How to Learn Product: Roadmapping Your Product Management Career with Paige Conrad of Honey

Episode Transcription

Anna Eaglin:

Customers can say a lot about what they want and what they need, but I think your product intuition has to kick in and you have to get deeper and deeper and peel back the layers because people can't often articulate what they want. Otherwise, everyone would be a product manager.

Christian Beck:

This is a Better Product original series on how to learn product. I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. We are in week two of our newest series and super excited to connect our community with Paige Conrad, a senior product manager at Honey. Prior to Honey, Paige got her start in product management at Twitter, then serve as director of product management at Acorns, so we've got a breadth of product knowledge in this episode. Before we dive in, I first want to invite you to join our community where you get exclusive access to expert's site page, along with events to connect with other like-minded leaders. You can join at betterproduct.community. While last week, Carlos provided a really great overview of what you need to be a product manager, Paige is really going to share how to actually break into a career in product management. Let's start with how she did.

Paige Conrad:

When I was applying to work at Twitter, all I knew was that I wanted to work there. I love the product. I used it every day, and I was super passionate about what they were building and bringing to the world. I really would just scan the job site and look for anything that I thought I was qualified for when one day I saw this role in ad operations, which was very like support driven role, triaging, ticketing bugs, answering questions from advertisers and the sales team, and it had to know the ins and outs of the products. On a whim, I just applied on the website. I didn't know anybody who worked there and was lucky enough to have my resume picked out of I'm sure maybe hundreds, thousands of applications that they were getting.

Made it through the process and got my foot in the door, and always just had this mindset of just get there, get started, be valuable, and then figure out what you want to do from there.

Anna Eaglin:

As we went deeper into her role at Twitter, it was clear that she embodied a lot of what Carlos shared last week. She was able to combine the three skills of technical acumen, business acumen, and industry expertise to move up inside the organization.

Paige Conrad:

Part of being an ad operations is really trying to be the expert on the product, specifically this ads product and knowing all the ins and outs and things of that nature. Part of that was triaging bugs and letting the product managers know if something was seriously wrong and helping them prioritize issues and things of that nature. Then from there, I ended up expanding my role into more project management in sales ops, and part of that role actually was being partnered with a product manager. I took it upon myself to do a lot of analysis and quantifying problems and making recommendations to her. She was super influential and actually gave me a lot of rope in terms of my involvement with her, and we were working together.

Her team building like a brand new internal tool customized that sat on top of Salesforce, and she and I were working together. She took me to lunch one day and she said, "You know, how do you like working with my team?" I was like, "You know honestly, it's my favorite part of my job. I love working with your team. It's so fun to build things from scratch and really see like the impact that you're making," and she said, "Okay, great. I really think you should think about a career in product. I've actually been letting you PM and I just didn't tell you." I was just like, "Oh wow." Like taken aback, I think you see a lot of product managers that are former engineers, former engineering managers, and so you just assume like that's who gets to be a product manager.

It was really fortuitous timing because there was a person on her team who was at the time leaving the company, and so she encouraged me to apply. I did, and I ended up getting it, so that was the impetus for the pivot that I made, was like really good timing for the role opening up and playing a lot of I think supporting roles that were very product adjacent and having the relationships and understanding what the job was.

Anna Eaglin:

There's one more thing I want you to hear before we get to her interview.

Paige Conrad:

I mean, honestly I love my job. I found what I love.

Anna Eaglin:

You just love that to be great at what you do, loving your role is essential, and it took intentionality on her part to get to where she is today. She started by identifying the company she wanted it to be at with a commitment to do whatever it takes to get in the door and become knowledgeable and valuable. Spending four years at Twitter provided Paige with some valuable lessons, so I simply asked her what those lessons were and how they helped her move to Acorns and now with her current role at Honey, let's start the conversation there.

Paige Conrad:

One thing that I learned at Twitter and really loved about it was no matter how big the company, wherever you fit, any individual can add value. Something that's really cool about that ad operations team that I came from was a lot of us ended up graduating into like much bigger roles at Twitter, at other companies. I think it really came down to like all of us having this want to contribute, this desire to contribute and take on bigger things, and a lot of it was all of us raising our hands like, "Oh, I see an opportunity. Let me take this on. Let me make this company better. Let me make this process better."

I think through a lot of hand raising and initiative and hard work, those were the things that whatever opportunity you wanted, Twitter would give it to you and it really gave you space to grow. I would say like a big takeaway was no matter how big the company, no matter where you sit in the hierarchy, like one person can make a big impact.

