Product Q&A with Brandon Chu

Brandon Chu

About:

Brandon is a Sr. Product Manager at Shopify, where he currently splits his time leading conversational commerce products (selling through messaging) and building the product management discipline itself (i.e. the hiring, on-boarding, and decision making frameworks the company’s product managers use).  Previously, Brandon was a product director at FreshBooks, a series B startup in Toronto, where he led a product group responsible for all payment, partnership, and mobile products. His first foray into product was co-founding Tunezy, a 2010 startup focused on helping youtube musicians monetize their tours that was acquired by SFX Entertainment in 2013. Shopify is a commerce platform used by over 275,000 business around the world to easily sell things anywhere their customer are: whether that’s their own website, a retail store, or on their Facebook page. IPOing in 2015, Shopify has 4 offices in Canada and one in San Fransisco and now employs over 1500 people.

On the web:

Follow Brandon at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrandonMChu
Medium: https://medium.com/@brandonmchu

To join in on future Q&A, check out our Product Manager HQ community!

PMHQ Community AMA Sessions - Brandon Chu

Select questions and answers from the AMA:

In a platform like Shopify, how do (or did, or would) you draw borders around different parts of the application to segment out products? Would you mind giving specific examples?

Great question.  Right to the meat!  At the highest level we break up the platform as the ‘Commerce OS’ portion (the APIs that drive basic Shop management) and everything that will consume that.  Examples are Channels (places people can sell like their own online store or Facebook), or Services (drop-shipping like Shipwire). Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Punit Soni

Punit Soni

About: Punit was until recently at Flipkart (India’s largest ecommerce company) as their Chief Product Officer. In this role, he led the product definition and innovation charter for Flipkart consumer products, marketplace and transaction platform. He was responsible for driving Product Strategy, Design and Product Marketing functions to build world class user interface and product solutions.

As a senior product leader at Google and Motorola in Mountain View, California, Soni was involved in the development of some of the world’s most revolutionary products including Google News, Google Books, Google Plus, Google Mobile and a suite of Motorola devices including Moto X, Moto G and Moto E. Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Ken Norton

Ken Norton

About: Ken is a product partner at GV where he provides product and engineering support to startups. Prior to joining GV, Ken was a group product manager at Google. In his years as a PM at Google, Ken led product initiatives for Docs, Calendar, and Google Mobile Maps. Ken joined Google in 2006 with the acquisition of JotSpot, where he was vice president of products.

Before JotSpot, Ken led product management at Yahoo Search. Back in the day when he was a software engineer, he was one of the first 50 employees of CNET and the founding CTO of Snap (which became NBC Internet). Ken has written extensively about the craft of product management.

His classic essay “How to Hire a Product Manager” became the playbook for a generation of PMs. He’s also the reason donuts and product management have become synonymous. He earned his bachelor’s from Boston University and master’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Continue Reading

30 Questions to Determine if the Product Manager Job is Right For You

30 Questions to Determine if PM is Right For You

This is a guest post that was originally published by Stephanie Oh on StephOhSays.

Are you considering a career in Product Management, but feeling lost as to how you’re supposed to gauge whether or not the role would be a good fit for you?

Several people have asked me for advice on the topic, so before you jump into taking a pricey Product Management course — and for everyone who may not have a “PM friend of a friend” to ask for advice — here’s a list of 30 questions to ask yourself first. Answer them as honestly as possible, and by the end you should have a much better idea as to whether or not you’d be a good fit for a role in Product Management.

In a ‘former life’, were you:

1. That kid who did whatever it took to help your group finish a school project and get an A? Continue Reading

Product Manager Interview: Prioritization Question

Product Manager Interview - Prioritization Question

Every new feature or product your team works on is an opportunity cost for the company. As a product manager, it is absolutely critical that you fully understand your customer needs and establish a prioritization process to identify what your team should be working on next. Without proper prioritization, your team could waste many months of time and cash building the wrong thing.

During the product manager interview, you will often get a question revolving around how you think about prioritization. The question could be as high-level as something like:

“You are a product manager for Facebook Groups. Can you talk through your prioritization process?”

There are several different approaches and preferences here but here is one we recommend: Continue Reading