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 playbook is basically an amalgamation of a lot of experience across companies that have done this really well. but it really starts with working backwards from the customer is the number one thing, and to, teleport yourself into some future point in time, when you are launching that product and to think critically.
Around what that north star vision is, what the press release might look like. And then, zooming back into the present. And from that moment in time, identifying all the different steps. there's a lot of tactical execution oriented things that are really important. There's also. maybe this is where I should focus a little bit, a lot that has to do with the critical thinking,and the right mental models to,to think through this high degree of ambiguity, that starts as you get into more of a, as you start to converge to, that, [00:01:00] that end point wherever you're actually launching the products, just to give you, some examples:
To make sense of all this ambiguity, me personally, I've found a bunch of frameworks that would just be really useful. obviously there's the product management frameworks. I mentioned Steve Blank earlier. The lean startup canvas, there is the jobs to be done. Story mapping; extremely useful for workflow oriented.
It's like the example I gave earlier where you're mapping a workflow and trying to identify where the value is, the Canno model, the list goes on. So that's one cluster of frameworks to look at. Probably the other one is what I would rely on folks like Amazon and Bridgewater, the hedge fund,out east where it's just thinking through what are the leadership principles and mental models that are instituted?
Company-wide now Amazon case this the PR FAQ [00:02:00] these working backwards documents for really well, to take an ambiguous situation where a product manager, might not know what to do and how to even approach it, given a product area. And to just flush it out by writing the press release and coming up with a set of questions,that can help disseminate.
I mentioned one way, two way door decisions. So that's like another kind of bucket of, of, frameworks to use. I also, just in my day-to-day rely heavily on. Yeah, economics and system dynamics, frameworks, that anyone with a consulting background can, tap into, approaching a problem. what is the mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive set, know what we call the NYSCI framework?
What externalities exist are there reinforcing loops? for example, as a product manager, thinking through, is there a fire on your loop or referral loop where customers can,discuss,where they promote your product to [00:03:00] other customers and refer your desk, an example of the reinforcing group.
So it's really around thinking critically and having a baseline for how you're gonna approach the problem. identifying the outcomes that you're trying to serve. Bye bye. Fixing those problems. That's another big element. And then ideating on the solutions, getting the right stakeholders, using the RACI model.
For example, coming up with a work back plan that's shared that's aligned. and then starting to go more into the ideation side where. In Abnormal Security’s case, where we have a very strong design team, also iterating on concepts, working with the product management team to really, try to flush out the specifics of those initial use cases.
And then before any code is written, codifying all of that in the right documents and the right mock comes and then [00:04:00] taking it all the way through to the release process. So maybe the net take here is. A lot of upfront thinking and deliberate, just having very strong opinions that you validate early on.
before you engage a much larger team can really pay dividends downstream because it's much less expensive. and rather than relying on. good intentions and I hope this person does it, or that person does it just having a systematic way to do this. I think,works really well. And once that whole front loaded side is done and you start flipping more into execution mode, I would say a lot of that becomes a little more cookie cutter.
