The Importance of Collaboration and Business Understanding in Product Management

Today, we have a very fun episode.

We’re teaming up with my long-time collaborator and friend Aatir Abdul Rauf—who’s now a VP of Marketing and spent the past decade in senior product roles.

We’re each reviewing 3 of each other’s favorite posts.

Today, we’re chatting about:

* The New Trio - 00:01:34

*Growth Loops - 00:20:28

*The Languages of Product Management - 00:36:28

*5 Lessons from Netflix’s decline - 00:46:24

*Roadmap isn’t a strategy - 00:51:30

* My viral post of all time - 00:53:39

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Key Takeaways

* There’s a new trio in town. We all grew up on the “PM + designer + engineer” model. He advocates for the new trio: PM, PMM, and Growth. It’s a very important concept to think of. PMs build, PMMs tell the story, Growth makes it scale. If even one of those is missing, good luck sustaining anything.

* PMMs are the unsung heroes of real product impact. Most teams either ignore the role or treat it like launch copywriting. But without a PMM, users don’t understand the product. You can ship the most powerful feature ever but if no one knows it exists or why it matters, it’s worthless.

* Growth isn’t the first thing; it’s the multiplier. You don’t bolt on a growth loop day one. You ship → PM & PMM find what clicks → then growth turns it into a loop. Premature growth is how startups/teams burn cash and lose trust.

* PMF alone isn’t enough, you need sustainable PMF. You can hit PMF with a few power users… but what happens when the market shifts? You’ll not be able to sustain. So, always build products that can sustain themselves in the longer run.

* Alignment is the only way to scale. The trio (PM, PMM, Growth) needs shared answers on: what vision are we chasing?, what’s our real North Star?, and where are users actually getting stuck? This kind of clarity among everyone saves months of confusion later.

* You can’t copy-paste growth loops, you apply them to your context. He shared his 13 types of loops and literally you should have it on your desk if you do anything with growth. The real insight is pick one that supports your product and the whole ecosystem at the given moment. The one that fits your product’s natural behavior. If you try to force it, it will break.

* PMs need to be multilingual. If you can’t speak Salesian to sales, Designees to design, and Techugu to engineering… You’re not going to get buy-in. Remember, you’re not just planner anymore, you’re the translator. If you want to build your influence, you need to learn their language.

* Distribution is part of product; not just marketing. This part will hit hard. You might’ve built features that worked beautifully… but went completely unnoticed. Why? No in-app education, no onboarding touch, no internal enablement. Shipping =/= adoption.

* Content is product and packaging is UX. We also touched down on our content creation journey. We both broke down what made our biggest posts go viral.Here’s what we’ve learned: People don’t share content because it’s clever. They share it because it makes them feel understood. Same rule applies to features, by the way.

* You go viral by being useful, not loud. Every high-performing post we had started with: “What’s a real problem I face as a PM?” Then it was turned into a visual or framework others could actually apply. That’s the bar. That’s how you build signal that spreads.

Check it out on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Where to Find Aatir

LinkedIn: Aatir Abdul Rauf

Newsletter: Behind Product Lines

Related Podcasts:

* Marty Cagan - Marty shares how irreplaceable PMs build products that drive real business outcomes.

* Melissa Perri - Melissa shows how to tie product work directly to the company's existential goals.

* Jaryd Hermann - We dove deep into Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Up Next

I hope you enjoyed the last episode with Matt LeMay (Author, Impact-First Teams on how to build $1m+ product team). Up next, we have episodes with:

Phyl Terry - Author, Never Search Alone

Matt Arbesfeld - Founder and CEO, LogRocket

Andy Carroll - 15 years in PM, Vibe Coding Expert

Finally, check out my latest deep dive if you haven’t yet: The Art of Winning Interviews via Referral: Complete Guide

If you want to advertise, email productgrowthppp at gmail.

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