How to Learn Product: Building Products for Product Teams

Episode Transcription

Anna Eaglin:

Product managers wear many hats. They focus on the product from all angles technology, business impact, communications across teams and markets, while ensuring user's needs and wants are met. To say there's a degree in product is true. To say that most of the skills needed are gained through experience is also true with varying degrees of nuance.

So, what would we say is the number one skill or trait of a successful product manager? At its core, this role embodies the essence of the product. So, the product manager has to be a great storyteller, and a great product story begins with a vision. And it's the product manager who tells that story to the team who executes on bringing it to life. The PM tells that story to the users, to the marketing and sales team, to the developers. And in those stories, the success of both the product and the company is determined.

Throughout Better Product, we feature product leaders in all stages of their careers, and we've leaned into the expertise of our guests to capture the insights and topics most interested in by our community. For our How to Learn Product series we are revisiting some past guests. Justin Bauer, VP of product at Amplitude Analytics, Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of Product Board, and Brian Crofts, the chief product officer at Pendo. And they all have one thing in common. The products they discuss on the show are aimed at serving the storyteller, the product manager. By showcasing how they navigate the ever-changing world of product, my hope is you walk away from this episode, understanding how pivotal a role the PM plays and what it means to turn a dream into reality by creating, designing, and building better product.

Justin Bauer:

So, definitely didn't know exactly what we needed to put it in place. I think it was a process of getting to know the team, getting to know the customers that we were solving problems for. I think I did have a strong intuition in terms of the vision, but in terms of the actual roadmap, that actually was something that was work in progress. And so, one of the first things I needed to do was to put together a map for the company.

Anna Eaglin:

Justin Bauer shares how he had a vision in mind when joining. For him, like many of us, the challenge became executing on it before we go there. How did he know to trust his intuition for bringing that to life?

Justin Bauer:

The way you build products was that build, measure, learn cycle. And it wasn't go and just ask people what you should build and then go build it for them. And to do that, you're going to need analytics. And so, we felt a lot of conviction that that was going to be the future of how a product would be built. I think maybe something that has been a bit surprising for us is how quickly this has now been adopted, even enterprise companies. I think we knew that startups needed this type of solution, but the enterprises quickly come on board to understanding that if they're not able to compete with fast moving companies that are building what their customers want, they're in the long run, not going to succeed.

Anna Eaglin:

He understood product. He understood what product teams at all phases of their journeys were lacking. He was to build his experience working in other products capacities. Then, in building out the roadmap, Justin hones in on how important it is to know who you're selling to and what story needs to be told, because when you have the wrong audience, your product will never come to life.

Justin Bauer:

So, the first thing that we needed to do, even before we got into the feature solution space, was make sure that we had a really deep understanding of who our customer is. And then, what is the core problem that we want to help solve for them? Because the company was super early on, we didn't fully have that clearly articulated. At the time, we were still selling into engineering teams, as well as product teams and analytics teams.

And so, one of the first things that I did was help the company kind of realize that actually it really is about product. And that product manager, while they may not even have budget today, they truly are the people that we should be going after. So, that was one of the very first things that we did. And then once again, rallying around, what's winning going to look like for us six to 12 months from now? And we decided that we wanted to be known as the company that will help you understand it, improve retention. And so that was our thematic goal, which then allowed us to then start to think about what are some of the solutions that we could build to actually help make that happen, and specifically for PMs and product teams.

Anna Eaglin:

I want to reference something that many of our previous guests have shared, which is having a passion for the product you're managing. You have to live and breathe the solution. And by doing that Justin proves that he was able to shift the conversation internally around who they were initially selling the product to. The story was wrong, but he knew it could be right. And it was up to him to align the team internally.

Hubert Palan:

So, part of it was vision-oriented and just saying, "We just have a belief that these are going to be the key people that we're going to be serving in the future," and just grounding people in. Like, do you believe that even independent of whether the budget is there or not? Do you believe that is true? And I think everyone said, "Yes, no, actually we do believe that that's ultimately true. These people really struggle with access to data."

