Episode 178: Startups or Enterprise: Advice from a CPO with Ying Chen
Ying Chen is a seasoned product manager who has worked in both large enterprises and startups. She is well placed then, to discuss the pitfalls and upsides of working in both.
Choosing which path is best for you is not straightforward, but advice on that front from someone who has worked in senior product roles at Covetrus, HubSpot, Luminoso Tech, and Quantive is worth listening to.
It was fascinating to speak to Ying on the Product Thinking podcast and understand how her learning mindset has allowed her to take different lessons from every position she’s held.
Read on to discover the key points made by Ying in our chat.
You’ll hear them talk about:
00:17 - Balancing Experience Between Startups and Enterprises
Ying sees the value of working in both startups and enterprise businesses. She recognizes that there are great learning opportunities to be harvested from each, and it isn’t as clear-cut a decision for an aspirational product manager to say, ‘clearly I want to work at the biggest company I can’. From Ying’s perspective, working with startups asks more of a product manager, giving them the chance to wear lots of different hats. Trying out both is a good idea and it will let you see which environment energizes you the most.
03:11 - Innovation in Startups Versus Enterprises
Managing and fostering innovation in the larger enterprise companies can be difficult. There are so many moving parts and convincing enough people of the need to experiment when things are already functioning fairly well can seem impossible. Ying has a background in psychology and a particular penchant for experimentation. She notes that the focus in startups is often on rapid experimentation and finding product-market fit, driven by the need for quick validation with limited resources. Enterprises, while having more resources, face the challenge of integrating innovation into their established processes without disrupting their current operations. Ying stresses the importance of trying to maintain flexibility and the ability to pivot based on new insights, regardless of the organization's size.
37:16 - Emergence of the GM and Product Leader Role
Ying discusses the trend of combining general manager (GM) responsibilities with product leadership roles. She notes that this hybrid role is becoming more common as organizations recognize the need for a cohesive strategy that aligns product development with market execution and business objectives. Taking on this new kind of position requires a deep understanding of business metrics, go-to-market strategies, and organizational competencies. Trying to evolve your skills away from purely product and research-based competencies into more commercial skills is important here. Ying emphasizes the need to grasp revenue growth and customer retention, highlighting the evolving expectations from product leaders to drive holistic business success.
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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're joined by Ying Chen, who's a General Manager, Chief Product Officer, Go-To-Market Strategist, and Public Speaker, experienced in leading VC-backed startups, scale-ups, and global public enterprises. We're going to be talking about what the critical skills are in today's fast-paced technology world, and how product leaders need to step up and take ownership over the business. But before we talk to Ying, it's time for Dear Melissa. This is a segment where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions and I answer them every single week. Go to dearmelissa.com and drop me a line. Also, I do prioritize voicemails. So leave me a voicemail so I can hear all your beautiful voices. Let's look at today's question.
Dear Melissa, I have a product owner role, but my boss sees me as a release manager. I feel more like a project manager and honestly, I don't feel like I am growing in my career. While execution is important, staying only in the delivery portion of the delivery process makes me feel like a scrum master that writes tickets. Any advice for me, please?
I'm very sorry that this is actually happening to you and it's really common out there. I do get this question a lot. Now, let's start to think about things that you can do to maybe shift the conversation or shift the perception about how you do your job and why you're there. What can you do to shift the focus to outcomes and questions about why you are building the things and not just what you are building? Can you start? Start conversations with your boss where you say, okay, great. Here's the thing that we're building. What do we expect to happen when we actually release it? What kind of metrics do we believe will move for our customers? Which customers do we think this will affect? I want to make sure that I instrument this so we can go back and make sure that it's doing what we expect it to do. That's a great way to start just by saying, you know, you're not arguing here. You're not saying just don't give me solutions. You're not saying, oh, I'm only focused on delivery. Now you're just asking questions and you're tying it back to your role. I want to make sure it gets instrumented in the right way. I want to make sure that we're actually able to measure this when I put it out the door. When you start to ask those questions, now you can go back and monitor for yourself if it's working or not. If it isn't working, this is your opportunity to say, hey, this didn't hit our expectations. Maybe we should iterate on this. Maybe now you could start to show that we're moving towards a different way of working, right? You're not just a release person. You are somebody who's asking questions, who's thinking about the bigger picture, who's getting ahead of the things and proposing what to do next, right? What to change, how we make strategic decisions.
