Episode 170: Unlocking the Future with the Power of Alignment with Margaret Jastrebski, SVP of Product at Tegus
In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Margaret Jastrebski, the SVP of Product at Tegus. Join them as they explore what it means to be a leader today. They discuss Margaret’s role at Tegus, the power of alignment within an organization, understanding sales and marketing, and the importance of a vision for execution.
You’ll hear them talk about:
00:51 - Investors need to know as much information about their investment before they actually invest. They need the information about the company that isn’t on Google. The old way was to call around and ask what others know about the company. This is where Tegus comes in. Tegus identified this friction between investors and their investment and put all these conversations and information into one place, smoothing out the process and making it easier for investors to say yes or no. Tegus is a successful product that has been expanding for 6 years.
08:17 - There’s no silver bullet to figure out what needs to be done when starting at an organization, but there is always work to be done. MJ shares her approach of spending time with the executive team and CEOs, to really learn where they see the business growing, and then working to shape the business to fit that future vision. In the case of Tegus, the biggest opportunity for growth is alignment between teams. There’s always misalignment somewhere but MJ’s approach fleshes out the frictions and smooths them out. When the product team, market team, customer service, sales, and success teams aren’t quite aligned, it’s important for you to make the other teams care.
38:17 - When coming into a new product leadership role, MJ encourages leaders to make decisions and communicate the reasoning behind them, externalizing the process to show leadership. It creates an open dialogue: The more you externalize the process, the clearer your teams will be on your decisions, and the more comfortable they will be to challenge or discuss your decisions.
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Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we are honored to have with us Margaret Jastrebski, who goes by MJ. She was recently announced as the SVP of Product at Tegus, the company intelligence platform for key decision makers. Tegus is at a really exciting stage right now. It's been growing like crazy, and it is approaching that stage where we typically see companies IPO. So I'm excited to watch it keep growing and see where it's gonna go. So MJ's experience spans nearly 20 years of product management and advisory, and we sat down to talk about how she orients herself to a new company as a leader and what product management leadership needs to consider when working with cross-functional peers like marketing and sales. She's spoken at numerous events and educational institutions, sharing her skills, insights, and practical solutions in the world of product management. But before we welcome MJ, it's time first for our Dear Melissa segment. Dear Melissa, is that segment where you can ask me all your burning product management questions, and I answer them on upcoming episodes. This week, we have a caller. Let's hear from the phones.
Caller - 00:01:43: I never thought I would say this, but I think our high NPS score might actually be hurting us. Right now, our score is over 80, and customers, at least the ones who respond, say they love us, which is great. But here's the problem. The business seems to think this means we don't need to continue investing. So how do I break through this mindset? I'm not a huge fan of NBS, and just want to get that out of the way, but that's what we use in my org. We know what improvements we'd like to make, and they're all based on feedback from customers we've surveyed or talked with directly. And we know we can do better, but our high score seems to actually be hurting us. Thanks for all you do.
Melissa - 00:02:18: Okay, so it sounds like you did really well on the NPS score. So bravo. It's a good problem to have, to have a good high NPS score. I'm very proud of you. A lot of customers don't like products out there. So that's saying something. Now you have to maintain it, right? Now you have to keep it. And that's where the danger comes in. There's a couple of things here I think you can do to help people understand that the goal now is to keep that high. One, if you ignore Net Promoter Score, then you're going to go into decline, right? If you ignore Net Promoter Score or if you ignore keeping up with the latest UX design or the usability that you need to see, the more complex your product gets, the harder it will be to use. So UX always has to be something that you really strive for here. Whenever you're thinking about new features and there might be this point where you get to where you're adding and adding and adding and you do have to reconsider your workflows and how they look today. So keep that in mind. Otherwise, you start to decline. I'm sure there's a lot of great companies out there that had high Net Promoter Score scores that are no good. No longer around. Just because you have it for a moment in time does not mean you will have it forever. So take InVision for an example, right? InVision, I'm sure, had really high Net Promoter Score scores for a moment in time. But now it's obsolete because they could not keep up with Figma or with the changing market out there. So you want to make sure that Net Promoter Score is not just saying, hey, we're successful. That's it. We don't have to do any more work. It's more like, hey, this is one health metric that we measure. And it's a place that we can go look at and see how we're trending, if we're going up or down as we release. And as time goes on.
So that's my part two, is really considering it as a metric in a system, not only just Net Promoter Score, right? Like, that's not the goal. That's not the ultimate goal. So here's what I would look at there. I would build yourself a health metric dashboard for your product and start to look at things that say, this makes the product healthy. Net Promoter Score score is one of them. There's probably other things, though, that you can really gauge on a usability perspective too, right? Or a UX perspective. It doesn't have to just be Net Promoter Score. It could be things like people using cross products, right? Or you make it easy for them to discover. You can look at usage rates. You can look at time through workflows. You can look at all these different things that might give you other signals besides just general happiness with your product. Create yourself that dashboard. And when you're talking to stakeholders, show them that. And if you see that other items are going down in the dashboard, that's a good indication that you're going to want to get ahead of it before Net Promoter Score falls. Usually it takes a while for Net Promoter Score to fall. That's like a lagging indicator. People are already unhappy. So you want to make sure that you're catching them before they get unhappy. They're still able to do what they want to do. That's where the investment is. Now, also though, if you do have a high Net Promoter Score score, like I said, you should always be monitoring it. But there's also the thing where did you do enough to get it to that point for this initiative where now you want to move on to something else that might be burning and important. So you're going to have to weigh more work on the current things that you're looking at versus doing different initiatives or different type of work.