Christian Beck:

You talked about like starting a Twitter and getting to figure out the different types of thing it could be done and just taking that opportunity. At what point did you realize that product management was a thing that you wanted to start excelling at, and then how did you start going about like creating a path in that career journey?

Paige Conrad:

I think the first time I realized that I really found what I love to do, I think maybe it was like the first time where you actually see like requirements that you turn into something, and then you get that first wave of feedback from your customer and they're like, "I don't know what I was doing before this." I think the first time you get that feedback loop of like your intuition and the things that you did made a difference in someone's life and their productivity and their output. I think that was the first time I was like because you really get that sense of fulfillment, I was like, "I am so motivated. This is something that's exciting.

Yes, I want to get up every day and I want to write requirements and work with design and build things that will actually make a difference to the point where someone's compelled to reach out to you, and let you know that you did that.

Anna Eaglin:

One thing you love about product management is intuition. Is this something that this idea of like product intuition where you talked about a couple of times on this show and it's something that I feel like we talked about with Marty Cagan too, which is like talking to the Dalai Lama about whatever Dalai Lama is an expert in, but product intuition. I'm curious, like what does that mean to you and how does one develop that?

Paige Conrad:

I think product intuition for me is about having endless curiosity about your customer, really peeling back the layers and getting to the heart of the why. Why are you doing this? Why are you trying it that way? What's going through your head, really trying to get at the heart of what's going through the customer's mind when they're doing something. I think just really distilling it down to like what is the truth? Customers can say a lot about what they want and what they need, but I think your product intuition has to kick in and you have to get deeper and deeper and peel back the layers because people can't often articulate what they want.

Otherwise, everyone would be a product manager, but it takes that product intuition and that really careful curiosity to really understand what is the real motivation, because the solution oftentimes is not what the customer is actually asking for. I think that's definitely one aspect of it. I think another aspect of it is just like anticipating not what they need right now, but what the customer needs in six months and a year, how is like the day to day life going to change, how is the industry going to change? Therefore, how was the consumer and how they move through the world, how is that going to change and having some intuition about not just what's true right now, but what will be true in the future?

Christian Beck:

What goes into that? How do you develop that intuition, staying ahead of the consumer?

Paige Conrad:

That's so hard.

Christian Beck:

Does it involve a Ouija board or-

Paige Conrad:

Yes.

Christian Beck:

... like more science involved? It's okay if it does. You can just tell us.

Paige Conrad:

It depends on your chart, your astrological chart.

Christian Beck:

First and foremost.

Paige Conrad:

[Crosstalk 00:08:54]. I don't know. I think it comes with once you get to a place where you feel like you have deep empathy for your customer, then you can chart forward and then you can look into the future. I think it's not necessarily this light bulb goes off in your head one day and you're like, "I think AI and machine learning, that's what everyone's going to be talking about in two years." I think it's really thinking a lot deeper in terms of who your customer is as a human being. What would really make their life easy? What would really make their life value? What would really garner trust with them? I don't know. I don't know if there's one process or one answer to how to develop that. I think it's a practice that you have to have just hammer and do over and over and over.

Christian Beck:

Well, thinking about just yourself specifically, it sounds like you read blogs. Are there other things that you do to develop your own maybe personal skillset in product management?

Paige Conrad:

Yes, I love having what one of my friends used to call a personal board of advisors, having your own personal board for your career, having people who will give you honest feedback, who are invested in you improving. I think having people identifying peers and people who are above you, people who are below you in their career, and it's always asking for feedback, making sure that people with different skillsets can give you different ways to look at yourself and just be very critical and be very open to that critical feedback. I try to stay in touch with a lot of people who have worked with it in the past at Twitter and product functions and in non-product functions, and just always keeping those mentorship circles alive and keeping those relationships alive is really important to me.

Christian Beck:

You transitioned into product at Twitter, and then you went from Twitter to... I mean starting at Acorns in 2017, what was the biggest challenge for you now figuring out how to pour your skills over from one company where you maybe knew the customers really well to a new company, with a new set of customers? What was the most challenging thing, and then what skills were you able to bring from your previous experience?

Paige Conrad:

I think the most challenging thing was working in advertising product. You can have access to your customers. You can talk to them directly. You can talk to the people who manage their accounts. It's very easy to talk to them one-on-one directly and get a sense for how they're feeling and what their problems are. I think the biggest challenge for me was how do you actually get in touch with a consumer customer and develop that empathy? That was the biggest challenge.