That's one simple way where you can actually start trying to change the conversations that people are having with you. But you do have to be proactive about it. Instead of asking for permission, just go do what you think you should be doing and then ask for forgiveness if needed later. But rarely do we actually have to ask for forgiveness. I perceive this as, as long as you're not slowing the delivery down, people will be okay with it, right? But start poking, start asking questions and do it in a way that comes from an earnest curiosity instead of, I don't think I should be doing this. I don't want to be a delivery manager. That's not the tone we want to take. It should be more like, hey, I'm curious about how this is going to affect this. Can I write this down? Or I'm curious about this. This starts having the conversations that we need to be having about, are we building the right thing. Now, if you tried this and it did not work, now we got to look for where we want to go and grow in our career. I firmly believe that if you want to get better at your craft as a product manager, you need to go work for great product leaders. So if your boss doesn't recognize that being a product manager is more than just a release engineer, then that's the time to maybe look for a new job. So you want to try to take ownership over what you can control, try to do the best you can there. But then at the end of the day, if you're not able to practice your craft here, it may be better to look for other opportunities outside of that company or outside of that leader and find somebody that you can actually learn from. That's what I really would be focusing on. But first, try poking. Try taking ownership of what you can control. Try not just asking if you can go do things, just go do them, right? To see if you can make it work and for the best interest of the product.
So start small. Start with a few key practices that might help. Ask those questions, maybe set goals, see if you can instrument it. Maybe go talk to a customer, see if you can validate things. This type of work here is going to help people change their perspective of what you're doing, that might get you a little bit further. So I hope that helps. And I know this is a very tough situation to be in. But do I think about where can I actually learn? What control do I have? Because you do probably have more control than you think you do. And what can I do to feel like I'm learning? All right. Now it's time for us to go talk to Ying.
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, Ying. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Ying - 00:05:39: Thanks, Melissa. Nice to be here.
Melissa - 00:05:41: So you've had a really interesting career where you've worked for a lot of really large enterprises and you've worked for startups as well. Can you tell us a little bit about your product management career so far? And why did you bounce between these two?
Ying - 00:05:56: I think you can probably see in my experience at this point, it's about 50-50 in terms of that enterprise versus startup. So at the end of the day, I'm a builder at heart. And it really doesn't matter if I'm building the offering inside of a startup versus an enterprise. I think I just developed an appreciation of what doing product and an enterprise can be versus at a startup. So I think a lot of us have heard the, oh my gosh, you know, it feels like when you go to the enterprise, things move slow. I disagree with that. I think of enterprises as a great learning ground, particularly for young product managers. Who are maybe coming out of another career or basically coming out of school, want to get into product management. When you go to an enterprise, because by nature it's highly matrixed. So you're going to be dealing with a lot of experts in their respective functions. So it's actually a really good learning opportunity for somebody to really understand what really good can look like. At the same time, startups have their value too, which is now that you can understand what good can look like, startups, offer this great opportunity for you to do more because typically startups are not as matrixed because there's just not as many people.
And what you get to do is to be able to wear multiple hats and being able to get closer to kind of the entire operating model of a particular offering that you're working on closer than probably what you can get to from an enterprise perspective. So I don't think there's a right or wrong with either one of those approaches. I think the question that, you know, I ask myself and I invite everybody to ask themselves is what kind of situation brings you energy? What kind of situations do you feel like your skill set bust a line? What kind of operating model enterprises you have to be a really good communicator and you have to be the master of alignment because there's a lot of functional teams. At a startup, you have to be comfortable of the proverbial, the songwriter, the graphic artist, the performer. So you have to wear a lot of hats, basically. So again, I think it really depends on what kind of experience energizes you and makes sure that you understand what you're kind of, you know, leaning into in terms of your skill set.
Melissa - 00:08:25: When it comes to working in enterprises versus startups, what are the different factors that people should take into consideration about how they actually operate, you know, what their strategies look like? And how does it affect what you do as a product manager?
