working on a SaaS product at a company. It was kind of a start-up vibe. At the time I was very in the weeds and defining every solution. Now my focus is typically more strategic.
How do you define product management?
Defining it is hard because it’s different everywhere. As product managers we straddle the line between strategy and tactics. We set the vision for our teams and provide context for what we’re going to do, why we’re going to do it and in what order to make the most impact. Our job is to make the best call with the information that we have at hand.
As product managers we straddle the line between strategy and tactics. We set the vision for our teams and provide context for what we’re going to do, why we’re going to do it and in what order to make the most impact.
– Kat Zivanovich
What is your particular approach to product management?
Always start with a problem: What is the problem and why is it important to solve? What levers do we have to solve it? What does success look like? Provide clear criteria to set the context, why is this a problem for our business, users, operationally? What are the opportunities that we see to solve this? How do we know when we’ve actually solved the problem? People are more comfortable with tactics and solutions but if we don’t start with the problem, we lose the opportunity to get to the right outcome
What’s your strong suit as a product manager?
I’ve become progressively more comfortable with ambiguity. That was really challenging for me early in my career. I got more comfortable living in it.
How do you know that you’re doing a good job?
If my stakeholders feel aligned and my team is motivated and excited about the work we’re doing.
What’s your favourite part of being a product manager?
Hands down, helping other people get excited about solving problems and seeing them succeed.
What question do you wish I had asked you?
How did you get into Product Management?
There’s no clear description of this, I didn’t really know what it was when I started doing it.
How do you spend your time?
Being remote has changed this: Most of my time is spent communicating with people. 80% of my time is spent on a video call talking to people. The other 20% is writing briefs or Slack messages, but never emails.
How do you approach problem solving?
Depends on the situation but a high EQ is important for PMs to have. To build great products you need to understand people, their motivations, and then make something simple and convenient that solves their problems, not your desires.
Thank you so much for your time Kat! This post is part of handful interviewing product managers at other companies in my quest to learn more about my profession.
Kate Moore Hermes 