And then the other part of it was a little bit more quantitative where we did look at our most successful deployments, as well as our successful wins versus losses. And we identified that many times where we won was when product was the champion. They may have had to go and get budget elsewhere, but they truly were the champion for us. And I think when the sales team also came to that realization, I think that was then where it was a combination of both of those gave us conviction that this is truly where we should be going. Now that doesn't mean that people didn't challenge that over time. And so it's really important that we had ingrained in that vision because otherwise we might have actually done that. And in fact, some of our competitors did. And I think that ultimately was one of the downfalls for them versus because we were so focused as this product led era has come to be, our brand, we've just invested so much behind it, that we've been able to grow with that trend.

Anna Eaglin:

Stay on this just a beat longer. He shares that alignment enables success across departments. Another thing we've highlighted in this series is really that importance of cross-departmental collaboration.

Justin Bauer:

If no one's doing it, then you do it or you encourage somebody else to do it. One thing that is really important to me though, is that in B2B, this concept of build what you sell. Sell what you build. These things need to be highly aligned. And so working really closely with your sales counterpart to ensure that how we are talking about the products and our go to market motion is highly aligned with how we're building the products and the direction that we're going there.

Anna Eaglin:

Alignment is essential, no matter what stage of company you're in. You can have a team of five salespeople, a team of a hundred. The story thread has to remain intact. Switching gears slightly and leaning into the product of amplitude. Justin offers a unique perspective in that he was the persona of who the product was intended for. Naturally, I was curious how much of the product was built because it was something he wanted.

Justin Bauer:

So, in the beginning they were highly aligned because I did happen to be the target customer. I had previously run a gaming company, early stage startup, and that's who we were going after. And that was I think fun. And I think also a reason why I was brought into the company because I had a really strong conviction in understanding the problem. And also I think just you find that commonly a reason why startups are successful. The concept of founder market fit, where most successful startups actually had founders who really felt the problem or were actually the customer in the beginning.

And so, I do think that was why we were able to find early success. However, as you scale, that can become a challenge and potentially even something that prohibits you from growing, because today I actually am not the target customer. In fact, most of the time we're now serving enterprise companies. They have much larger teams. I think we went through a learning process about three years ago, where a lot of our intuition was still based on assuming our customer was this 50 person startup, when in fact, they were no longer that. And so then a lot of my job became educating the product development organization, how that's different. What are these new problems that we had never really thought of before, to kind of rebuild that intuition to make sure that we weren't just building for ourselves.

Anna Eaglin:

Ultimately what he learns was how to communicate at a larger scale. As the company grew, the belief in the solution grew, which gave him the ability to scale up instead of staying stagnant in their assumptions. And the only way they were able to refocus to continue to grow is by understanding their product story.

Justin Bauer:

It was a big shift for us. We had to rethink almost everything that we do as a company. But on the product side, it was like, well, we found so much success with these small, fast moving startups. Why are we doing this? And something that I think we talked about, which was really important, was we still believe that we should be serving startups. And the reason for that was they're the ones that are basically the cutting edge of product development. And these enterprise companies, they want to actually learn from startups. And so, it wasn't a startups no longer matter to us. It was no, what we're saying is enterprise now also matters. And the startups, we still want to make sure we're building a cutting edge product. They are going to be a key partner for us to do that. But then we need to think about how do we bring that to the enterprise? And that ends up being different solutions.

Anna Eaglin:

While challenging to serve multiple audiences Justin proves again how important it is to focus on the foundational beliefs of the organization. It's what all the messaging points back to you and the constant thread for how product innovation is communicated internally. Justin shares this notion of his intuition to learn from customers while knowing when it's time for innovation. His intuition seems instrumental for how he thinks about product. I asked him to break down that intuition thing again, because it doesn't seem like anything you can learn from reading a book or just listening to a podcast. I mean, not even this podcast.

Justin Bauer:

So, I kind have a belief that every great product leader or product person has this mental model of how the world works in their head. And that is their belief around what are the problems that are out there and why do people struggle to accomplish whatever the goal is ultimately that your company or product serves? So, your intuition comes from that mental model. It is like a belief that if we were to tackle this problem, we will find success. This solution is the right type of solution for that problem. And I think that's just critical of having just good vision and the ability to have the right discretion for what you should be doing within your product. And you need to focus a lot of energy, I think, on building that up and continuing to make sure that that mental model is accurate, which is why we do things like we spend 20% of our time talking to customers or prospects. Constantly talking because I think that's making sure that our mental model is accurate.