I think one thing that we did at Acorns that I think really was one of those defining really big learning moments for me was we did an ethnography study with IDEO, and actually going through the process with them and seeing how deep they go and sitting in customer's living rooms and discussing personal finance, which is highly emotional was the most eyeopening thing that you can really ever go through and from a design, discovery process experience.

That was a really big learning experience for me that I think I took a couple of things away from that, that really resonated with me, that even if you're talking to someone on the phone, a customer on the phone or you're doing UX research digitally, there's no substitute for actually reading body language when you see someone talk about something as personal as their finances. I think the second thing that IDEO really taught me was that every customer is the expert in their own experience. Even if you think there may be using your product wrong, they're not using it as you intend, it doesn't matter. They're the expert in their own experience and therefore, that is true and that is real, and you take that to heart.

That was definitely the biggest challenge for me, but that was really helpful for me. I think the skills that I used that I took from Twitter to Acorns was Twitter was very, they were really good at pushing you to be a thought leader, be creative, come up with these ideas, and sell them until you have as much alignment as possible. I think that was the biggest shock for me. I'm a natural introvert coming into product management, not knowing that a lot of what you do is sales.

That was something that I really, really had to overcome and I felt at Twitter, that was something that I had really, really practiced and gotten pretty good at, but I think at Acorns, I tried to port that over and make that a strong point of mine, make that a strength of mine of upselling, of communicating and being relentless about getting people aligned with your vision.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. When you say that a big part of your role with sales, I think I've never really heard it phrased that way, but talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that.

Paige Conrad:

I came into product management thinking yeah, if I just do a good job at my desk with my team, everyone will know about it and it'll be fine. My work will speak for itself, but that is just never the case. I think when you're in a fast paced product and engineering organization, if you don't sell, if you don't get people excited, you not only will one, lose visibility, but two, you run the risk of losing your resources. Because if someone else is out there doing a better job selling and gaining alignment than you are, you always run the risk. Even if you have a dedicated team or squad, you always run the risk of well, if the company shifts priorities based off of that idea or that initiative, there's potential that you could lose your team.

There's always a bit of a sense of competition that's very healthy that you have to be out there selling and getting people excited and making yourself visible. One, for your own career so you can have those champions, have those allies when it comes time for promotion, but also two, just making sure that you have the resources you need to actually go execute on your vision, and you protect your roadmap if you will. It's a little bit offensive, but it's also a little bit defensive in terms of making sure that you keep your team together, and you're able to go build those things that you want.

Anna Eaglin:

You have to advocate for the work you want to do, or the features or the visions that you want to bring forth.

Christian Beck:

I appreciate that the word ethnography came out and also, you just describe your experience with IDEO, which reminded me like when I was in grad school, that was my dream job for the very reason you just mentioned. I was like, "Oh, we'll get to go out and talk to people on site," and then I haven't really gotten to do that in my career ever. That was the dream and it was good to know that that actually does happen in real life, that there are people that interview people in their home, so it's good to know.

Paige Conrad:

Yes, and it is a dream. At some point, you have to get to do it.

Christian Beck:

Because aAs you're talking about insight, you're also reminding the debate Anna and I have had over the last, I don't know, seven years about personas. I know this is related, but this is a detour. There's a cool world's giant ball of yarn we're going to stop off and see here, but I'm curious what your opinion is on personas.

Paige Conrad:

I mean, I definitely have found them very useful in the past. I think it just depends on the type of product which stage you're at. They're super useful at Twitter. Twitter ads was a very mature product. There were very clear, different types of advertisers, different types of agencies, different types of people who actually interact with the product. Having a clear definition of who the personas were and what their challenges were at, that was super helpful, but then in other instances where you're working on something brand new, it's like it's hard to break it down to a level that's granular enough to where it's actually helpful.

Christian Beck:

It's like in that example, you just said of going into somebody's house, do you convey or did IDEO, maybe they did the analysis, but did you convey that level of insights back to your team in house or are you synthesizing in that, and that's just something you noticed and just affects your intuition, or do you find out... I think that's where my question about personas came out beause I'm curious, how much of that contextual highly specific information that you get from in person ethnographies, do you actually bring to the product team?

Paige Conrad:

I think we've definitely brought it all back to the product team beause it was all good learnings, but in that case for the IDEO state, it was not in the format of personas because I think the people we spoke to were very similar in terms of demographic and behaviors for the most part. There wasn't enough variation to where personas made sense.

Christian Beck:

Okay.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, so talk to us a little bit about, again, that transition from Acorns to Honey. Honey also being consumer focused, what was that transition like?