That doesn't mean that you still design all these new initiatives or these new things with Net Promoter Score in mind and with good usability and good customer experience in mind. You just want to make sure that you're prioritizing the most important work. So that's why we hit set goals. When we hit our goals, it's time to move on to the next initiative, right? The next product that needs help. So I would really also, when you're discussing this, assess what else might be failing. Maybe your user experience is great right now and you don't have to do a huge overwhelming push to make it better, right? You just keep chugging the way that you've been chugging and make sure that you're adding great experiences as you go with new functionality. So also weigh that. Do we need to do more work here or is our work done for now, but we're just going to monitor it and make sure it doesn't fall? That's how I would really approach this. And I think that conversation with stakeholders will go well too. So I hope that answers your question. And again, for those listeners out there who might have a question for me as well, go to dearmelissa.com, drop me a line, and let me know what you want me to answer on an upcoming episode. All right, let's go talk to MJ.
Advertisement - 00:06:18: Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at hustlefund.vc/mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome, MJ. It's great to have you on the show.
Margaret - 00:06:55: Thank you so much, Melissa. I'm so happy to be here.
Melissa - 00:06:58: So you just recently joined Tegus as their SVP of Product back in December. Can you tell us a little bit about the company and what made you join it?
Margaret - 00:07:06: Let me start a little bit with context on Tegus. My relationship with Tegus is about six years old, maybe a little bit more, six, six and a half years old. They started out as an expert transcripts company. So for those of you who don't know much about fundamental investors or kind of the investing world, you know, for hedge funds, for private equity, for VC, et cetera, before they make a choice to go invest into like a company, public or private, they talk to a lot of people and they try to get really like, what is the quantitative story and the qualitative story? I think that really resonates with product people. But like, what is that qualitative story about that company that Google doesn't know, right? That they can't find publicly. And so when you're talking to or when investors are trying to make a decision, they have really big checks that they're writing. They're going and talking to a ton of people to try. What's the story? What's the angle? Where does that company align with what's being said publicly? Where does it not align? And what do I think the opportunity is? So there's a lot of friction in that process. And so what Tegus did, it's pretty amazing, four or five, six years ago was really innovate and say, hey, we're going to broker all of those conversations and then we're going to go put them online and you can buy a subscription to the content and or you can pay for us brokering those conversations. If you pay for that, then we're going to put that content back into that. So the innovation there is just making sure that all that information is available. And that didn't exist before Tegus So the old way is like, hey, somebody with a Rolodex and they would call and they would broker the convo and you might or might not get a PDF later.
So it was really about driving down a price point, driving out friction and really getting insights faster. And so since then, over the past five or six years, the company has really expanded, done a fantastic job and in the process has bought a handful of companies. And I mean, I'm sure we're going to talk about those companies later. But they have bought a handful of companies. And so now Tegus has pulled all of the information, all the capabilities. One company has built tons and tons of financial models for public companies. So that's a lot of friction for investors. And so they have out of the box models for you. So you don't have to spend hours and hours building your own models. And then another company has made filing super easy to go look at. So your 10 Ks, Qs, et cetera, everything online through EDGAR. EDGAR is terrible. So again, this financial investor world. But if you go look at EDGAR, EDGAR is terrible. It's what the government provides. And so this company created a much better interface. So what Tegus has done is pulled all of that together, created one single platform. And it's really all about driving friction away from the process and making it a lot easier for investors to go figure out, hey, how do I go answer this question of should I invest or not? And it's all the information is all in one place. So that's a little bit about Tegus My choice about joining the company. I have been friends of Tegus for many years, so for about four or five years when the co-CEO Tom Elnick, when he was. Looking for when he was getting the company started, he was looking to hire his very first product person. And he is a networker. He talks to everybody. So if he has a tough question, he will go ask everybody and try to figure out, like, what are the patterns here?
So if you're trying to figure out, OK, how do I think about product? What is this product function? And a friend of mine put us in touch and we ended up grabbing coffee and just really hitting it off. And so we created a really long lasting relationship over the years. And I would go to him with questions. He would come to me with questions and I would help him think through kind of like, how do you build a product organization? Like, what are the talents and the skill sets and the things that you should be looking for relative to the size of your business? When he and I first met, you know, Tegus was probably, let's say, kind of low seven figures and, you know, ARR now, you know, orders of magnitude beyond that. So the product's demands, the organizational demand is much different today. So Tegus as a company, very interesting, has gone through a lot of changes these past few years. Tom and I had a really great relationship early on. I've maintained it over the years. And so. So now Tegus is kind of squarely in that one to two stage of like initial product market said, fantastic, created some really amazing kind of product capabilities. And now it's how do we actually scale this and how do we operationalize it? And so for me, it was just a really wonderful time to join the company.
Melissa - 00:11:09: That's such a great story too about Tegus growth. And I haven't really heard of Tegus that much out there in the market. It's like a sleeper hit there.
Margaret - 00:11:16: It's kind of, if you know, you know, like if you're in the industry, you've heard of it. Like, you know, there's all sorts of companies like, you know what, I'm not going to name all the competitors. Like PitchBook and Bloomberg and companies like that also. So we're kind of squarely in that space. But it's fantastic. I think a little bit about there's B2B and B2C. And in this kind of, in B2C, you're looking for like, I'm going to say this isn't true for everything. The kind of general rule is you have low cost, maybe low value work, but lots and lots of people. Right. And so everybody's paying you a little bit, but you have really massive scale. And when you're looking at this industry, I mean, scale is relative. There's a lot of scale here to think about. But we're in the tens of thousands of users. We're not looking to be, well, I mean, it would be amazing to be in the hundreds and thousands and millions of users. But there's really not that subset of people in the world. And so each one of our users has very high value action that they're trying to take. You know, and so kind of everything that we provide has to be very deliberate, very mindful. Because every moment that they take to do something. And so I think about it as just like there's fewer people, but every person kind of their impact is much higher.
