How do you ensure that the products you oversee remain high quality over time?

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.

It's important to recognize that different companies operate differently at different stages of their life cycle when you're really early on, hacking stuff together, putting good out there, just really, you're really trying to validate as you get more and more customers. And as the maturity grows, you just you're now in a different regime and quality is the one thing that, Has to continue to get better.

No one's ever going to say, Hey, 10 years from now, I want a worst quality product. it's like security, privacy, it's like a core tenant. to ensure that, the number one thing is that the bar is really high, for hiring. And if I'm on a team, I want my peers to be high quality.

I, so I want to. Bringing in the right mindset, the right people, even those who are off grading in a high velocity environment, velocity doesn't mean low quality. It means, just having, being able to make that right. Trade-off [00:01:00] and tied to that as this idea of ownership. I actually don't fully like the term product manager because it doesn't fully convey,this underlying theme you're referring to.

Which is around, maintaining quality. It's really around product ownership. We are the custodians of quality for our products, but the buck stops here. So to speak for every product person, big company, small company, rushing things out the door initially might make sense, but it's the wrong mindset, as the company scales.

So what are the kinds of things? The mechanisms that we do, PRDs for example, should have edge cases, validation criteria, the guardrails and inspection mechanisms need to be put in, in, into the fabric of the product development process, measurement, relentless pursuit to improve. But it's really around having the mindset of product ownership, where every single person feels fully responsible on the quality of the product, to, to [00:02:00] themselves, to their customers, et cetera.

And I will say, one, one related thing to this as well. Is, the role of innovation as part of that process can not be understated. People often think about, I will innovate and bringing a new type of product to market, but there's also innovation and invention that can be done in the pursuit of quality.

More simplifiers, simplifying the user experience that can be, feel potentially better. quality simplifying the architecture. invention to improve engineering excellence. All of those thing are factored in as well.

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