Paige Conrad:

Most of my time at Acorns working on the checking account and the debit card, leading that business line, building out a product team, and it was really fun. It was a big career goal of mine to actually build something from scratch and bring it to market, and then develop it and things of that nature. I was really happy that I got to accomplish that and had a ton of fun doing it, and I loved my team, but yeah, I had this itch where I was asking for more and there was like, "We love what you're doing, keep going," and I was like, "No, I think I'm ready for a new challenge again." I was super interested in Honey because again, another consumer product slightly FinTech, but also I would get more exposure to e-commerce and online shopping.

I am a self-proclaimed deal hunter online shopper and so I was like I really identify with this product, would use it all the time and so this was something that was close enough to my background, but also opened up new opportunities for me in terms of learning and areas of expertise. That was really what attracted me to Honey.

Anna Eaglin:

What was that transition like for you? Were they similar teams, similar stages?

Paige Conrad:

The transition was actually like even though it all happened remotely, it was fairy easy and seamless, and I've only been there for a couple of months, but I've been nothing but very happy. Everyone has really opened their arms and welcomed me, and Honey has an amazing culture around aligned autonomy. It's how they described it, which is everyone's aligned on the high level goals, the high level vision, but there is an enormous amount of trust placed in the product team to make good decisions for the customers to deliver customer value. I'm really enjoying that type of culture.

I think Twitter and Acorns were super different in terms of what the role of the product team was, and I feel Honey is the perfect happy medium in between, where there is the strong vision and overall alignment, but an enormous amount of trust and empowerment at the same time.

Christian Beck:

You're a couple months in, so when you start a new role like this, now that you've done this and two other companies, do you have a better sense for maybe your own personal goals or your own personal strategy? Has that changed as you started this role?

Paige Conrad:

I like to think that I am getting better at it. I think I did the best that I could to just try to be business as usual, even though we're remote. I think the first thing I tried to do when I joined a company is set up a ton of one-on-ones. I think in my first couple of weeks, I think I met over 30 people, just introduce yourself, talk about your background, get people's feedback, ask have you used the product, what's your sense, what's your feedback. Just what's important to you in this role, get everyone try to get as much of a three 60 view of the world around you as much as possible, and then also just ask a lot of questions. I know for me, I would never join a company, unless I felt very comfortable asking extremely basic, very vulnerable questions.

How does this work? What does that acronym mean? How can you explain this to me? Can you explain this to me again? I think having a culture where people are happy and friendly and just want the product to succeed, that's made everything super easy and made all the difference.

Christian Beck:

When you think about your role, I don't know a better way to ask this but what are you hired to do at Honey? Did you oversee features? Do you oversee products or are you figuring that out right now?

Paige Conrad:

I was hired to basically work on shopping tools and financial services. It's a really cool mixture for me because I get to leverage what I've done in FinTech and my experience there, but I also get to get new exposure to commerce and things of that nature, and also tap into my own consumer brain as an online shopper and deal hunter. I like that aspect that it's something that I very personally relate to. It leverages my experience, but it also challenges me in new ways.

Christian Beck:

You've stayed predominantly in the B2C space. When you reflect on your own skills as a product manager, do you see an area that you think you'd work best? I know you look for new challenges, but for example, if some new head of product role opened up at a office-based SaaS product or say in a government type position, do you view that your own skillsets could translate over to that, or do you feel like the way you're building your skillset as a product manager is sticking to the B2C world?

Paige Conrad:

I think for now I'm having a lot of fun in B2C. Consumer products, they're just their own beast and animal that you have to wrap your brain around. I'm having a lot of fun doing that. Now I do like that I have ad tech experience and tools experience in my back pocket if I ever decide to go back to those realms, but I think for right now, I really enjoy the consumer space, mainly just because it's so challenging and there's so many people's lives that you can impact and make better in terms of scope. That's where I'm living and having fun now, but I don't know if there's one particular head of product role that I would be like I would drop everything and I would do that, that one thing. It might just have to be my own idea or my own company that hopefully I created one day.

Christian Beck:

No, that's fair. What if you see Berkeley contacts you and says that we are starting a program for product managers and we need Paige Conrad to do the syllabus, what is the first week of that course look like for you?

Paige Conrad:

Oh wow. I think The first week of what is product management of the Conrad school is actually just defining what it is and explaining to people what you're really responsible for and where you fit within the organization, what your very clear responsibilities are. I think that's one thing that sometimes I definitely encourage people who are looking to get into product to do is spend some time with a product manager. The job descriptions are always like, do you want to build the next technology? Do you want to build things that people are going to use for the next five to 10 years, and are indispensable to the life?