Melissa - 00:12:21: This is my favorite thing about doing this podcast, too, is discovering all these companies I never would have heard of otherwise because I'm not using it on a day-to-day basis. But I think it's so fun to hear about these companies that grew and, you know, scaled and did these amazing things that their customers love. And it's not in your realm. Like, it's not in my realm. At least I'm not using it every single day. But that to me is one of the best parts of this.
Margaret - 00:12:42: One quick quip on that. I think the irony. I mean, it's very much like. The cobbler's kids have no shoes. We're dealing with like these are the people that are funding all of the biggest companies in the world. Our clients are the people that wrote checks to grow Netflix, you know, to grow Uber, to grow all of these companies, to grow all of these amazing platforms. I probably should use B2B platforms in my reference. But like those are our clients. And yet the tools that they have are still like the way they're doing the work is still kind of how they did it 15 years ago and 20 years ago. And so like that's the opportunity and the friction that we're going right after. It's like, how do you take a modern look at this? And like, how do you really think about what exactly these humans are doing and how do you create much more efficiencies, you know, across the process? And we have all the tech. It's just it's not evenly applied yet.
Melissa - 00:13:25: So when you come into an organization like Tegus and you're trying to figure out, like, what is the challenge? Where do I get started? What are you doing? Like, what's your process to evaluate that and figure out what needs to get done?
Margaret - 00:13:37: I don't think that there's a silver bullet listening at first. There's no substitute for that. And I think there's no shortcut because there's a reason, right? There's a reason why they're hiring somebody like me or, you know, somebody of a senior level. And there's an outcome that they're trying to drive. And so for me, it's like, OK, great. I spent a lot of time with our executive team, a lot of time with our CEO, really trying to learn, like, where do you see the business going? Where do you see, like, what is the opportunity ahead of us? And what's your perception of what's not working today? Or like, and it might not be that it's not working. It's just like, where does it need to evolve? Where is it not fit for kind of this future vision? And then what I do is let me go talk to other people. Let me go understand the team's perspective. Let me go understand stakeholder perspective. And let me start to kind of triangulate and understand, like, where do I think the themes, the major themes are? And so it's like, again, like, typically we're very much in that, like, one to two stage where it's like, we're not really optimized to all be rowing in the same direction. The product team is not quite lined up with marketing team. It's not quite lined up with the customer service. And success team is not quite lined up with sales. And so that, to me, is really the biggest opportunity.
You know, and where I'm going to have the biggest impact, where I've had the biggest impact so far is very much like my first team is my executive team. You know, my first team is my SLT. My product team is fantastic. It is a fantastic team. And I think the world of them. But really what my job here is to make sure, like, we are all rowing in the same direction at the topmost level and pointed in the same direction. And if I can do that with my sales leader, and I can do that with my marketing team, I can do that with my sales leader. And if I can do that with my marketing leader, then it creates much less whiplash at the day-to-day team level. So when coming in and listening and hearing, like, I've been on a handful of executive teams before, like, these problems, I think there's a lot of pattern recognition of just like, you can never communicate too much. There's always something to work on. There's always a misalignment somewhere. But ultimately, it's all about, like, how do you just make sure, like, at least kind of at that most senior level, you're operating from the same playbook and the same strategy.
Melissa - 00:15:32: I think what you're honing in on here too is a really common trend I see when companies are scaling, right? So when they get to this certain point where now we're either going through an influx in our strategy or we've done a bunch of acquisitions or we're at this stage, right, where we're kind of looking at our product strategy, trying to make sure it's still aligned for growth, still going forward. But then when we look at the operations, we want to also make sure that we're aligned back to sales and marketing. And sometimes I find those departments grow individually instead of together, right? And it comes to this point where we go, oh, we have to bring this all back together and make sure that product is collaborating with sales and enhancing it so that sales team can go do what they need to do. And same with marketing, same with branding, same with all those pieces. And it's funny because it's like when you start off as a small startup, I feel like all those things are so intertwined. And then you kind of diverge for a little bit and then you come back in later stages of growth. And it feels like that's kind of the area you're in. And I feel like a lot of product leaders don't understand that challenge. When they get into that area or that part of product, a lot of times we go, oh, let me just go look at product, right? And not go look at sales, not go look at marketing, not try to figure out how all that cross-functional part goes together. What do you do to really understand those areas, right? And make sure, like, why should product care anyway? Let me put it that way. Like, why should we care? How does it relate back to us? And what do you do to go dive into those areas and make sure? Everybody's swimming in the right direction.
Margaret - 00:16:58: One quick comment back to what you were just talking about, about communication growing from smaller to midsize to, you know, growth stage. I think a lot about Metcalfe's Law. And you've got this idea that the more people you have to keep in the loop, the harder it is, the more conversations you have to have, right? Like, the more connections and communication. And so for me, it's how do you right-size the sphere of decision-making, you know? And so it's not decision-making across. Like, all of these people, when you're a much larger organization. But it's like, no, that's truly kind of what the SLT is, or the senior leadership team. Like, it's truly what the leadership team is there to do, is to make these hard decisions. And so I think a lot about, like, what is my responsibility as an executive? Like, how do I show up? And what is most important? And it is my obligation to make sure that I am in alignment. It is my obligation to make sure that I go and have those communications. Because it will be impossible. The scale of it at much lower levels is impossible. Like, it will not stay in alignment. And it's also, what got you here won't get you there. So you have to change your patterns. And so, like, for me, Metcalfe's Law, I just think, is kind of omnipresent when I look at these types of challenges.
