On Saturday, November 9, 2019 I attended the NY Product Conference, a fascinating gathering of digital product leaders working in and around the New York City area.
As there was a designated note-taker and lots of live-tweeting going on, I decided my focus would be to listen and think, and record only the key points that really resonated with me. So, in what follows I will share my own key insights from various presenters.
Increasing Your Impact
Brent Tworetzky, SVP Product at InVision, was one of the conference hosts, and he kicked off the day reminding the group that the day’s theme was “Increasing Your Impact.” Prior to the conference, Brent conducted a survey with a variety of key areas in which organizations can place focus and asked respondents to rate them on total impact to the business. Overwhelmingly, the top 3 areas with the highest impact, were:
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- Strategic and Business Thinking
- Outcomes vs Outputs
- Organizational Culture
What about adding resources, or investing in more tools? Somewhat ironically, the area that most of us hear the most about, “Resources and Tooling” was considered to be one of the lowest areas of total potential impact.
Which to me means that focusing on problems and their solutions, and developing the people needed to maintain that focus, are the most likely areas to result in positive impact. And while resources and tools are necessary, overloading on them can end up distracting or diluting the overall effectiveness of an organization’s potential to make really impactful work happen and have desired outcomes for company and customer.
Grow Your Strategic Muscle by Understanding the Business
Shelley Perry from Insight Partners gave a great talk about how to advance in product management by “closing the gap” in your knowledge and communication approaches by “understanding investors or c-suite stakeholders and what they’re looking for.”
She cited areas in which many PMs may lack knowledge, and constitute such a gap. These include “Strategic, Finance, Go-To-Market, and Executive Presence.” In her experience she stated, C-Suite stakeholders are looking for “Balanced Executives that Drive Overall Results,” not just results aligned to product success metrics. In order to become such a balanced executive, PMs may need to “Learn a new language for CEOs that don’t speak in product language.” For example:
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- Increase SAM/TAM
- Improve LTV/CAC
- Improve EBITDA
Without the acronyms, that means to me:
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- Come to know your market and how it might be grown
- Do the math on the revenue each additional customer adds vs the cost of acquiring that customer and refine product and marketing strategy to increase the ratio of revenue / cost
- With points 1 and 2 above in hand, focus on growing company earnings by increasing revenue while managing cost
In the image below are specific examples of tactics for accomplishing each goal.
These are learnings which are part and parcel of a standard MBA curriculum. However, she offered that you may not need an MBA to close this understanding gap. One method of such acceleration is to ask to shadow peers in other other departments, such as finance, legal, sales, or support. Attending board meetings would be ideal if possible, I think, but even where not, joining investor calls or doing research on investors may provide additional circumspect learning.
Simplify and Standardize Communications
Alexander Powell from Greenhouse.io gave a fun lightning talk illustrating how offering a dozen different ways to submit product intake, and a dozen other ways to share the results of that intake back to the organization, can create noise versus signal. In his experience, adding constraints to the information flow yielded salutary results. Specifically, if all intake went through the same consistent form, into one master database, and if all responses or updates to that intake went to the same product blog, there resulted a clear I/O communication. As a side benefit, the blog becomes over time a knowledge base and permanent, searchable record of all responses to product intake. My summary: limit and standardize intake methods, and limit and standardize output methods. Consistency and reliability will result in effective communication.
Alexander also cited a useful technique of incorporating a “10 minute rule.” The 10 minute rule stated that unless a question was simple and easily answered, any questions or requests should have a wait period of at least 10 minutes before a response is given. A wait period enforces that deliberation and thoughtful articulation will go into a response, and that the time will be available for that thoughtful response to result in a documented, searchable, archived response.
Avoid Echo Chambers and Fight Biases
Inga Chen, PM for Homepage Personalization at Spotify, provided detail on how Spotify manages to personalize every of their over 140MM users’ home screen experiences, without necessarily just recommending the same things all over again, all the time. With a truly massive catalog of music and huge amounts of data pertaining to every artist, album and track, mapped against individual users’ attention data through music listening, it becomes important to ensure that users have the ability to experience things they have never experienced before.
In order to introduce serendipity to discovery and variety to personalized homepage programming, Inga explained that Spotify completely randomizes the programming for 2% of all homepage visits. So that, even if 2% of the time your experience seems suddenly, random, you are exposed to new music outside of your preferences. And thus there is a way out of the echo chamber of known personal preferences.
Build High-Trust Environments
Paige Costello from Asana gave a superb talk about the critical value of trust in building effective products.
"There's a story that says..." "I'm feeling kind of under the line today..."
She started the talk by describing her immersion in the Asana culture as a new hire, explaining that people did not express their opinions, but rather positioned them as “stories” for consideration. “I have a story that says…” someone will begin; or, “there’s a story about this that goes like…” might explain how a situation might go wrong if the current path is pursued. The concept at play I gleaned from this was that the use of selective dialectic can put ideas at a distance from possessiveness and unclutter free exchange of ideas from being “mine” or “yours” to defend or dismantle. If ideas are all on the table without name assignment, they become more objectively transferable into consideration.