And then when I hear something that doesn't actually fit with that mental model, that's something I can go and dig into a bit more and try to understand that better. And sometimes I understand it better. I'm like, "Oh, well that actually isn't a problem that we should be solid. That's great. Someone else's problem to solve. We don't have to solve every problem in the world." But sometimes you'll hear something and you'll actually realize that that is a problem. And I wonder if other people have that problem. Let me go and talk to other folks to try to validate that. And that's how you develop more of that intuition.

Anna Eaglin:

Going beyond intuition and analytics, how does Justin know when something within the product is working?

Justin Bauer:

It's hard and it's something that we need to make sure that we're doing all the time, which is actually going back and doing retrospectives on the things that we have previously built. So, we'll do things like let's review the last 10 product bets that we've made as a team. And so we'll go through that at least once a quarter and look at like, "Hey, when we created our initial one page [inaudible 00:00:12:03], that measure of success, what does that actually look like, or all of these different bats?

And I think it's important to be a harsh grader because in the long run, we want to see things fail. It sounds counterintuitive, but that means that we are taking risks. And so, something we talk a lot about is like, "What's our batting average on that risk and are we getting better at that?" But we should not be batting a thousand. If we are, and we're definitely not swinging for the fences. And it takes time to be able to do that evaluation.

And so, it might actually take a couple of months before we can fully evaluate the effectiveness of the first version of that bat. And then we have to make a call. Do we want to double down on it? Do we feel like it's sufficient for it's meeting the needs that we have today and we'll let it live? Or should we actually deprecate it? It didn't meet the needs of our customers. That can be a really hard choice to make in enterprise because a lot of enterprise products are just... It's like there throw more features at it. Throw more features at it. And we really try to make sure that if something's not working, we'll deprecate that and be comfortable with that. And that might make a couple of customers angry because there might be a couple of them that use it. But in the long run, carrying that product debt can definitely be a burden for us.

Anna Eaglin:

Throughout the conversation with Justin, we asked him to tell us what he predicts a future of product to be. And while it may not be about how to learn product, it may need to be added to the curriculum.

Justin Bauer:

So one of the biggest trends that we're seeing is kind of a redefinition of what product actually means in two functions really coming together and that's marketing and products. So, the concept of growth really is, I think, this kind of evolutionary arm of where we're starting to realize that we shouldn't look at the world as marketing channels, separate from a product. Because to the customer, it's all one in the same. It's all just their digital interaction with us. Whether it's the push notification, email, web, app, mobile, social, to them, it's all one experience. But right now, the owners of those things are separate.

And then we'll do the common thing of shipping your org chart, where it ends up being not a holistic experience. I think we're seeing more and more of these teams come together. And I honestly personally believe that marketing actually is going to go through this evolution where marketing will truly become brand. And then the performance side of marketing actually is going to be product. I don't know if it would be called product, but it's going to use the same principles that we use in product. And it will basically become a technology problem. And we're seeing that with some of our customers where even in the enterprise, whether they are actually changing their marketing function into a growth function and embracing that.

Anna Eaglin:

Justin spoke about vision and intuition. The next place I want to feature is Hubert Palan, the founder and CEO of Product Board. He makes a clear distinction between product strategy and vision. Before we go further, what's the difference?

Hubert Palan:

Vision is the long term. How do you see the product? Well, how does the product look like in the longer term. Whether it's five, 10 years, but the strategy is what is the sequence of steps that I'm going to take in order to get to the vision so that I maximize the chances of getting there? So, that I waste as little as possible along the way. So that I maximize the chances of winning in the competitive environment. So that I minimize the chances that I built something that is not, that shouldn't be there because the vision can be misguided because you keep learning. It's really overall it's okay, what functionality am I going to launch? But then also, how am I going to message it? How am I going to communicate? How am I going to price it? And so all this is part of the strategy.

And I think that this is kind of what has been taught in marketing strategy class. So, in the traditional world... before digital world, if you talk to product managers at Proctor and Gamble or Unilever, or just like fast moving consumer, good companies, they've actually perfected this. They think strategically about how to introduce new products to the market. And we somehow haven't made fully the switch from the non-digital to the digital. It seems like the people that are the digital project managers, they don't have the classical marketing strategy education because digital is now swarming everything.

