Building The Throughline
Abesh Thakur
Mar 15, 2024
Product management is a complex science, where one needs to juggle conflicting goals across stakeholders while dealing in ambiguity.
Smooth product management requires reliable operations. In some companies, this may fall on technical PMs, Product Operations teams, or be a cross-functional joint effort. However, with the explosion of SaaS tools, we are faced with the problem of infinite data silos and loss of control of our own information. This lack of context carried into each of these tools can lead to missed goals, unmet expectations, and ultimately, delays in launches resulting in a real loss of revenue.
A process oriented product manager spends a significant amount of time tracking all information, continuously summarizing and synthesizing it, and disseminating it to key stakeholders. While it is expected to have negative results every now and then, just as is the case with any experiment, it is a much bigger missed opportunity if there was no way to find out how and why something happened the way it did.
In my role as a PM at Meta, I had to spend at least 2 to 3 days a week simply consuming, organizing, and synthesizing information from a fire hose. It was my primary responsibility to understand how we were doing and communicate it to leadership, peers, and other stakeholders. I completed the loop by sharing the information out in a timely fashion, collected feedback, created action items, and followed up. Finding time for deep strategic thought certainly had its challenges every now and then when I was in execution mode.
At https://thatworks.ai, we are building the tooling that we believe will reduce grunt work by automating summarization, synthesis, and keeping collaborators on the same page through a purpose-built, dedicated workspace powered by AI. We believe that by enabling teams to quickly digest critical information across the board with context - and use it to stay up-to-date, or debug gnarly problems which don’t always come with an error log - we can revolutionize the way work is done.