She also gave a primer in some core tenets of mindful thinking and how they relate to productivity. In this dialectic the “line” is an individual’s mindful baseline. As one becomes more self-involved, closed-off, or defensive, it is called being “below the line.” By comparison, when someone ascends “above the line,” they are being more curious, open, and willing to learn from others; more accepting and giving in exchange of others’ perspectives. By articulating how you are feeling, and self-identifying your current disposition by comparison to “the line,” at the very least you can share that you may be “below the line” at present and explain a difficulty in that way.
Through the process of sharing ideas openly and overtly sharing one’s feelings during an exchange free from assignment, blame, possessiveness or defensiveness, a more consistent basis of trust can be assumed, and the configuration of multiple Areas of Responsibility (AoR) can take flight to work more seamlessly and easily together.
What did this mean for me? I found myself inspired to take more inventory of myself more frequently in the future. For example, during collaborative conversations, to pause on occasion to ask myself “where am I?” either with regard to this helpful “line” or what is my place in the world, and my place here and now in this situation. Other examples: How can I be most helpful to myself and others here? What can I learn here? I think a brief moment spared for this kind of internal dialogue may provide helpful break points to recenter and reemerge (probably seamlessly) back into conversation with much greater positive effect.
For Profit or for Good, Language is Power
Osi Imeokparia’s superb presentation on “Building Products for Commercial Success vs Social Impact” taught me much about what would be involved were I to transition from a for-profit to a for-social-good context in my next career act. She described her own arc from Google to the Hillary 2016 campaign onwards to the Chan / Zuckerberg Initiative and provided thoughtful examples of differences and similarities in the work involved in achieving adoption and making an impact in both scenarios.
What really stuck with me though was her focus on power, which opened her conversation. Power as something given or taken away from people, is in large part a dynamic in companies, in teams, and in societies. In the latter case, power imbalance in societies can be a cause of injustice and result in movements for social good or reform. Power struggles in companies or in teams can completely derail focus on the useful and the good, across the board. We have all seen it. Hence, starting with power in this talk.
Osi focused on a few very simple examples where the use of language, or specific terms, can shift power dynamics in teams. For example, she said when she joined the Chan/Zuckerberg Intitiative, in one meeting with some scientists, she used product-technology lanaguage, describing the people, or the public, as “users.” One of the scientists said, “what do you mean, are they drug addicts?” It was a funny example of a malapropism in this case, but the idea was driven home when she explained that by calling our product customers “users,” we are genericizing them into computer terms, in a way of speaking. This case is not so very harmful, but in other contexts can take on more dire consequences when language is designed to make people ” less than.” It can lead to “othering” – setting up lines of privilege or entitlement, between haves and have-nots – rather than “including” and being open to diversity of peoples and ideas. Which is preferable for building products? My money is on inclusiveness and diversity.
So my main takeaway from Osi’s presentation was to be mindful (as in “above the line”) about inclusiveness in my language and communications, which should logically lead to a greater diversity of consequent ideas shared, and better designs, and better decisions.
Close the Empathy Gap
Janelle Estes from UserTesting.com gave a fantastic presentation surrounding empathy’s role in the product creation process. As she illustrated, firstly with research from Forrester’s Consumer Experience Index, and with some statistics (shown below), most companies believe they are in touch with their customers, but most customers do not feel the same way. This difference in understanding or misalignment is “The Empathy Gap” which companies must strive to close up if they want to understand customer needs, design products to meet them, and market the products for customer adoption. Ideally, with products designed so nearly exactly to what was needed, customers will be joyful for and thankful to the teams who designed them.
I know a thing or two about empathy because more than one management consultant has given me the good news and the bad news about my personality type. “As an amiable,” they might have stated, “you’re less likely to push hard to get what you want, and more likely to go along with what others want.” I didn’t like that, so much. “But,” they continued, “this personality also endows you with a great capacity for empathy, so you can better understand how others feel and imagine what it might be like in their position.” So, all things considered, I’m alright with being an amiable, if I also get to be an empath. Seriously, it’s important to me, especially in my role in understanding customers and designing product solutions specifically for them.
But not everyone needs to be an amiable to be empathic. Janelle shared many techniques for closing the Empathy Gap which she has deployed at UserTesting.com and in other customer research functions in her career. For example, “Empathy Interviews” may be conducted, where customer respondents are asked to answer questions and also their behaviors are observed. Janelle was particular that customer research science has shown that people may say one thing (e.g. I will go to the dentist this year) and do another (I did not go to the dentist this year). Only through mixing interviews with observation can a fuller picture be gleaned. Also, she described the use of “Empathy Maps” to document the particular conditions and needs / desire quotients of individual respondents – kind of like a customer journey document but directed at one person’s particularities at a moment in time.
Lastly, Janelle walked us through “The Squiggle” (above) wherein she recommends front-loading on research and definition, so much more free-form time (squiggle) is taken understanding and defining customer and product problems before ideating on the fit of product to problem, and then getting into more straight-lined prototyping and testing.