Melissa - 00:18:07: People don't know what they don't know. So how do you discover on your journey, like on your product leadership journey, I need to go care about sales, right? Like I need to go care about marketing. Like I need to figure out how to bring these things into alignment. When did you first discover that?
Margaret - 00:18:20: I think about my journey, both in my career, my personal interests, and like my product acumen. Product-led companies are integrated companies, right? It's not product management-led, but it is product-led. And we are all stewards of the product. We all have our part to play to go get it on the market, right? So I went to business school. I've worked at a handful of companies. I've worked at big companies. I've worked at small companies. And like everything is just fascinating to me. It's just this idea of like what makes a really great product-led business? How do you define that? Like what is the nature of that? And I think for me, kind of probably my career quest is really to embrace that and like figure out like what is my definition of that? A handful of years ago, I had an opportunity to take on a growth role. So kind of in my product career, 20 plus years, like I was an engineer early on. I taught myself how to develop. Like that really kind of set my sails kind of for the first, let's say, 10 or 15 years of my career. Right. And that worked really well. I understood technology, understood how to get how to build things, get things out the door. And really kind of this next phase of my career, this opportunity to go run growth for a company based here in Chicago was just a massive opportunity for me. It was really, really exciting. I was working with this firm and they were like, hey, you know, want to come run sales and marketing? And I'm like, you people are bananas. Like, I've never done sales and marketing before. Like, dude, no. And they're like, well, we sell to product people and you're really good at talking to product people and you know how to break down a problem. You know how to be thoughtful. And oh, you're also very authentic, you know, in these conversations.
Like you're not going to try to sell somebody something that they shouldn't don't need. And that's kind of like rule number one. It's like sales is, again, stewardship. And so I was like, all right, if you're going to take a chance. I mean, I'm going to take a chance on you. And I was able to do, you know, sales account management and marketing for about three and a half years. So it was a really, I really valued the journey. It was a fantastic journey. I learned so much. I had so many incredible teachers in the process. I sought out external advisors. I sought out like mentors. Like, I don't know how to do this. What is a sales motion? You know the words. Like, it's a whole new language. And so I did a lot of self-education. It was great. But I also. I also did it long enough to realize, like, I was still reading product blogs at the end of the day. I was still listening to your podcast, right? Like, I was like, let me go listen to Melissa Perri. Let me go listen to Teresa Torres. And I'm going to connect with Hope. And, you know, it's like, this was still my world. The thing that I really, really loved. And so when push came to shove, I was just like, I really have to admit to myself. I want to get back into product because I want to be on the execution side as well. I want to be on the delivery side. I don't want to just stay at kind of the ideation phase. But I want to actually get into the details and get to the execution. But in the process. I learned so much about it. And so I think for me, when I. In retrospect, I was like, man, maybe I was a little smarter than I give myself credit for. I'm very thankful that I took the risk for it. The risk in doing it. Because now when I show up at Tegus and places like Tegus. My previous company was very similar. It's this idea that, like, product management is really fantastic. And it gets, you know, we focus on.
We talk a lot about, like, discovery, delivery, right? Discovery, delivery, discovery. And Dual track agile. And, like, how to get. Those things out the door. But there is a whole Go-to-market function that has to be successful based on our products. That if you don't get right, you don't grow. You know, like, this is a growth side of a business. Is there sales, Account management, marketing? Or I say Account management, but Customer service, Customer service, etc. So because I got to go do it. Because I got to go live it. Because I got to go fail at it a little bit and succeed at it a little bit. I learned kind of the language, the lingo. I learned the pain points. And I learned. I learned. I learned a lot about, like, man, if we don't get the product management, like, upfront definition right. If we don't get the product marketing right. If we don't get the storytelling right. We're not actually equipping people who, in the heat of the moment, are standing in front of who knows who. Those people are asking for a lot of things. And, like, the things that come out of your mouth that you promise in that moment. It's very hard. You know, it's very hard to think on your feet. And I think a lot about, like, Malcolm Gladwell's 20,000 Hours. Doing their 10,000 hours. It's being kind of on my feet. Doing value-based selling and strategic selling. It's like a business case. Like, every day. Five times a day. Eight times a day. For three and a half years. Where I had to be very efficient with my time. Really understand what the problem was. The person on the other side of the phone. Ask enough questions to be smart. But not ask so many questions to put them off. You know, and, like, really try to triangulate and work through that. And then it made me really realize, like, what is it that I show up with? What is it that I advocate for? What is it, like, what is the problem?
What is the solution to their problem? I was working for a consulting firm. It wasn't a product-based firm. So our people were our product. And so I had to get really good at understanding, okay, what are the problems in the market? What are the things that our people are really good at? And then how do we structure work? And with a consulting firm, you really have to be particular about hour. Hours and days and structure of work. I mean, you know this. You probably, you've done a ton of consulting in your work. And it's like, if you get that wrong, you blow your margins. And then it's like, or if you get that wrong and put people in the wrong situation, they're not going to succeed. They're going to fail. So there was a lot of moving parts in it. So, you know, I think about, like, for three and a half years, that's what I lived. And so now showing up at Tegus and working very closely with our marketing team. Product marketing reports up through me. It's part of our team. Working very closely with our sales team. It's like, I've walked a mile in their shoes. I know what it feels like. And so for me, it just becomes even more imperative to make sure that of what we're planning on building, we know how to tell the story. We know what pain points we're solving for. And we know. We work. We work. It's really, really hard to arm kind of all of our market-facing people as effectively as possible. And then we have to listen. We have to get that feedback loop back. That's my story as to why, like, I think about this stuff a lot. There's no shortcuts to it. Like, you have to get it right to scale.
