Advice from Product Leaders

Congratulations on getting hired in this market! Product management is pretty fluid - in the sense, co to co there are different ways of practicing it, rituals etc. Don't worry much.

Few things:

1. Ensure the new company is actually doing product management and not hiring you to do project management. There are many companies which are putting job offers for product management but are basically hiring folks to manage complex projects that engg cannot manage themselves. How to validate: ask them their data/telemetry stack. Further ask them non-intimidating questions around some core metrics. If you get vague answers here, run! Further, see how big is the PM team. Ensure there are senior folks with some good time >2yrs in some large startups before their tenure in this company.

2. In an event you join the new co, get a hang of what gets valued the most. High agency/ high ownership work; metric movement; extremely detailed PRDs + process adherence; well planned roadmaps; or what exactly. Most places will value different things based on the stage & scale of the product. You can have different product teams value different things within an org as well. You need to ensure you know what gets valued and work towards it from the first sprint. Ex - a flow needs to be re-done: if metric movement is important, I would instrument the broken workflow first, get a baseline, then ship the new flow, track delta, publish that to the stakeholders. If high agency/speed is valued, I would get the new flow built asap and ship out, get early appreciation from cs/sales, figure out impact metrics post facto and send out a release note! Your way of working and what gets valued in a new org must align! If your super power is high agency but company values process adherence. You will be looked down as a PM saying you don't adhere to the process, get stuff in between sprints etc. If your super power is detailed PRDs, metric movement but the company values speed/ raw pm stuff -- you will be c