Product Management at Dropbox: The Mechanics and Impact
-Originally published as an article on Built In-
“My husband always tells me I’m in a fight-or-flight state, but he’s like, ‘There isn’t actually a flight mode in your body; you’re out here like, let’s go!’”
Since joining Dropbox in 2017, I have transitioned between various product management roles before stepping into my current position as interim head of core product. Through my career journey, I have learned what it means to truly be a product manager — a far more nuanced role than some people may believe. PMs aren’t solving the surface level of a problem, they’re really leading with curiosity.
A More Enlightened Way of Working
PMs are always focused on our customers; they’re always ensuring that they understand who the customers are, what their needs are and the problems that they’re facing, including both small problems and ones that they haven’t even said to you yet. That’s where it’s really important to consider that a PM is only as strong as the cross-functional team that’s around them.
Oftentimes, PMs are also called “mini CEOs,” because they’re people who really understand every single part of the product and also have that business acumen to understand how different things are actually going to impact the bottom line. They consider, “How are we driving overall profitability? How are we driving net new revenue? How are we ensuring that our customers are staying with us?” A really fantastic PM isn’t just thinking about all of their customers; they’re also thinking about how to create win-win situations for the business as well.
Product Organization at Dropbox
We have different types of product management at Dropbox. We have PMs who sit within our platform teams, and they’re primarily building things for the core product PMs, such as services and APIs, which you can think of as the different building blocks that we need to ship the customer experience. Platform PMs do things like make sure that the underlying file system and structure can support that little folder icon that you see on your screen. Their world looks a little bit different than that of customer-facing PMs.
Customer-facing PMs are aligned with the products that we have, whether that’s Replay, DocSend or Sign. They function typically within an engineering, product, design and data science quad. The way these people work together is to have clear repeatability and reproducibility hours. But when there’s an imbalance, such as if a designer is overloaded, a PM should be able to go in and run some of those customer research sessions, understanding from a user testing perspective what’s working and what’s not working with the solution that PM is offering.
It’s really us working as units, where the thing that we’re all prioritizing and incentivized on is how we’re delivering value to the customer. That shows up when product engineering, design and data science are golden in terms of output and input metrics. For example, as customers use our desktop application, we ask, “How are we ensuring that our overall daily and weekly active engagement is top-notch? And because we have such a massive customer base that’s already paying and using us, how does that team also do long-term beneficial things in the product to reduce churn to make it so that fewer customers fall out of the bucket?”
That company-first mindset is also a transformation we’re going through in product. It’s this idea that you’ll be rewarded based on company-level impact rather than your own empire-building.
Biggest Priorities for 2024
Right now, we’re focusing on our business acumen. We’re asking ourselves, “What are the competitive insights that we’re gleaning? Who are our competitors?’ Being able to answer that with confidence is so important, because that helps us have some directional signal. It’s not us saying, ‘Go copy this product.” Rather, it’s us saying, “What are the things that we’re not offering that we’re uniquely positioned to offer? What are our ‘superpowers’ as a product, and how does that fit into the competitive landscape?”
Another big piece here is how we’re cultivating and supporting what leveling up looks like overall from a people perspective, such as the types of programs we’re offering and the type of learning and development support available. I’ve worked really closely with other leaders to decide on what additional scaffolding we could put within the product organization to have a clear trajectory on the impact of leveling up and what it should look like.
Impact Dropbox as a whole
We have really clear business targets, and we review metrics every week. We have targets that teams set that have been validated to actually help us grow and put us on the right trajectory for the future.
Another thing we’re focusing on is trying to break down silos and breaking down how we operate to really focus on the customer, reiterating the idea that if we do well, we all get rewarded. We’re asking ourselves, “How can we be smart about how we’re staffing and organizing our teams to deliver the most impact?”