S3 Ep. 4: What Was Your Defining Moment as a Product Leader? Part 1: Process
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Hope Gurion: Every person has a moment in their life when something made such an imprint on their way of thinking and approaching how they live their life that it is indelibly imprinted in their brain because it surprised them and taught them something important. In a 2-part series, we’re going to hear from product leaders who had defining moments related to how they approach both people and process parts of their roles, both of which are critical to their success. In this first of 2 episodes of this Fearless Product Leadership Defining Moments miniseries, we’ll focus on Process as we hear from 5 experienced product leaders share their epiphanies as they answer the question “What was your defining moment as a product leader?”
Welcome to the Fearless Product Leadership podcast. This is the show for new product leaders seeking to increase their confidence and competence. In every episode I ask experienced and thoughtful product leaders to share their strategies and tactics that have helped them tackle a tough responsibility of the product leader role. I love helping emerging product leaders shorten their learning curves to expedite their professional success with great products, teams and stakeholder relationships. I’m your host and CEO of Fearless Product, Hope Gurion.
When I’m coaching new product leaders, there’s nothing more rewarding than when a product leader has an epiphany that transforms their approach for the better. The most impactful epiphanies come from our firsthand experiences, but as I seek to accelerate new product leaders becoming confident and competent, the next best thing is to leverage the learning curves of others. This episode is jam-packed of defining moments that influenced how these experienced product leaders approach how they lead their companies and teams, all focused on process changes they made that dramatically improved how they bring new product experiences to customers. In it you’ll hear from leaders who changed:
How they clarify the problem they’re trying to solve
How they protect time to do deep strategic thinking
How they think about learning from customers
How they decide on the right product investments
Fearlessly tackling the question “What was your defining moment as a product leader?” are:
Sean Murphy, Vice President, Digital Pharmacy, Optum
Zabrina Hossain, Product Lead, Shopify
Anthony Marter, Product and Delivery Coach, Harmoney
Nicole Brolan, Chief Product Officer, Redbubble, previously Executive GM – Global Services, Xero
Dave Wascha, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Zoopla
First, Sean Murphy shares his defining moment came he reluctantly ran a test to surprising results and it taught him a valuable lesson as a product person, which is always make sure you’re working on the right problem before you go chasing solutions.
Sean Murphy: One of them immediately comes to mind right now, which is when I was working at CustomInk, which is a custom t-shirt company where you go online to design custom t shirts. We're trying to find that product market fit, it's an entrepreneurial company trying to transform an industry, and a core part of designing custom t shirts, is the artwork you could put on the T shirt. Yes, someone may have a logo or have other artwork they've already provided, but at CustomInk make we spend a lot of time and getting the artwork right on the site for all the different occasions that people would make t shirts. So, the challenge that that I was faced with, was we had all this great artwork, how can we unlock and show more of it to consumers so they can pick the artwork that's right for them? One inside joke for a bachelorette party is not the same inside joke for everyone, so you got to have the right art to express all that. So, our team spent a ton of time working on how can we unlock or show the artwork in its fullness even better. My boss, the CEO of the company, kept nudging me and saying “Sean why don't we just make the existing artwork bigger. Like don't try to show more, just make it bigger?” and I said, “Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah but the problem is we need to we need to show more of the artwork.” And so finally I said okay well we'll set up a little time to run this test, where we just made the artwork bigger, and we actually showed less artwork. and it led to a dramatic improvement in the results there. So, that's a long way of saying it's just are you sure you've got the right problem in mind as a product leader? And this is probably where we can easily put our blinders on and become fixated that the problem is we need to show more when it really what the consumer needs is they just need to see it in more detail. So, taking the time to pause and say “Do we really have the right question?” before we start chasing after the solution is something that I think all good product leaders struggle with and need to be reminded that they're focused on to get it right.
Hope: Next, Zabrina Hossain shares her defining moment was when she received advice that it was up to her to make the time and space for what was most valuable for her to be doing as a product leader, that deep strategic product thinking and writing.
Zabrina Hossain: The transition to becoming a product leader isn't a definitive day but rather a really gradual transition, sometimes you may not even know it's happening. So what I think is you have to do is actually learn how to rebalance your individual contributor work that you've been doing your entire career already, with more time spent in the long term strategic thinking and planning as well as people management.
