Lessons Learned In Rebuilding a PM Organization: The First 90 Days and Beyond

In the start of my new position heading Product Management for SwiftKey, I have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. I will attempt to share as many of these learnings with new product leaders, to help them create their new org or enhance their existing one, whether they’re a manager of PMs or a PM in a (mostly) functional team.

I have instituted product requirements documents to create transparency, redesign how we prioritize projects, realigned the PM organization’s reporting, redefined the role of PMs from solely product owners into value creators, changed multiple communication methods, instituted review processes, helped create a new ideation process, started to train the org and mentor my team… all while making too many mistakes to count. Oh, well – ship and iterate, even within your organization, right?