Martin Felcman on Product Leadership greatness, extreme ownership, and dogfooding at Productboard
Product State Q&A
Martin Felcman is the Head of Product at Productboard, and an active Product mentor and advisor. Previously, he was VP of Product at Deepnote, Sr PM at Operam, Sr PM at ROI Hunter, and Founder at Apploud Digital.
Website / LinkedIn
EC: As someone who has built products and solved problems for product people — what makes a great product leader?
MF: There are many skills and aspects to master to become a great product leader. However, here are a few key areas to emphasize:
Obsessed with customers and their challenges. You need to be in front of the customer at every stage of their journey, from prospect to eventual churn.
Being a great coach for your team. Provide the right level of guidance for both product and people to succeed and grow. You should not only set the vision, and direction, or articulate the major milestones, but also lead the way.
Understand the product. I have seen too many product leaders who joined a company, didn’t learn the product, didn’t use it, and were simply not effective in their role. The same applies to the best practices associated with the usage of your product. I often say to my PMs that the solution equals feature and best practices.
Be a reliable partner to people around you. Every product leader influences things without authority. Therefore, you need to invest in building strong relationships with your technical, design, go-to-market counterparts, and many others.
EC: What is the difference between ownership and extreme ownership — and why do some PMs struggle to get there?
MF: I have been asking that question myself for quite some time. I am a person living and preaching extreme ownership, which, by the way, has its upsides but also downsides.
The assumption I have is that not everybody really has the entrepreneurial mindset or experience from an early-stage company where product managers need to be the jack of all trades. As the company grows, their territory shrinks a bit. Every additional role you hire will have fairly clear responsibilities. Product management responsibilities can sometimes be a bit ambiguous, and some of the responsibilities are implicit.
My motto is: ‘If there is no clear owner, then it’s the PM that owns it.’
EC: How does Productboard approach prioritization?
MF: First, we set a product strategy — considering the business context, market, and product diagnosis (use cases we serve and their importance, customer segments, their product usage, and satisfaction).
It’s a continuous evaluation that we just package together and further discuss where we invest – improving the product for existing customers, expanding on the use cases, growing into new customer segments, or building a technical foundation for future growth.
All that results in a set of objectives and related target customer segments for the upcoming period and how much capacity we want to dedicate to each, and sometimes the prioritization principles we should follow.
After that, we take it to the product teams and eventually break down the objectives further, but more importantly, complement it with capturing the initiatives that contribute to the objectives. The teams prioritize the initiatives based on the principles or value we align on, and then we have a conversation before we create a plan in the form of a roadmap.
Prioritization is half science, half art — and having a deeper conversation about the priorities, ensuring we consider the right aspects and put them in the right weight, is absolutely essential.
And yes, most of it is happening in Productboard.
“If there is no clear owner, then it’s the PM that owns it.”
- Martin Felcman