Rami is the Chief Product Officer at Abnormal Security, where he leads the company’s product vision, strategy, and execution. In his masterclass, Rami walks through the steps necessary to build a world-class product from scratch, providing time-tested principles that enable product teams to come to life. Previously, Rami held various product leadership roles at Amazon Alexa, led product marketing and sales at Swagger (acquired) and led product management at Reverb (acquired) as VP of Product. Rami also led product management and marketing at Proofpoint, from company inception to IPO, for its inbound and outbound cybersecurity products.
The top answer I would give here is thinking in systems rather than good intentions and systems and mechanisms and processes maybe are all used interchangeably. if there is a, if you think about what a high performance team is, which is at the end of the day as a product clear my product.
Let's say is the team, because if we have a well-functioning scalable repeatable team, or product development process, you could argue that we can tackle any market and any, product area. So it's really around, like, how do you shift things away from, one person being really good at this or the other person really good at that and having the right mechanism and system to enforce that and all the top companies.
Who do this really well, do this, and it's never too early to start. And one thing I love about abnormal security is that this has been, it's embedded in the culture. and it's a really good thing. The other one, [00:01:00] related is just having critical thinking. It becomes, very wasteful for the company, if product managers and everyone involved in the early stages of where to allocate resources.
Picks incorrectly. and you'll never get it a hundred percent, But the better, the critical thinking upfront, working with customers, applying these processes, et cetera, et cetera, the better off you'll be and then engaging the broader team, which leads to my next point. really around having a close partnership with all the different functions, engineering, marketing sales.
product as a product manager. you're like a mini CEO. If you're the CEO and a product manager. that's great. You have the authority of the CEO, but if you're the product manager, you're not leading by authority, you're leading through other means as well. And maintaining that close alignment with [00:02:00] others.
Is,is really important and communicating that effectively. I think a mistake that some folks who, are earlier in their career make is, Hey, as a product manager, I get to decide what to do. And I go off into my ivory tower and I come back and, and I give the answer.
That's not at all the case. your job is to synthesize to listen high empathy customers. Customer support customer success, all the different stakeholders and have the right level of judgment and synthesis that you can carve out what you're hearing to where you want to go and really threading that needle.
so I can't stress that enough. the other one and maybe I'll, that's the last one I'll say here is, If you think about the role of the product manager or a product oriented startup founder, is that, like all things in life, you can, distill it into a two by two matrix, right?
[00:03:00] There's this, there's a very heavy tactical piece all the day in day out execution, which. Many, all product managers go through and many product leaders are heavily involved in,that's one dimension, heavy operational, heavy tactical. There's another dimension, which is more strategic.
Where are we going, et cetera. But you also have two audiences. you have more than just those two, but I'll break it down into two. You have the engineering sort of R and D side of the house. and then you also have the external go to market, team customers, partners. So those are the four quadrants, operational tactical versus strategic, and then inbound versus more of the,outbound go to market.
And your job is to serve as that blue. and your job is also to really thread this needle, which is actually my original point where you want to think really. But you [00:04:00] also want to be able to dive into the details as deepest possible,and execute and unblock and solve problems. And, I think both, CEO, founder types, as well as product managers and product leaders fail when they do.
Recognize that no matter how senior you are or how junior you are, it's really important to be in the details and execute around those while at the same time, having a vision for where you want to go.