Melissa - 00:24:10: When you're thinking about why products should care about sales and what you should do to work together to be better, how would you explain that to somebody who might be like, okay, but where do I get started understanding sales? Like, what's my objective when I go in there as a product leader or as a product? How would you connect those dots for them?
Margaret - 00:24:29: I connect those dots in two ways. The first is, we might have talked about this, you know, before we started recording, but it's like, it's not altruism. Like, we're building a business. So the three lenses of innovation, and it's been talked about ad nauseum, but like, there's very much like, what is the pain point, the user desirability, the solution feasibility. And then there's just that business viability. And it's like, we can't forget that. It's the reason why I went to business school. It's like, we're building businesses here. Like, we're not doing this just, you know, for philanthropic. I mean, some people might, but for the most part, we're building businesses. And so we have to understand the ROI calculation. And so when I look at like those three lenses, to me, it's ROI. It's basically thinking about ROI. And if we don't know what the business model is behind our products, if we don't know how we're selling, who we're selling to, where we're getting traction, you know, what price point are we selling it for? Like, you can get upside down on that really, really quick. And so, you know, for me, that's the way in which I really work to communicate with my team. Instead of like, this isn't. It's not ROI calculation. You have to know how this maps together. The second way that I think about it is leading versus lagging. And so I think about scorecarding, you know, metrics. I mean, you are product operations embodied. You know, you do such a good job explaining that to all of us. And I've learned so much. But product, I think, oftentimes can be like vague in terms of how to track success. That is probably a whole other line of podcasts and discussions. But how do you track success with products?
And I think that the journey that you're going down and the things that you've helped illuminate for all of us is really start to think about how do you piece that together? And it's product market fit and it's ROI. And it's like there's ways that we scientifically map that. But kind of fundamentally boiling that back up, it's leading versus lagging. Companies pay attention to revenue because that's how you build a company, right? That's the kind of overall success metric scorecard. So you know if you're winning. And it's top line net revenue. You know, but product doesn't influence revenue, but we don't directly own. I'm sorry, we do influence, but we don't directly own those revenue metrics. What we do own is the product experience and the product feature set and the engagement. And so we have to have a very strong opinion about how does engagement map to revenue, you know, and how do those two things tie together? It is their off cycle. It's not like we launch a feature in the next day like revenue shows or potentially it does if you're maybe B2C or if you're like a massively skilled company. But effectively, like think about how what your features, your capabilities, the things that you push out in your product, who is using that? What value are they getting out of it? And is it likely that they're going to convert from trial to, you know, full time? Is it going to prevent them from churning? You know, does it up our renewal rates? Does that story that we even merely have that a pain point big enough for somebody to pay us and just become a new customer overall? And there are very direct relationships there. If there are not direct relationships, then we haven't done our work. You know, we missed it. We actually haven't done the product management work that's required. So for me, it's think about leading versus lagging. How do these two things tie together and make sure that we develop a strong opinion about how they're mapped?
Melissa - 00:27:26: I think it's really interesting. I work with a lot of VCs and private equity firms now too. So I hear them diagnose where they think the problem is with a lot of companies and they will go, oh, it's sales. But when you dive into it, sometimes it's very much a product problem and we just don't have an effective way to give sales something to go out to market with. And I think it's really easy to go back and blame sales for not selling hard enough. But then if you look at the quality of the material that they're actually selling, it might not be great. It might not make a compelling case or it might be positioned wrong or we don't have the right features for people or we don't have the right packages or the right pricing or anything like that. It's not necessarily just sales. Sometimes sales is the issue, but a lot of times it's not just sales. It's a much deeper problem. And I think we forget about that when it comes to product management. We're like, oh, we build a bunch of stuff. You should be able to sell it. But it's like, no, if we don't build the right thing, they're not going to be able to sell it. It's the same thing about building the right thing. So I always have had tremendous empathy for salespeople. And I don't understand sometimes the friction that exists between them and product because if we get a chance to build you this product strategy, it's going to be very easy for you to do your job. That's the idea is to make it so easy that you walk in anywhere and you're just like, check the box, close the sale, make it all my numbers, hit all the revenue targets. And that's a dream, right?
Margaret - 00:28:44: It's the dream. We talk internally a lot about value-based selling. I think some of that is a little bit different depending on who you're selling to, what you're selling. The difference between selling a platform and selling a point solution, I mean, just massively, massively different. But your point stands. Your point is absolutely valid that if we're not arming people with the information on why, then as soon as they get pushback, and they always do, right? Because it's a sales conversation. Nobody trusts a salesperson. So having a salesperson show up and not have the credibility, not have the context, not understand what it is the thing that they're selling, and they just have a checkbox, the moment that they get pushback is the moment that all crumbles down. Or we sell something that the client doesn't want, that the user doesn't want. And then that also, to me, is a massive failure. Yeah, you're going to get the deal today, but they're going to churn. And it's a problem tomorrow. And also, I want to sell great products. I want to have an impact to our users. I want to have an impact to our users. I want to have an impact to our users. I want their lives to be better because they get to use Tegus every day.
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Melissa - 00:30:16 When you came into Tegus how did you kind of work across the different functions like marketing and sales and customer success and actually build alignment? Like, what does it mean to build alignment, I guess, with those different areas? Like, what are you actually putting in front of them? What are you discussing? What are you trying to get buy-in to go forward with?
