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.
As a PM or product leader, the message sent from you is very different than the message received. So this is another really important thing to think about. So it's Hey, I wrote the PRD. I did this, I did that. And I, I don't understand why the rest of the teams aren't aligned well, whose job it is to make sure they're aligned.
It's your job because. you've communicated that message. And it's also incumbent upon you to make sure that your audience received that message, whether that means tailoring your message,or maybe repeating the message, repetition, reiteration alignment on it's alignment. It's,select location.
It's really wrong. This alignment and aligning early on. There is, you can instantly dive into the details, which might be a bad form of communication. But one, one tool I've picked up is this idea of the tenants. So [00:01:00] as you, if you want to, if you have a new project and you're trying to communicate a lot of complexity all at once, you've delivered that message, but your audience is not going to be able to pick up that message.
It's just too much. And, by operating. At the tenant level, which are the guiding principles of the projects and the tiebreakers what might've been, 30 bullet points can now get distilled into the three or four key trade-offs that serve as guardrails around that project. And as long as everyone is aligned to those guardrails, now they're operating within those guardrails.
And the kind of discussion you have,is a lot more aligned because now you can say, Hey, speed is more important than accurate. Or you might say as a tenant, accuracy is more important than speed. So all the downstream discussions around what is the requirement on latency, et cetera, that [00:02:00] becomes moot.
If you've already figured out what those higher-level trade-offs are. So I think of these tenants of the requirements, and it becomes a really key. Point under this idea of if the message sent message received and you look for like ways to, to the, what are the techniques we have as, as product people, to ensure that our audience is understanding what we're saying and that we're in tune with our audience.
And by the way, this also applies to customers. If we're, if you throw a whole bunch of information at a customer, they're not gonna, they might not. If you're not going to really understand. It goes back to simplicity of communication. Tell them what you're going tell them and tell them what you told them.
Simple messages repeated over and over. many product managers might be really well versed in all the techniques, et cetera. But if, communication and leadership are not there,th they won't succeed. And if they're a part of a small team that can. Being a big factor in the [00:03:00] team or the startup not succeeding.
