I recently had the good fortune of talking to Morgan Patzelt who is a product manager at Showbie. I met her because one of her colleagues (hi Ella!) messaged me on this here website after reading one of my product manager interviews and told me Morgan and I should connect. I’m so glad we did!
Do you consider your product a Saas product?
Yes, the service we provide is a paperless classroom for teachers and students. Teachers can upload assignments to the app. Then there are annotation tools for students to complete the assignments, and teachers also have access to those annotation tools to give their students really rich feedback. We take the core workflow for the classroom and put it inside the app.
If you’ve product managed for other products, how does Saas PMing differ from other products?
This is the only one.
How do you define product management?
The core of it is working with the users and talking to them to figure out what their needs are. Then it’s working with the development team to turn those needs into features.
What is your particular approach to product management?
It’s very much a team sport. I rely heavily on the designer and tech lead on my team. I also rely heavily on the other PMs at the company and in the community to bounce ideas off of. I try to get as much information from my users to make informed decisions with the team. I rarely make decisions on my own, I like to make them with the team — it helps build excitement about what we’re working on and creating new things for the product. It creates buy-in.
What’s your strong suit as a product manager?
There are two things that are core: Strong communication and making sure people have the channels to give feedback, the user, team, company — I’m taking in feedback from everybody.
Always be learning, I read articles everyday, listen to podcasts to look for new approaches to push the team a little bit further. I’m always trying to improve. Things are always changing so you have to adapt to it.
How do you know that you’re doing a good job?
This is an area that we’re trying to develop as a company. We are looking at having well-defined KPIs (key performance indicators) but getting those is hard. It’s hard to find the one criteria that covers it. We try to put metrics on everything we do but that doesn’t always tell the whole story. Right now, our best indicator of success is about talking to our users and making sure they are satisfied and happy. Ideally it’s a combination of metrics and our users reflecting that it’s making a difference in their day-to-day life.
What’s your favourite part of being a product manager?
I love talking to people. It allows me to talk to so many different people in the company, as well as, teachers around the world. I came from a data analyst background on a one person team. Being on a one person team, I felt isolated at times, from the other teams in the company, and the end-users. Being able to work remotely means connecting with more people but you miss those conversations in the kitchen etc. I try to make an effort to stay connected with the company and our end-users.
How do you generally make decisions?
I very rarely make decisions on my own. I rely heavily on the tech lead and designer on my team to make sure that we’ve looked at it from all angles. I like to use their wealth of knowledge to know what is usable and feasible. I think it’s a wasted resource to not use them and to make decisions without them.
How do you spend your time?
I’ve found that Product Management can feel a little floaty! There are always a bunch of things you could do at any given moment. There’s a lot to spend your time on! You’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Everyday is a new adventure. Most days I have a user interview, a call with my team or someone in the company, some head’s down working time and getting some research done, documented and pushed onto the next stage.
How do you approach problem solving?
I try to gather as much information as I can, talk to users, and talk to my team. Make sure we really understand the problem that we are trying to solve. We try to break it down into multiple solutions and figure out how much value each one has and if we can solve it that way. I like to narrow it down and make it more and more specific to test it out. I want to get feedback on it at every stage so that I know we’re on the right track. You need to test until you know you have the right solution.
Thank you so much for your time Morgan! This post is part of handful interviewing product managers at other companies in my quest to learn more about my profession.
Kate Moore Hermes 