Product management is crucial for startup success. A good product manager understands the market and user needs and uses this knowledge to define a product roadmap that aligns with the company's vision and goals. They work closely with designers and developers to ensure the product meets customer needs and is delivered on time. The manager must be adaptable and able to make quick decisions, as the company and its goals may evolve rapidly.

Jason Knight, a product management consultant, and coach talks about what it takes to excel in product management and what challenges are common for today's startups as well as how to overcome these.

How did you get into product management? I believe you used to work in data analytics earlier, so what made you change your path?

It’s been a long journey! I’ve been passionate about technology ever since I saw my first computer, aged 6 or so. It was my uncle’s ZX81. It was a terrible machine by today’s standards but I was totally hooked.

My first proper job was programming little green screen terminals for a call center, and I moved on to data analysis, technical operations, technical leadership, and then to full-stack development. 

As I got more involved in building more complicated applications with end users, I naturally found myself gravitating towards those users and trying to connect tech to the business. The rest is history.

What led you to start One Knight Consulting? Would love to know the story behind it.

It seems strange to me, having spent 19 years working at one multinational and being well on the way to getting my gold watch, that I moved into the world of startups and have had a few roles now.

After I quit my last job, I took stock of what I wanted from my career and realized that the thing I most wanted was to help advance product management, not for one company, but for many companies, and for many product managers. That was at the heart of my decision.

When working as a consultant or a freelancer, what are some of the common and most-pressing product problems that you’re clients come to you with?

I speak to a lot of product managers, product leaders, and company executives on a week-by-week basis. I see a lot of product managers struggling to make inroads with their leadership teams, either through being underskilled in key areas or, quite often, a complete misunderstanding of the business value of product management by non-product leadership.

This is a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, PMs could probably do more but, on the other, some business leaders are very set in their ways.

A lot of what I do is aimed at helping PMs bridge the divide.

How do you think should startups define their product vision and strategy? What should be some critical considerations to decrease the chances of failure?

It’s important for startups to have a vision focused on their user and their paint points, and how they intersect with what that startup can offer them. I see startups focusing so hard on their technology and how cool their idea is that they forget to ask if anyone actually wants it. It’s really important to be market-led and stay close to your customers.

Your vision should be aspirational and something people really care about. How you get there is your strategy, which needs to be more than hand-waving - it needs to be actionable and you need the confidence to prioritize doing a few things well rather than just trying to do everything.

What should be the approach of PMs and other product professionals when it comes to prioritizing and managing their product backlogs?

Some people will argue that the very concept of a backlog needs to die. I’m not quite there yet, but I do agree with keeping backlogs small. Have the confidence to tell people that their ideas aren’t going to make it. If things are really important then they’re going to come up often.

I’ve seen too many people trying to score their entire backlog, sort it by some artificial number and then expect that we’re just going to work through it in that order and eventually get it all done. Meanwhile, they’re adding more stuff on all the time! 

People need to realize that most stuff in the backlog isn’t going to get done, and do their best to concentrate on the strategic initiatives that are most important. I’ll caveat this by saying that, in many B2B environments, that’s easier said than done!

Can you discuss your experience with creating and managing product development timelines? Do you have some heads-up for others in the industry?

Ah, timelines. Salespeople love them. Product people hate them. I understand both sides of the equation. In many B2B companies, there’s going to be an expectation of a roadmap that looks very suspiciously like a Gantt chart.

My preference is to try to get stuff as constructively vague as possible. Maybe we can’t get to “Now/Next/Later” but can we get to quarters? Well, what date in the quarter do we give to customers then? The end of the quarter! 

I think it’s also super interesting that there’s some commentary around customers using roadmaps as reasons to delay signing deals - quite the opposite of what salespeople want to happen.

Ultimately, all of this works best if you get used to focusing and keeping the scope of your initiatives tight, rather than trying to throw the kitchen sink in.

What should the ideal process of customer/ user feedback be when working on iterating a product in a startup? How can startups identify the pain points and what should be the overall approach?

Identify your Ideal Customer Profile and go talk to those people! It’s surprisingly simple but you need to make sure you go in there with an open mind, don’t try to impose your will on them, and listen to their feedback even if it disproves what you really wanted to be true. If people don’t have a problem, you can’t will it into existence for them.

When companies are early, the founders will be doing a lot of this work. As they transition to having a product management team, it’s crucial that they make room and space for those people to have good conversations with customers, and have them often.

We see you also worked as an Interim Chief Product Officer. Can you share some advice for professionals transitioning into similar roles?

Interim CPO is an interesting role. You’re only there for a certain period of time, and it might be fractional (as mine is) which means you’re part-time too.

It’s tempting to want to throw yourself into everything and get involved in every single operational task. This won’t work.

You need to set clear boundaries, identify the highest-leverage tasks that you can do that will make the most difference in the time that you’re there, and agree up-front on what success looks like. You’ll probably end up hiring your successor, so make sure you do a good job and leave a clean campsite!

What should the process of creating and managing product go-to-market strategies look like in a startup? How do you think it is different from what happens in big organizations?

I can’t speak for all organizations, but I think it’s really important for product managers and product leaders to deeply care about more than just the features of the product and what they’re building, but how it’s packaged, positioned, priced, and supported.

This doesn’t mean PMs have to be the arbiters of everything, but they can contribute a substantial amount to an effective pricing and GTM strategy with their knowledge of the product and their users. This should be possible in any size company, albeit much more complicated if you have a mega product in 30 different markets and selling into 30 distinct segments.

How do you help startups to identify and pursue new product opportunities and innovations at One Knight Consulting?

One of the services I offer is a health check, where I spend time interviewing the company’s exec team, their functional leaders, and their existing product team to find out how the company ticks, how it makes products, how it makes money from its products, what all the sticking points are. There are always sticking points! 

