Billy Kovalsky | Sisense | How Do You Build Products for Developers?

Description

Billy Kovalsky, VP Product at Sisense, describes running a distributed product organization of seven product managers across four countries, and why he believes only in "outbound" product managers who stay close to customers and are driven by impact. He shares the three things he looks for in product managers (telling the essential from the trivial, empathy, and soft skills), how he works with sales and customer-facing teams on prioritization, and his path from front-end developer at Yotpo, through a guerrilla team that gave birth to Yotpo Ads, to reviving Wix's App Market. The core of the episode is about building products for developers: error messages, documentation, time to wow, and AI tools that generate customized code without taking control away from the developer. Finally, Billy explains why every product manager needs to understand APIs and webhooks, and how the AI PM role is likely to spread to every product team much faster than the technical PM role did.

Key moments

1. 00:47 · What Sisense does and what Embedded Analytics is
2. 04:12 · The first wow moment and the product team structure
3. 09:29 · Outbound product managers and impact-driven work
4. 12:00 · What Billy looks for in PMs: essentials vs. trivia, empathy and soft skills
5. 17:31 · From development to product at Yotpo: the guerrilla team and Yotpo Ads
6. 22:11 · Wix App Market and reviving the developer ecosystem
7. 25:37 · Building products for developers: error messages and documentation
8. 29:43 · Why every PM needs to be technical, and how to learn
9. 35:03 · The future of developer products and AI
10. 39:52 · The rise of the AI PM