Ying - 00:08:40: Yeah. So again, I think it leans into where are you in your journey as a product leader, right? So having been somebody who kind of started my career journey in the context of an enterprise, I have found that to be a really helpful experience for myself when coming into a new product, you don't know what are all of the different ways in which you need to kind of interact with the different teams within an organization. So when you go into an enterprise, again, it provides a really great learning opportunity for you to be able to understand, wow, you know what? These are all the different functional areas that products can collaborate with. And learn some real, real specialized skills around how people do marketing, how people think about go-to-market, customer success, sales enablement. So being able to explore and understand a lot of these really, really highly specialized roles within an organization. So at the end of the day, it's somebody that is looking to learn. If you're somebody who already happened in the product management profession for quite some time, you're looking for more. Autonomy and you looking for more opportunity to have accountability in some of these areas above and beyond being a participant.
For example, if you want to own the end-to-end process around pricing and packaging as a product person, you can probably create more of an impact when you go to a smaller startup than maybe in the context of a large organization where they have specialized functions to do that. I think that's the kind of trade-off decision that this individual makes. Has to make as well as again, keeping in mind what skill sets do I have right now? What am I looking to learn and how can I show up best in each one of these environments where again, change is going to be the constant. You still have to act very agile in your fashion. The difference being, are you somebody who is into alignment, a really strong communicator, or are you somebody that prefers to be more focused? In terms of how you want to approach the product.
Melissa - 00:10:55: I always try to tell people too, I don't think there's just one model as a product leader. You could be a really good zero to one person type founder and be the product leader that way. You could take over from a founder and do the first early stages of the startup, right? Scaling. And then we've got scale-ups and then we've got enterprises. And I think that the leadership and the skill set for each one of those is very different where, you know, early days you're all about experimentation and product market fit and kind of. Dealing with chaos, let's say. And then as you scale and you get into the enterprise, it's about taking the chaos and actually making it not chaos, right? Figuring out how to put in standardized ways of working and processes and strategies that actually scale us in deliberate ways, right? It's more about optimization as well. And I find that a lot of product leaders out there don't think that way. They think like, oh, I just have to keep going to a bigger and bigger and bigger company. And that's what success looks like. And I'm curious for you. Like you were. HubSpot. You've been at Covetris at these, you know, bigger companies. And now you're at a smaller startup. Did you look at your skill set and say, like, I want to go small for a reason? Like what was the push where you were like, I've done super C-level leadership stuff at these big companies. Why go small now?
Ying - 00:12:08: Thank you for mentioning this concept of product market fit. So what energizes me about startups is getting to that point where you're like, oh, wow, I see this really great opportunity. We're fighting against the clock to get to that product market fit. You know, that 100th user or that 1 million ARR, whatever one comes first. You're really trying to get to that product market fit. And the whole experimentation, the build, measure, learn cycle really energizes me. So I'm somebody who by training because my undergraduate study was in psychology. So experimentation is like in my blood. So I love this concept, constantly experimenting, iterating, asking questions, and formulating hypotheses. So I think that that's what energizes me about startups because there's so much uncertainty and you really can't get to the answer unless you have effective experimentation. In the context of a larger portfolio, and this is where you and I probably have had very similar conversations with our team, which is, hey, you know what? The good thing is we have customers. And the bad thing is we have customers. So this makes innovation that much more challenging. And I think what has become energizing for me is when you go to these larger organizations that have built a portfolio of offering that leans into their current product market fit, you need to kind of think past where you are today, because at any given moment, a change could come such as generative AI or whatever the case might be. That basically rocks the core of your business model or COVID. Right. I mean, it doesn't have to be technology. It was like COVID, right. Or a depression, whatever the case might be. Change comes and it comes fast. And you, as the leader of a portfolio in a large enterprise, your job is to look past where you are right now.