My job is to help understand which are the stickiest and what we might to do unstick them.

It doesn’t have to be me that unsticks them, although it could be. In some cases, they might need a specialist in a certain area. My job is to try to give an honest assessment and justifiable recommendations.

We see AI being integrated into a lot of industries nowadays. How do you feel can it disrupt product management?

People have been trying to cram AI into their products for a while now - sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. I think it’s worth trying, but only if it serves a concrete need and the appetite is there. I’m pretty against the idea of an “AI Product Manager” because product managers should be, for the most part, technology-agnostic.

On the other hand, if you work deeply with AI-enabled solutions then you should probably know the basics. I studied a little bit, via books and online courses, when I went to work for an AI-backed startup because it was important to be able to have good conversations. But not too good - I’m not a data scientist!

When it comes to the effect of AI on product management, obviously everyone’s talking about ChatGPT right now. I love ChatGPT, and even enjoy Bing’s existential angst. Some people are arguing this is the end of product management but I see it as the opposite. If it’s the end of product managers being glorified ticket writers then I’m all for that. I want product managers to spend more time thinking about the future and talking to customers. If tools like ChatGPT can take some of the legwork away then that’s a good thing.

Since you are the Co-Founder & CPTO at My Mentor Path, we would love to know the story behind this initiative as well. How is it different from working at One Knight Consulting?

My Mentor Path is a startup that I founded with a couple of friends in the product recruitment space. It is, however, a completely separate entity and not at all related to the recruitment firm or my own consulting. The value proposition of MMP is pretty straightforward: I want to help every product manager in the world get the support they need to advance in their career.

We do this by allowing product people to sign up and connect with like-minded product people in mentoring relationships.  I strongly believe anyone can be a mentor with the right support; you’re always ahead of someone in your career journey.

I’ve mentored a lot of product managers in my time, and I think it’s one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake. It helps you understand what’s right and what’s not. It gets support from people outside of your bubble. I wanted to be able to enable that at scale and for free.

How has the experience of being able to help aspiring entrepreneurs and product management professionals been? Can you share some lessons you have learned along the way?

I love it. I love speaking to product people, through my consulting, through my coaching, and through my mentoring. I love hearing people’s stories. It’s one of the main reasons I started up my podcast, which has been running for 2½ years now.

I’ve had the benefit of speaking to some of the biggest names in product management, but also wanted to speak to up-and-coming product people from all around the world to share diverse perspectives and tell different stories. I don’t want to be just another tech bro telling tech bro stories. There’s so much out there.

There have been a lot of lessons, but I think one of the biggest is that there’s no one perfect company out there, but that even in the companies some might call “worst” there are people doing earnest, careful work and trying their best to make a difference. Some of them will have a better chance than others, but they’re all trying. Product management is a really hard job and I salute all of them.

Can you discuss how new startups should build their product pricing and monetization strategies that work?

There are some good books out there about pricing strategies that talk in a lot more detail than I can about the pros and cons of different approaches. For me, it’s all about understanding the value that your solution brings; the time it saves, or the pain it solves. How much is that worth? Charge that. 

That can be through a sales motion, self-serve, or a mixture. You need to know what your customers’ Willingness to Pay is, try to avoid discounting, and lead with (and be confident in) the value you bring. Having solid ROI calculators or case studies can help in big-ticket sales.

I’ve never been a fan of commodity pricing - you need to know what your competitors are selling at, and there will be a maximum price people will pay, but it’s important to be confident in your value and be able to stand behind it and justify it.

How do you help startups struggling to scale their products and teams? What are the most common challenges they face?

A common problem that startups face as they scale is moving away from founder-led product management. At least one of the founders is the de facto CPO at the beginning, and this is the way it should be. 

But, as the company scales there’s too much to fit in one person’s head and it’s important to build a functioning product management practice. Some people like to think that product management is a part-time role, or can just be filled in by developers or salespeople. It can’t. You need to have someone doing the things that product managers do, and this should probably be a product manager or two. 

The problem is that some founders find it very hard to let go of the reins, and understandably so. Other founders have very little idea what product management even is, having scaled the company through their force of personality and little book of contacts. They have no idea what to hire for, and end up colliding with the person they do hire. It’s important that they stay open-minded and accept external help to avoid making expensive mistakes.

On the other hand, the company would not exist without the founder, and they have an incredible amount of skin in the game, so it’s important for product people not to be too high-minded about all of this stuff. 

How do you see the role of product management in an organization evolving in the future?

Trends like product-led growth and product operations will continue to grow in popularity. In many companies, product managers will continue to be valued as strategic business partners and not just messengers between developers and “the business”. There’s also a refreshing trend of product managers being a bit more accepting of non-ideal situations, and not getting too idealistic because something’s not quite like some book or other.

I do have a sneaking suspicion that the arrival of product managers into legacy companies will continue to perpetuate some of the less wholesome parts of product management. There’s a whole mindset shift that some companies are never going to go through (including some surprisingly small companies). I’d like to see ambitious product managers move into companies that better fit their talents and interests, or start up their own companies.

What advice would you have for someone who is just starting out in the field of Product Management? And how can one know if it is the right career path for them?

I like to say that product management is a uniquely hard job, and you have to be prepared for it. You’re constantly context-switching between different types of conversation, either technical or commercial, or talking to users. You’re doing this multiple times a day.

You’re zooming in and out from high strategy all the way down to tiny implementation details and, again, you’re doing it every day. It’s a hard job and there’s nowhere to hide. You need to be able to embrace the chaos.

On the other hand, you get a chance to work in an incredibly high-leverage job and change the world for people by building the very best products, unlocking capabilities users didn’t imagine, and making a huge difference in their daily lives. It’s a heck of a ride.