Nikita Miller
Nikita Miller is a product leader, angel investor, and advisor. She has built and led product teams at companies ranging from early-stage startups to multinationals, and she is currently SVP of Product Management at The Knot Worldwide. Nikita is passionate about scaling product teams to support high-growth businesses and was a product leader at Trello and Atlassian for five years.
Career Skills
Startups offer the fastest learning curve for aspiring PMs because they force exposure to every part of the product discipline.
"I think getting into startups as a product manager is a pretty awesome way to get into product because it's just a lot of problem-solving. The problem with that is you don't have anyone to teach you t..."
Communication Skills
Strong documentation and asynchronous skills are the foundational requirements for successful distributed teams.
"documentation. It's a thing. Asynchronous communication, everyone just has to get used to it and better at it, so increasingly just being better communicators, whether it's on a video or written."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Even in remote-first companies, the first week of onboarding should ideally happen in person to build cultural context.
"I think that in-person onboarding for new folks is really important for everyone. For any new person to an organization, I think how we work culturally, having a contact that you can reach out to, all..."
Leadership Skills
Defining the optimization target is the prerequisite for making clear trade-offs.
"I always ask, 'What are you optimizing for?' That's the question, it's what are you optimizing for? And it's the short, medium, lon-term in product, but it's what are you optimizing for today, this qu..."
Alignment is best achieved when cross-functional leaders define their expectations of one another rather than just their own roles.
"The exercise that I often do is I generally have an idea of what I think the roles and responsibilities are and the expectations across these four roles, but the exercise especially with leaders in an..."
A collaborative review of role expectations prevents the 'everything falls on the PM' trap.
"I as a product manager, I write what I think my role is and also what I think what my expectations of my counterparts are and they do the same, and then we review it together."
Embedding data scientists directly into product teams (the 'quartet') reduces friction and improves domain expertise compared to a centralized model.
"if you have someone that's dedicated to a zone or an area of the product, then it's much easier for them to spot patterns as opposed to attempting to understand what's happening every time a ticket co..."
Product Management Skills
Competitive awareness serves as a driver for internal urgency and differentiation.
"I think that having a good pulse on competition helps as just a friendly reminder that there are others out there doing this and thinking about things very similarly, possibly, to how we're thinking a..."
High-quality ideation and documentation are useless if the team lacks the velocity to actually release products.
"if you're also not shipping a lot of things to market quickly enough, then it just doesn't matter that much."
Increased shipping frequency increases the statistical likelihood of hitting the desired outcome.
"the more tries you have at it, the likelier you are to get it right. So we're not actively monitoring how fast does it take us to ship things to market."