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.
At a high level I've always thought of this as there's really two main forks in the road. One is around market picking. Are you picking the right markets? And market can be, some grandiose definition of, a new geography or a new group of customers, or it might be just a lot simpler, and much more.
Just much smaller. It is however way you want to define that market. It's important to think around, how am I vetting the market and the needs of that market, the problems they have, the attractiveness of that market? And just, there's a whole bunch of frameworks around that. And then, immediately, after that is, once you start double-clicking into and market, you're now faced with a new set of challenges.
What I think of as a product shipping product picking. And this is where you have a different set of prioritization that are not as macro oriented. There might be a little more micro in nature. And there is, plenty of frameworks there, which I can also talk about. My [00:01:00] belief is that you should actually look at both, keep an eye on both,market picking a product picking and within the product piece, your ability and confidence to execute,and ship the product, which at the end of the day is what matters.
The other thing I will say is, as the company scales, it's also important to stay customer obsessed and to do that, at scale, and to have velocity at scale. So if you think about identifying the right markets and the right products, the implicit in those statements is that.
You're working closely with customers and you understand their needs. and we start to get into a new set of challenges, as the company scales, which might be a different team later on. and the importance of keeping that in mind, in other kind of interesting mental model here to think about.
Is as product leaders, and product managers and anyone who's basically, even starting a product oriented company. you [00:02:00] want to keep in mind that your role. And the product seat is ultimately to sell to a market. and your sales function is selling to a customer and that balance between selling to a group of people and thinking, futurist functions and problems that satisfied group of people is slightly different and nuanced than,solving, A whole series of customer problems, in a one-off manner and many companies, might, like it's not a good path to end up where for the 10 customers that you have.
You're assaulting 10 different problems. So the mental model I have, especially in those early days is really trying to think of the product management function as the distillation of those sets of problems that satisfy, more than a single customer, of course, as you work with customers and you start listening and hearing their problems.
And you want to very specifically solve those problems. It still has to make [00:03:00] sense in the broader context otherwise, the company itself,might not scale, it becomes a different type of company, perhaps even what you would think of as a consulting company, rather than a product oriented company.