Margaret - 00:30:35: Just like a roadmap. It's like it's never, like, ever done. It's like our Sisyphean challenge, right? Like in my head, I always just, I'm like, you know, pushing that rock up the hill. And so getting alignment, I think is, it depends on what your starting point is. I will say that I am very lucky. Like coming in, it's part of the reason why I wanted to join this organization. I mean, the company is a really just fantastic company. The humans are great. Like all of it. Like I can, I can wax poetic on a lot of things there. But massive kudos to the fact that we have a vision. Now that vision is like 20 to 30 years. Like it's a big vision. It is hairy and audacious and kind of all those things, but it's there. And we all can talk about it. We all know. And our CEO, Mike, mapped out kind of, here's what the next two years look like. And these are the things that we will do. These are the three pillars that we're focused on. And this is the way in which product is going to go fill in their part of those three pillars. In it, he talks about which clients we're going after, which market and demo, and like what our targets are, et cetera. And so I don't actually think I've ever worked at a company. I've worked at a lot of fantastic companies. But I don't think that there's ever been a company I've worked for that had so much conviction, just kind of like out of the gate. Where truly when I say it's like, this is a really fun execution problem because I actually know what our strategy is. And I know what our vision is. Execution becomes really, really tough when it's like, I don't know what I'm, what am I trying to build? Who am I trying to build it for? So kind of back to your sales conversation. It is so hard when you don't have that alignment at the top and everybody's rowing in the same direction. So then you're like, I don't know what I'm, what am I trying to build?
And sales is selling all sorts of who knows what. And they show up with a contract. I look, I got a contract signed. So you got to get out the door in two months. And it's like, well, that's going to blow up our roadmap. Well, then who makes that decision? Because oftentimes what happens is that it's made then by the BDR and the salesperson and the product person. You know, it's like it's made at the wrong level, you know, and it's people don't feel empowered, but they have to make a decision to move forward. And then you're off cycle and off schedule. So, you know, for me kind of coming in, I do feel incredibly lucky about working with this company, working for it. Working at this moment within the organization, because there is a clear kind of two-year plan and we are staying very close to it. And what I'm working on is really showcasing when something comes in conflict with taking us off that plan, I'm raising it up. I'm trying to make it very loud and very obvious in a kind way, you know, but like very loud, very obvious. It's like, this does not match this. So we have a decision we got to make. And I have very strong leaders around me that are willing to have that conversation. You know, and so that is kind of where I'm very much sitting, where it's like, okay, we have marketing motions. Marketing can do a lot of really amazing things to drive top line MQLs, right? Monthly marketing qualified leads, right? So you've got marketing driving potentially new ARR. And we've also got product marketing where it's like, we've got a lot of information about our existing product and platform that we can go communicate with our current clients. Like, hey, did you know about this feature? And that might actually impact, renewals and churn. And so then there's a really important conversation to be had of like, what is more important?
Like, are we trying to do top line growth? Are we trying to minimize renewals? The answer is always everything, right? Like you've got to pay attention to both and you never can say just one or the other, but there's a lot of communication that has to happen around like, what are we talking about in market? How are we equipping our sales team with what messaging, you know, and our CS team. And then like, how does that line up with the product roadmap that's coming over the next six to 12 months? But I can say confidently that roadmap might be a quarter or so off. And I deeply believe in like now, next, later. Like, you know, three quarters out is pretty squishy, right? But I know three quarters out, like we're going to be working on the things that we've outlined. Like we know it. And we're going to stay true to it because unless something big happens, which might always happen, but we're going to stay the course. There's a book. I don't know if you've read it. Amped Up by Frank Slootman. Have you heard of him?
Melissa - 00:34:36: No, haven't yet.
Margaret - 00:34:37: It's a favorite of the executive team here. But I was on a panel speaking today. There's a company named G2 in Chicago. That's also pretty badass. You should check them out. B2B company. Their theme, they did an all company meeting and their theme was Amped Up by Frank Slootman. So I'll give you the very, very, very short condensed like MJ version of what this book is about. But his approach is very much like execution is key. If you can't execute, it doesn't matter what your strategy is. And then it's very much like discipline to stay true to what your plan is. Minimize distraction. When a distraction comes up, you have to. You have to name it like you have to call it out. The book is great. Check it out if you want. I mean, it's it's short. It's kind of a typical like CEO book, famous book type thing. But I really enjoyed it. And I found a lot of value out of it. The reason why I bring it up is just because I see Tegus The thing that's unique about Tegus so far, relative to several other places I've worked for, is this commitment to focus and discipline and execution.
And so it's why product ops is very top of mind for me right now of just like, how do I actually start to create intuition around our ROI relative to where we're putting our product and tech resources, relative to the traction we're making in market? How do I map these metrics together? And then how do I use that to make sure that it helps influence the strategy? But what is so great is we have a strategy laid out and we are always re-upping on it. That is what we're doing. That is what we're doing. That is what we're doing. And there's not, you know, I think in many other companies, there's just like, there's just, it is so hard to say no because there's always a million things you could go do. And if we're not saying no as an executive team, if we're not saying no as an SLT, if we're not saying no at our CEO level, then you're just going to get Frankenproduct. You're going to get like lag time. You're not going to get things out the door. What you get is not going to be what you want. You just can't create momentum in that context.
Melissa - 00:36:25: Yeah, I think it's always hard when everybody's trying to figure out, you know, what is our strategy and you're in that moment and everything goes. Do you have any experience to like trying to gain alignment in that case where you're still trying to figure out strategy? And how is it kind of different from the execution side when you're working with different leaders or across different departments?