Product People Mix Hard and Soft Skills
A variety of presenters keyed into a similar theme: that product people need technical and domain expertise, but they also critically need to be effective with people.
Sitting as it does in between the business-end of a business (making money), and the human end of it (its customers), it’s critical that a product executive is very close to the business end, as Shelley Perry made clear in her opening talk (detail above).
But not everyone is or will be or even wants to be a C-level executive like the CPO. Having been one myself, I can now comfortably say I’d be happy continuing at that level, or reporting to one, so long as I am working with smart people making products people love to use. But how do you find those smart people, and since people come in so many varieties, how do you find the ones that are most likely to succeed as product leaders?
Giff Constable, CPO of Meetup.com, had a lot to say about this question of finding good product talent and he has a specific recommendation: locate, trial, train, and hire up from within. Depending on the size of an organization, its budget and the influence the CPO or VP of Product has on resourcing, he recommended setting up an APM (Associate Product Manager) Program where internal employees in other departments at whatever level can elect to join a trial program and shadow product managers for six months, and if all are in agreement after six months, become a product manager. There are various considerations (grandfathering salary, will old job be available if trial does not work out, etc), but that’s the basic gist of it. Anecdotally, Giff shared his experience of this program’s success in his own work, and stressed one key factor – that in identifying potential talent, one must focus on Skills (core, learned, capabilities or work experience) and Traits (soft skills or more human-level capacities). He showed two “spider-graphs” he uses to determine any person’s quotients in both areas (see below);
Another noteworthy participant was Oded Gal, CPO at Zoom, who was interviewed remotely, using Zoom, by Brent Tworetzky on stage. As Brent said, “this is either going to go horribly wrong, or it’ll end up being a fantastic advertisement for Zoom.” As it turned out, the quality of the video call was fantastic, even when blown up to the size of the projector in the Times Center auditorium (see image below).
We were treated to many lessons learned in developing and bringing Zoom to market, but regarding people, Oded stressed the importance of finding people who:
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- have a good mix of right and left brain
- truly have a passion for the product and the space
What this meant to me was yet another reinforcement that great product people need those left brain analytical skills and right brain creative skills: to have the hard experience and capabilities to understand a space, analyze it, brainstorm options, test things, and be integrated enough to understand how the pieces must fit together, all very quickly and on demand. And also, to be much more than a machine, but to be human enough to understand and care deeply about the human quotient of designing something – anything – for human problems.
Optimization and Innovation are Both Critical
Lastly, a couple presenters touched on the subject of ongoing optimization or “tweaking your way to success,” as sometimes counterpointed against innovation or making true step changes to realize a large scale strategic improvement instead of ongoing tactical improvements. My takeaway was that both are critical, and that good leaders and organizations should invest consciously in ensuring that both can happen. Of course no product organization will get far without having mechanisms in place to ensure constant improvement. But investing in large scale strategic step change is more elusive for some companies who get stuck in a chronic reactive cycle.
Sam Gardenswartz from Warby Parker shared his experience in iterating toward success very clearly with his example of the “Virtual Try On” for Warby Parker glasses. He and his team knew that the “holy grail” of virtual try on – a true, augmented reality experience whereby a user would have any model of glasses manifested on top of their faces in live smartphone selfie-mode video – would be a tall order and require significant investment. To try to get from here to there, they resolved on an iterative model, where they started with a simple image upload with glasses superimposed, then asked customers for feedback, then when feedback to “add color” was unanimous, they added all the different glasses models and colors; and when subsequent customer feedback was solicited and unanimously came back with “they should look more realistic” they were able to take advantage of the new iPhone X’s depth of field function to use actual 3D vector models to superimpose realistic glasses on top of a customer’s live video. This is not necessarily the same thing as “optimizing toward success” because the changes were minor, but significant steps. But it illustrates how planning a series of changes, with validation steps to reinforce the path remains a good one to follow (or not), is one good way of ensuring product market fit is maintained, and also, to ensure ongoing company investment in the process.
Regarding investing in step changes, we were treated to another great talk by Ben Foster, founder of the product organizational consultancy, Prodify. He walked us through a graph of relative value (in revenue) by focusing on operations, optimizations, or innovations, where the key area to punch through is the “customer value barrier” separating functional optimizations from strategic, fundamental, step change level innovations.
Key Takeaways from our Conference Leaders
To close out a long day (a Saturday, nonetheless!) of product learning, thinking and networking before a much-deserved networking happy hour, conference organizer Dan Storms, VP Product of Updater, recapped what he and our designated note-taker had captured as the key takeaways for Increasing Your Impact.
They were:
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- Customers reward companies that nail the user experience
- Great product leaders need to contribute to the corporate strategy in addition to the product strategy
- Fight echo chambers and biases
In Conclusion
These were the salient points I gathered from a great day of listening, thinking, learning, and meeting new people at the NY Product Conference. I’m glad I attended! I wasn’t able to hit every single talk available, but I’m more than satisified with what I was able to gather at this fine, well-organized conference. I hope that these notes may be useful to others who have a mind to improve their presence and effectiveness as product leaders.