And so, I think that we just need to make sure that we surface it. And you can buy books on high-tech strategy, or you can buy books and marketing strategy. And just like if you read them through the lens of I'm building a software digital product, you can directly apply those learnings and the concept of segmentation and how you should do market research and make sure that you understand the homogeneity of your target customers.

And all that is directly applicable. It's just that there's very little content in this specific arena of the digital world. There is very few examples. It's also challenging because companies don't want to talk about the wrong strategic mistakes that they've done.

Anna Eaglin:

Building Product Board was driven by building the right product that's solved a real need. And while on its face, the statement seems pretty obvious. But imagine having to sell a product to product people who may never have realized they needed it. For Hubert, it goes back to the notion of storytelling.

Hubert Palan:

Were talking to our prospective customers, we help them realize like, "Oh my God, you're right." I'm like there's this modern army marching at me. And I'm sitting here with the stone and hammer and that's... I think like I'm going to figure things out. And so, it's like jobs to be done. The needs are relatively stable. They don't really change. You need to understand the customers. You need to make the decision, the right product decision. You need to make sure that everybody understands why we're doing it so that everybody executes and people are not, running around in chaos. And so, once you kind of explain, "Hey, this is how you operate. We're not changing your behavior. We're just telling you that there's a better system that supports that." So, that then suddenly that clicks.

Anna Eaglin:

[inaudible 00:18:07] is highlighting, how you just can't show up and tell people how your product is going to change somebody's life. No, they have to experience it. And you, as the PM have to understand what that experience is like for your end users. Building from the vision to a product strategy, really points back to the beginning of every great story. Who am I talking to? And what world am I imagining for them? As companies scale and products get more complex. Everyone we've interviewed comes back to alignment through communication, even companies, building products for product teams. Hubert oversees product for product managers. And with that backdrop, I asked him what does he predict for the future.

Hubert Palan:

But the challenge there that I see as the biggest is the communication flow. And you need to create this shared understanding. And how do you make sure that there's this... how to describe it? Like the fabric in the company that allows everybody to understand the needs of the customers. Everybody can contribute and communicate what is it that they heard.

And so that's, that's challenging. It's because there is always the translation piece. I talked about it before. It should translate from use researcher to project manager, from project manager to the [inaudible 00:19:11]. It's the same thing. If the salesperson had a conversation, and now they're translating the insights to the product team, things get lost in translation. And then you have new people who are on team. They have their little context. They don't have the long-term history. They haven't had enough time to think about a problem and understand the problem space.

So, all this is kind of the typical pain points of a fast-growing startup or a fast-growing company. And we're just learning and we're making sure that, hey, whenever we stumble up on an issue, hey, if somebody didn't understand this problem. Or like during the discovery, it seems like the designs are not really meeting the needs. We go and just like, "Hey, well, what could we do? What is it that we can do in the process? What is it that it means for the methodology and for the framework?" And so as we grow, we are just trying to make sure that we adopt all of these processes and methodologies.

Anna Eaglin:

As I hope you heard. The product leader in the organization is more critical than ever. It's more than just giving information to teams or advocating for customers. Rather, the product manager is helping generate revenue, and that's a trend that's on the rise. For the last bit of this episode. We're revisiting a conversation with Brian Crofts, the chief product officer at Pendo. With vast experience in product management, Brian sheds light on the evolution of the role while reinforcing many of the lessons we've learned throughout this series.

Brian Crofts:

Well, I think one of the big macro shifts in product management since I began is this shift of call it business, not just business acumen, but business outcome ownership, if you will. So, one of the big shifts we see, and we see with a lot of teams is product managers trying to tie their roadmap narratives, and strategies to business outcomes.

Now, it hasn't gone to the extreme where product managers have P and L ownership, but it has gotten to the place where PMs and designers need to understand the types of outcomes that they're driving with a new product or a new feature or any new development. And so, because that's true and because that shift is happening more and more, product managers are trying to become more and more clear about the bets that they're placing. And they're putting goals associated with retention or acquisition, which are all maybe under that umbrella of growth.