Margaret - 00:36:43: It is such a dark place to operate from. I want to like just not name names to protect the innocent. I think you asked me earlier. I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly the question you asked. But like to me, it's, you know, as a product manager, product director, product leader, product executive, you know, VP or CPO or whatever. What is the role and function that you have to play to get this product led motion as a company kind of going? And like you're trying to create, I mean, it's really reductive, but you're trying to create a machine. You know, you're trying to create a machine that goes, delivers value at the other side. And so if you kind of misshoot in terms of what your kind of empowerment is, what calls you're able to make, then you can very quickly kind of go in the wrong direction, you know? And so there's some things like we had an oopsies a few weeks ago and we absolutely owned up to it. But like we pushed out a rebrand and refunctionality around one of our product sets that it shouldn't have gone out the door. And we had to revert and we emailed everybody that emailed us and we offered personal time with each and every single one of them.
But it was an oopsies on us. Like we should have caught that. So I think about like what calls need to be made at what level? Because if you're making the wrong calls at the wrong level, then now you're out of sync. And I see that kind of with sales. Like if you have a salesperson that doesn't pay attention to the roadmap, doesn't understand what's coming, and then they're trying to sell something that, you know, isn't on the roadmap or it's the bright and shiny object thing that just came up. It's like, great. Well, then we have a choice to make. We can either drop everything and start that. But now we're two to three months behind lagging to get that thing out the door. And I don't know if in two or three months that's going to be your hot thing. Or, you know, we stay the course and then you have to be able to say no. So it's just it's kind of to me, it all comes back down to like, what are the products we're building? Why are we building that? And how do we make sure everybody's just aligned behind all of that?
Melissa - 00:38:30: I think that's always the central core tenets there, which are really important to remember. If you were to give people advice coming into a new product leadership role, it's like their first 90 days at a new company, they're walking in. What would you tell them to do and try to accomplish in that first 90 days?
Margaret - 00:38:48: Make the call. And as a product leader, very much. But I do think kind of everybody in the product organization, you have to show up with leadership. Make the call and externalize your intuition. Externalize your thinking behind that call. And so very much like it sounds kind of basic, but a lot of the things that we're talking about as a team right now is there are a lot of just micro decisions. And we're a founder-led company. Our founders are very intimately involved in the product. I love it. I think in some organizations, sometimes it can be too much. But I think here it's very much like how do we think about how to get their knowledge into the product? But I think for us to scale, what we've got to start doing is being able to move through decisions faster and have to engage less people. Kind of through that process. I do absolutely love Amazon's disagree and commit. And so what we're working on as a team is very much like you have a decision you need to make. If that decision is not made, it blocks the team, slows the process. And now all of a sudden everything is off track. You know, like it snowballs on itself. So in this circumstance, like you need a call made. Sometimes you need to go to the CEO, you know, given where we are as a company. Sometimes you don't. And what we need to do is start making sure that we get those calls. In front of our executive team when appropriate. Otherwise, make the call, but let people know that you made the call. Let people know what the impact is, you know, and let them know like why that call was made or when the call does need to be made. And so just be very succinct about like, this is the moment and this is why it's really important. And I find, you know, Tegus says this a little bit.
I've found it in many companies where it's very much just like a spray and pray approach of like, we're doing this thing, you know, and you look at like the CC line or the two line. And there's like 20. 25 people on there. And you're like, who's driving this thing? Like, who is making the decision? So it's very much like we need to be crisper about there is a decision. This is who's making the decision. This is why we're making it. This is when we're making it. If it doesn't work, this is what, you know, the downside risk. This is how you minimize downside risk. So that is the thing that like as a new leader, get practice. And that is what I do with my CEO, my boss. Like, I'm very much like I've come in and I'm like, this is the call I'm making. This is why I'm making it. I'll just repeat it. But like, I know that he's very. I must have appreciated it because now he's not wondering, like, where did that come from? Why did MJ do that? It's like, no, no, I am like 51% feeling that it's right. It's not 100%, but this is the direction needs to be done. But I think like the more you can build that muscle on externalizing your intuition, the more it showcases like what you're thinking is and then enables people to challenge it appropriately to understand kind of how you're thinking about the problem. And then also helps them understand like it either gives them more information they didn't have or gives you. Gives them a chance to tell you more information you might not have. And like to me, that's just a very successful way of operating as you stretch your wings into new leadership.
Melissa - 00:41:38: So when you're trying to decide to like which decisions need to be made and which ones don't, like how are you kind of filtering through that?
Margaret - 00:41:44: I think about the leveling a lot. I'm a very not hierarchical person. I think product is like we are the innovation arm of every business. I mean, it is a super fun role. Like this role is so fun and it is like so exciting. But I do think that there is a little bit of like at what level is what being thought about, right? So if you're a product manager, product marketer, et cetera, it's like you were trying to get the product features and functionality out the door. You were thinking probably less about the process of how you do it. You're probably more given the process. Now, you might have an opinion, et cetera, and you're going to influence it. And as you get more time, you do. But like you're told more or less like here's the strategy, here's the process, here are expectations. As you get into like that director level, senior director, VP, you're much more responsible for it. Like how work gets done and like the process of getting work and then optimizing that process and like getting the right structure in place, the right rhythms in place. And you're also very influential on strategy. So you should have access to numbers. You should have an analytical mind. You should also have access to qualitative insights. And you should have and start to form strong opinions about what you're doing. And then ultimately kind of you run the tea in the box with you. So I think about like decisioning, like both what you're trying to do in your role is move your role, like the function of your role. Like you've got to do your work, move that work forward. But you should be stretching your wings and trying to do more as you grow your career, you know, and you want to go do more. So, you know, I always I also tell my team forgiveness, not permission. And I always like say it really quietly. And I never write that down.