It's like, of course everyone would answer yes to that question but, if you actually get down to do you enjoy documenting requirements and edge cases and thinking about all the potential things that could go wrong, do you like some aspect of risk management, the reality is that you do lots of things pretty well, while leveraging the experts around you. I would definitely spend the first chapter of that syllabus would be around what does a product manager actually do.

Anna Eaglin:

I would to continue this hypothetical scenario of the Conrad school with product management. I would be really curious to know if you were looking at the attributes of some of the top students, or I guess putting this into the world, what do you look for someone who you think will either make a good PM or is a good PM?

Christian Beck:

I think Anna's asking you what your final exams are going to be like? Who's acing that? Very prestigious school, by the way.

Anna Eaglin:

Very.

Paige Conrad:

I would say the things that are the most important and that I look for in really great PMs, I think the first thing is empathy. Are you able to break down a problem? Are you able to understand someone else's perspective? Are you able to be outside of yourself and get outside of your comfort zone to really deeply understand another human being or another use case? I think that's first and foremost. If you can't do that, you can't really have that intuition that we talked about before, and then you can't really come up with the ideas. I think the second thing that you have to be really great at is storytelling.

If you can't paint a picture or communicate why something is important, why it's the most critical thing that you should be working on right now, and why it's going to be important and why it's going to be impactful, then it's hard to get buy in. It's hard to get resources to actually deliver on those things, those ideas that come out of your empathy. Then the final thing that I think is so important is relationship building. Ultimately, things are going to get hard. It always happens. Things break, deadlines slip, there's scope creep or something happens unexpected and if you don't have strong relationships and trust with your team your engineers, your designers, your other product managers, those hard times are a lot harder than they need to be.

If you really strong relationships and you have a team that is cohesive and really comes together, then it makes all the difference and those bumps in the roads and pushing through.

Anna Eaglin:

Before you press stop, we've got a different kind of Vblock for you. Paige shared her four tips for people who are interested in getting into product management.

Paige Conrad:

I think the first thing that is helpful for people to know is that I believe it is so much easier to pivot into product at the same company, as opposed to trying to apply to external product jobs without any direct product management experience. I think you just have so many more relationships and things that you can leverage and knowledge about that company that you're already at and that product that you already contribute to, I would say that first and foremost, it's much easier to pivot internally than it is to go apply externally. I have seen it done and she turned out to be an amazing product manager.

She was formally an analytics and data science manager who pivoted into a growth PM role, so that data-driven mentality was super applicable and transitioned really well, but I would say the vast majority of people that I've worked with who didn't start in product and ended up in product where people who did it at the same company. I would say the second thing, I think the thing that really worked for me was partnering with a product manager in a way that you can add value and ideally some unique value. When I worked on internal tools, I was the only person who really had that vantage point in terms of what were the issues with the Salesforce instance, and what was the data around it and why were these things causing issues.

Anything you can do to add value to the product manager and make their lives easier, that will definitely win you lots of points in terms of identifying maybe a mentorship relationship and trying to stay in touch with them and stay connected with them. Let's see, how another thing to do is definitely just get as familiar as you can with the day to day. There's a lot of writing. There's a lot of written communication. There's a lot of verbal communication, so getting as familiar as you can and brushing up on those skills and sharpening those skills in your toolbox, that's really important. Can you write a user story? Can you write a requirement, understanding how to do those things? If you have basic mechanics down before you even start the job, that's a leg up.

Then I would say the last thing that really, really helped me was building relationships with mentors and sponsors making yourself visible, raising your hand. I think one thing that I did at Twitter was when I was on ad ops, I would get endless questions from the sales team around how the second price auction worked. I told my manager, I was like, "Why don't I just do a training for all of the new sales classes that start, and then we'll answer the questions upfront and we'll reduce our ticket volume by X percent and, everyone will be happier?" That was like by doing that, I had to go talk to the engineers who built the auction. I had to talk to the data scientists who understood the ranking scores.

I had to talk to the product managers. By doing that, people know who you are. You build those relationships. One of the product managers that I worked with ended up being the head of all of product at Twitter at the time when I was interviewing, and he was super encouraging. He found out I was going through the interview process and reached out to me and said, "You know, I heard you're considering joining the team. I really hope you do it" and, those small connections that you have with people over time really add up to something and can really help you find advocates in the organization.

Anna Eaglin:

Again, that was Paige Conrad and be sure to join us next week when we continue our series on how to learn product with Cameron Curry and Yonas Dinkneh. 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.