And so, that's to me, a big transition that's happened. And so when, because of that transition product managers and teams, they're needing more insights, whether it's more insights around analytics, they need more tools to be able to drive the type of adoption, to be able to achieve the business outcomes that they're aligning to. I think it's a trend that we embrace and we're excited about.

Anna Eaglin:

With this trend in mind from Brian, I asked him how he felt it impacted the growth or development of product teams.

Brian Crofts:

So, one of the things I would say in terms of the evolution of the actual team itself has been the product ops team. If you think about a modern product team, it looks very similar to what it did a few years ago, with the addition then of product operations. And the product operations at Pendo and at other teams that we've talked to, their kind of purpose is to help facilitate internal stakeholders and the relationship with product and our outcomes with those stakeholders, such as sales and customer success, to make sure that as product managers, we're focused on end users and accounts that product ops helped connect the dots to the business, to sales and customer success. And making sure that we're thinking about all the different inputs associated with internal and external stakeholders.

And then, in terms of metrics, in terms of how we measure our effectiveness or what a good year a bad year looks like, we try to make sure we have the right measures in place above and beyond things like product usage and NPS. We want to measure things like net revenue retention, retention, but of course, acquisition.

Anna Eaglin:

Brian reinforces many of the lessons learned in this series. The reality is product management is a strategic function of the business with a pulse on the many components of an organization. Now he brings up a product function that lives outside of product management, calling it product operations and brings us back to the realization that those in product have to be storytellers. They connect the dots for everyone, from the customers to the stakeholders.

Brian Crofts:

So, product ops for us really has three major components that tie into the team. One, is there a big input into prioritization because they represent those stakeholders I mentioned, like customer success and sales. So as you know, like any sales team is getting feedback in terms of feature gaps that are that drive win-loss. You have CSMs that are working with customers that also have feedback or our product requests. And so, because they're engaging with those stakeholders, they are an input into our prioritization for our roadmap.

The other thing that they do is they facilitate launch readiness. So obviously, a product manager is very focused on ensuring that they're building the right thing for the right customer at the right time. And so, we take this idea of launch readiness and the cadence of training enablement and organizational readiness to launch a new product that's on product ops. And then, just overall delivery status and communications to the broader organization about how we're executing against our bets and against our roadmap. And so, we really leverage them to take stuff off the product manager's plate so they can focus on discovery and delivery against our strategy.

Anna Eaglin:

Having a product ops team and the roles within, that goes beyond product management. It speaks to a greater understanding of ensuring product managers are at the epicenter of customer feedback and delivering that directly to their teams. Brian shared with us just how important it is to hold fundamental beliefs as an organization, which ties back to what Justin shared earlier.

Brian Crofts:

At the end of the day, there's a shared mindset and a belief that I think again, fuels culture around really trying to create a category and create a solution that's been missing in the marketplace for a long time. And, and I really do think we're in the golden age of product management. And to kind of be here at this time, working with these types of teams and trying to listen and create tools that will ultimately help the world become better. Everybody that is here kind of believes in that mission and believes that they're part of that. And because they are in the space and because it's their craft, they get to talk about it and teach it and speak on it and write about it. And I think it's just really self-reinforcing and it's not... Of course, it takes work on our end, but not too much. It's just something I think that stems from belief and inspiration and motivation.

Anna Eaglin:

To wrap up the episode, I thought it'd be really helpful to leave you with this last insight from Brian. He reiterates the importance of organizations as a whole to leverage the product they have in all facets of the business to ultimately build better product.

Brian Crofts:

Because the more people outside of product or are leveraging the product to do their job, the more emphasis and call it support or investment that business is going to want to put into the product. And then you just see this nice flywheel of activity that ultimately everybody benefits, which is at the end of the day, it's a better product. That's what drives all of our passion is can you imagine having the best product in the market for this particular series of jobs and then to have a sales force that has unnatural confidence in selling it because they know that. And to be able to have customers talk about real life stories of how it's saved them time, or improved their life. That's where it's like okay, yeah, this is worth spending more time away from my family than being with them because I'm making this type of difference. So it really is a great thing.

Anna Eaglin:

Next week, we'll end the series featuring Aaron Chan, sharing exactly what it takes to evolve in product management, from starting out to transitioning to a founder.

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market, and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join... Well, the community. And as always, we're curious, what does better product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcasts@innovatemap.com.