But like I'd rather you just go push, like go push and go try things because that's how we learn. Frank Slootman again, Frank Slootman, he says, I'm. Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. So in an innovation arm, we got to have a little wiggle room. We can't be so fragile. Like, you know, we rolled out something a few weeks ago. We rolled it back. We owned it. You know, we said we messed up and we made it right. You can't do that all the time. And we've learned from it. But, you know, to me, it's very much like those are the things and those moments that you learn from. So how do I enable a team that feels like they can go take, you know, some chances and go stretch their wings and make some calls? And all my quotes, like Amazon, Bezos says, you know, the one-way door, two-way door, right? I mean, we kind of feel like almost everything's a two-way door. Like there's very few things you really, really, really can't back out from. So I'd rather run a team that we have a little bit of looseness. You know, we have a little bit of ability to go take chances. And then that enables people to learn, like, what are the right decisions to make? How do I think through these challenges? What are the impacts? And if it messes up, then OK, great. Like you learn from it. And I think a lot about like it's collective knowledge.
And that's where your culture sits. And so if you can live through this lived experience. And so me as an individual, I have lived experience, but us as a team, we have lived experience as well. And so if we mess up, there's a lot of times where I see things go out the door and I'm like, you know, or a process implemented where I'm like. Go ahead, do it. We'll see how it works. And then like a few weeks later, it's like, yeah, didn't work so well. I'm like, it's okay. So now we all have the same understanding and the same sense of pain that something didn't work. And so then now collectively we're in a better place to go solve for it. But if I came in and was like, no, don't do it this way, then it's MJ dictating. And again, in a high throughput, high velocity team, not all of us are like strongly ego-led, want to win, type A people. And so how to enable people to like kind of challenge themselves, go live through those challenges and learn from it collectively as a team. So like that to me is just the, also the part of like this operationalization phase that I just think is so fun. It's this like collective growth and learning as a team.
Melissa - 00:45:25: I think that's such an important point too, because I've just had this experience recently too, where I kind of like walked in to this company and I saw an issue and I was like, this is the issue. I could tell you it's the issue, but it had been one of those things they had debated for years about whether they should do it or not. And everybody was like, no, no, no, we already evaluated that. We shouldn't do that. And I'm like, that's an issue. Like from all my experience, I could tell like, if you just made this change, we'd be going in the same spot. And instead everybody was arguing about it. So we did a bunch of research. Everybody went out to the research, came back and they've come to the same conclusion that I did on day one months later. But at the same time, I'm like, now everybody's on the same page. Now it's not fighting an uphill battle of just saying like, go do this. Right. And everybody being like, oh, this is a bad idea. And then, you know, when it works, like being shocked, but now everybody has the collective experience of why we should do it. And I think that's so much easier to lead from than a mandate of go do it. So even if it costs a couple months, it's still at this point where now. There's a lot of momentum, right? And now everybody's ready to run. Now everybody's got the collective knowledge to go like tackle it. And I think that's so important and a very underrated thing for a lot of leaders.
Margaret - 00:46:35: I mean, honestly, this to me also is like years of messing it up. Leadership doesn't come for free just because you have a manager on your title. Like this is me doing it the wrong way and trying to figure out like, why didn't this work out? And so I do think some of this just comes from kind of a level of experience and learned experiences to be like, no, I'm OK. Like I'm going to let these fires burn because it's going to take care of itself. It will be fine. And so I think that's like just your growth as like a leader and a manager of a team. I think that's such an important thing to learn. I had to go through the same thing. I'm like, it's not worth just like screaming at people and telling them what to do and then being upset that they don't want to do it. It's like, OK, let's just go on this journey together. We'll all be at the same place, you know, there. Sometimes people just get there a little faster than others. But once everybody gets there, then it all just clicks into place. And that's what you need. That's what you need to get momentum. As we're talking, I just think about all these examples of me.
And truly, at the end of the day, it's just me beating my head against a wall. Like I might as well have done that because that might have been more effective. You know, it's like I can come out with like long pages of like we are implementing this process, you know, like capital P. And it's like, ain't nobody going to follow that. I think nobody wants to do that. Who's going to track that? MJ, come on, you know. So one other kind of related thing is like I think about process like a product. It's iterative as well, you know. And so so much of it is just like learning process is like practicing, seeing how it works and adjusting and tweaking and practicing. And how do we want to communicate? How do we want to track? You know, how do we want to do roadmap process? How do we, et cetera, et cetera. Like right now we're working through what's our product management to product marketing mapping of like how do we do beta GA? What does beta include? What does GA include? What do we communicate to the market? And how do we line those things up? And I'm very, very explicitly telling the team, Version 1, this is Version 1. So there are multiple Vs after this.
Melissa - 00:48:23: And you don't have to get it right.
Margaret - 00:48:24: This is like one page or less. Like how do you want to run this? Literally, Thursday meetings at 4. Make it simple, but just get started somewhere. And don't boil. The ocean. And then they'll learn to figure it out. Thank you.
Melissa - 00:48:36: I think that's such great advice for all the product leaders out there who are tackling their new challenges. Thank you so much, MJ, for being on the podcast. If people want to go learn more about you, where can they find you?
Margaret - 00:48:47: LinkedIn. It's the best place.
Melissa - 00:48:48: We will put all of the links to MJ's profiles too in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com for you to find them. Thank you again, MJ, for being here.
Margaret - 00:48:57: Thanks so much.
Melissa - 00:48:57: And thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another fabulous guest. I'm also taking all your questions for Dear Melissa. So go to dearmelissa.com and drop me a line about what you would like me to answer on a future episode. We'll see you next time.