I think earlier in my career, I was waiting for somebody to tell me. “Hey Z! Today is the day that you don't do this anymore and now you do this you are officially a manager you are officially a leader,” and that day doesn't come like you actually realize over time and through feedback that hey, you have you have to create that space for yourself. So, I received some great advice from a lead and realize that it was up to me to clear time in my calendar for deep product thinking, strategic thinking, writing, because those are the things that are really important and take a lot of time and we may not give priority to when we're running from meeting to meeting. I feel like as a PM, it's really easy to get caught up in the short term work and wins because they're super satisfying and you can be like, “Check, check, check, I went to all these meetings, I got this out the door and I did that” but to grow yourself, you really need to push yourself to think more big picture, to help define the longer term strategy for your company or product and team, which will help everyone to do their work better. It's definitely a more uncomfortable process, because at first, gaining alignment along around longer-term strategies and changing team structures is much harder. Things don't always happen the way you want them to, but you're guiding it in a certain direction, but it's a really important skill to learn and we'll enable product teams around you to accelerate their development and impact.
Hope: Next, Anthony Marter recalls a talk he heard from a leader at one of the most innovative companies, who challenged his audience to learn faster than their competition.
Anthony Marter: A moment in my career, which is really defined my approach to being a product leader was actually… to give a shout out to the Product Tank meet up, actually it was at a Product Tank Auckland meetup. Going back about two or three years now, and it wasn't even from a product person. It was the learning and development leader for Air New Zealand who are viewed as a very innovative organization; and he opened his talk with saying, “If you want to succeed in the market, it's not about can you outsell the competition, can you out adopt them, can you out retain the customers?, can you outprice them. It's about can you out learn them? Can you learn faster than your competition and can you incorporate those learnings back into your product and what you're doing faster than your competition?” that was a just a lightbulb moment. I was still sort of learning product at that point, and saying well we need to figure out the why and we need to measure things okay and I need to do all those things but it wasn't until I sort of had that lightbulb moment of, “Ah! If we can move faster” and everyone talks about moving faster, but what does that really mean? Moving faster means that you learn and pivot faster, and that was it was a learning, that education moment of the kind of brought the whole end-to-end product together. That was both personally for me as a product manager at that time but also, it's really informed my product leadership because I'm able to sort of then give that same insight. Just when you bring in a product manager, it just ties together everything that they do. It's a really powerful concept when they're working with their team, because even within the notion of the team the same advice. Can we learn from that? And suddenly all of the Agile fundamentals and all that all fall into place as well. Agile turns into mini waterfall sometimes, but actually if we're shipping something because we're going to learn from it, do we understand it? Do we understand the change we’re going to make? Do we understand what we're going to measure? That becomes a forcing function on the team and on the product manager to have all their ducks in a row with respect to doing that. I've had so many examples of shipping things where, you know, looking back at it. I was looking at, I was wanting to see a metric or you know how does this metric move? Why does that matter? Oh it’s because I'm going to use that metric to make a decision about maybe a simple decision about whether it was successful or not, or more complicated decision that relates back to maybe decisions we've made earlier about whether this was the right bet and things like that. that real lightbulb moment came from the notion of not only learning but also learning velocity can you learn faster?
Hope: Next, we hear from Nicole Brolan who explains why you must care more about learning from customers more than your smart ideas or being right.
Nicole Brolan: The first one that really stands out for me was when I was still a head of product, and I was leading our ecommerce funnel. I had revenue targets and was leading the revenue funnel delivered about 35 to 40% of Seek’s overall revenue. So, highly lucrative lots of opportunity. What I learned through this is, we were doing just mass experimentation; so a lot of that is around behavioral economics, doing a lot of research, working out how far is your business. Probably prior to that, I probably had more of a mindset, so I think it's a maturity thing, I think I have more of a mindset of. “I'm smart. And I think I generally know the right answer here.” and there's nothing better for that than running experiments in something like an e commerce funnel because there's nothing more humbling to tell you that actually most of the time you're wrong. So, through that process and through running all these experiments, what I would find is that almost half of the time, I would have a hypotheses as to how the test was going to play out and why people were going to respond so well to something. Half the time I was wrong. Half the time it didn't go that way at all, would actually go the other way and we have which was great learning, but it was really humbling for me as a product leader. I really set me up, I think because from that point on, in how I structured teams and how I think about kicking off initiatives, kicking off the business projects. I always start from the perspective of most of the time we could be wrong on this. we think we know things, but we actually don't know. So, how do we build a robust process around figuring that out and not relying on “we know” figuring that out with customers. So, I think that was a really defining moment for me.
Hope: Next Dave Wascha shares his defining moment in product leadership was when he moved from feeling he as the product leader must decide what investments are prioritized to realizing that he must ensure the priorities of the organization are well defined and aligned.
Dave Wascha: This moment came for me, probably four or five years ago when I was running a decent sized organization at a fin tech company probably about 100 people. I came to the realization that the biggest impediments to the team progressing and kind of delivering on our goals was my own personal behavior. I think a lot of us as we grow up through the ranks of people management and leadership roles, certainly in product, we feel like we need to protect our teams; we need to defend our teams. Now I think there's a natural inclination, certainly as you're maturing, a natural inclination to try and separate or silo off the product team, and keep them separate from the rest of the organization. And I came to the realization that my behavior and doing this was the thing that was really inhibiting us from becoming successful, and it was me personally, the leader of the organization, trying to keep other requests at bay, kind of probably inadvertently limiting the amount of transparency that we were sharing with the organization, but it really impacted the stakeholder management, certainly with the senior stakeholders and the investors and the board. That was really starting to frustrate people and it really started to create friction. The learning that I took from that really was, I think, again, many of us and I've had this discussion with many of the people I've mentored over the years, feel like we own the resource or we have to own the resource and we have to own the prioritization process, and the actual deciding on what the priorities are. I think that really is unempowering and divisive, and I think the transition I made was to really articulate my role as to clarifying what the priorities of the organization are for, you know, and really working with my peers in the executive team clarifying what those priorities are. Then, making sure that our product and tech resources are aligned against them, so it's not me deciding what these teams are and I don't have marketing coming to me and asking for something, and I don't have commercial coming to me and asking for something, but we are aligned that what the priorities for the business are those decisions are all made and then my job is just to be a facilitator of making sure that that's done, it's done with high quality, it's done at pace, it's done with keeping the customer in mind, that's really the role of a product leader, but it's not really about dictating to hold kind of resources or priorities.
Hope: That makes a lot of sense. Did you just sort of it occur to you or like was there something that was like a catalyst for you having that epiphany or making that shift from, I will be the decider, to I will facilitate us as a team, deciding our priorities?
Dave: I think a lot of it was my own personal frustration, in that everyone kept wanting to interject, everyone kept wanting more visibility they wanted to debate and discuss and I felt like they were poking their nose into my business. And that is a very immature view of the world really. What I didn't appreciate was that everyone feels, you know cares deeply, as deeply as we do about what we're doing as a company and how we're serving customers, it's not just the role of product, it's everyone's job. In many cases people's bonuses and their compensation was dependent on the output of the team and you know, as I think back on it now it's really naive and immature to think that I shouldn't have been way more transparent than I was being. Really unfair. and I think at someone put me in that position then I put a lot of those people in the position that I put them in, I would have been a lot less constructive than they were with me.
Hope: Defining moments come in experiences that we can’t help but remember because they forever change our outlook and approach. One important defining moment for me when I was working as a product leader at a Beachbody trying to transform out of their executive-mandate, everything-is-a-project ways of operating. The Coach-facing product team I was introducing to product discovery methods had no informed perspectives to effectively negotiate nor set meaningful goals with their executive stakeholders. While we worked to instrument their products with analytics to give the team quantitative behavioral insights, I ramped up the team’s exposure to users by conducting weekly discovery interviews. They were able to see what they were previously blind to, including user segments (newly onboarded users, experienced users) and impossible to see behaviors in our own platform including users that were getting their jobs done with never before known competitive products. In weekly stakeholder meetings previously that had taken the form of status updates, the conversations became more meaningful and informative but the team now had the superpower of user knowledge that they couldn’t easily forget. The conversations became more balanced and stakeholders were inquisitive which began a healthier partnership and ability to set the first meaningful goals the team would measure their progress toward in a newly launched product with the analytics that would measure our success.
This is the type of work I get to do again and again with product leaders and teams now as a coach and I’m grateful for it every day, with every new team and leader eager to work in more collaborative, productive ways.
I want to thank Sean, Zabrina, Anthony, Nicole, and Dave for sharing their expertise on this episode.
If you’re a product leader seeking to improve the product development process in your organization, I’d love to be of help. Contact me on Linkedin or Twitter or schedule an initial consultation with me using the Contact Me page at fearless-product.com.