And then again, putting on your experimenter hat, always be ahead of the market and thinking about, okay, so who is playing in our space right now? Or who is actually closer to what we're doing, but they're not doing the same thing. And then how would they change their playbook so that they're not competitors today, but they may be a competitor tomorrow as well as, okay, so the technologies or the value proposition that we're pursuing assumes our lead user's job hasn't changed. How is their jobs kind of changing? So I lean back into, you know, I think HubSpot recently launched RevOps. So, the Ops Hub, and this is absolutely looking at how the jobs of our JSON users are actually changing and lean into that kind of innovative thinking. So again, don't look at having the customer as being a pain. It always feels hard to kind of innovate when you have customers. But at the end of the day, the same kind of concept, the same agility that you need to have mentally around startups trying to get to that product market fit, you need to do the same kind of thinking at that portfolio level and then always look for opportunities to figure out, is that an adjacent market pivot or is this a complete new product market kind of pivot? So I think you have to really enjoy experiments. You have to lean into uncertainty and actually enjoy the process of, I don't know, making sense of experimentation and uncertainty.
Melissa - 00:15:44: In larger organizations, I find that they struggle with this innovation piece that you're talking about. And it's not just from the concept of, hey, we should be innovating. They all want to say that, but it's the managing piece of it to make sure they have enough budget to do it. They're putting the appropriate attention towards experimentation. I see a lot of them just go all in on unvalidated ideas. When you were at larger companies managing a portfolio with innovation, how did you think about that? Or can you tell us an example of how you experimented, like how you baked experimentation in, how you encouraged innovation? And then how did you logistically plan for it to make sure it didn't get overshadowed by all those revenue generating products you also had to manage?
Ying - 00:16:28: I think that this is where I tend to lean very heavily into lean startup as kind of that framework. And always coming back to this concept of a minimum viable product. And by the way, it's actually not a product. I think the name itself was kind of misleading, but essentially it's representing an idea. And typically it's a business model. And I think that that's what people forget. They keep thinking that it's about me building something as opposed to you're really testing the value of this thing that you're trying to deliver into the marketplace. So I think there's two dimensions. How do you create an MVP in the least amount of build required? So again, the great wizard of Oz, right? So what are the things that you can basically get away with, with maybe configurations or even just concepts on a piece of paper? Leaning into your customer advisory board or maybe get a couple of best partners in the ecosystem. Again, we're kind of talking about large portfolio innovation, right? Like your partners are amazing at helping you kind of scale that kind of testing and understanding because they're also feeling out the market on your behalf. They're also listening to what's going on. So again, thinking about MVPs, pick a couple of partners, maybe in your ecosystem to be able to kind of talk about what are some of these things that we can run together where we're co-delivering this value proposition. We're trying to test out this value proposition. And the last thing that I will add to this is, lot of organizations, to your point, they're committed to innovation, but they're stuck on the playbook that got them here. So if you continue to do incremental plays, leaning into your current go-to-market, there's no chance that you're going to be able to effectively go after a whole different market.
Because by definition, you're being disrupted not because you are doing something that you've always done. You're being disrupted because somebody is doing something different that you've never done before. And so I think the temptation that organizations fall into is, oh, yeah, I support innovation. We have this lab going. The idea was validated, but we're going to use the existing go-to-market or whatever structure to execute on that. That is a mistake. We need to make sure that you have the right play for the right approach that you want to take and not lean into what you have today. Because again. What got you here might not be what you need to get you to the next level of where you need to go. And that's the same for startups, but that's the same for enterprises. So don't, you sweat your dick to get here and think that it's going to work for a whole different kind of market. That's my advice and I'm sticking to it.
Melissa - 00:19:23: I think it's a very solid device. One other thing that I've seen with product leaders, they have a little bit of trouble with CEOs have trouble with this too, honestly. But it's the, I've got two types of companies, right? I got the one that's like, I'm going all in on this new innovative idea I have that's not quite validated. But like, we're just going to put all of our resources in it and ignore the cash cow over here. Then on the other side, I've got the people who are like, I'm only going to do this cash cow and I'm going to ignore all the innovative things. Like, yeah, sure, go experiment, but we're never going to invest in it. Logistically, are you doing like a portfolio approach where you're going, oh, I'm going to always have like 10% of people in innovation? Are you waiting for people to come pitch your ideas? Are you coming up with innovative ideas as an executive team and deciding to fund them? Like, how do you think about balancing that? So you're not swinging one way versus the other.
Ying - 00:20:13: Yeah, and I think that this is where how enterprises approach this is going to be different than how startups approach this. When you're at a startup, you don't have the level of resourcing because you don't have that customer buffer the way that an enterprise might have. So you have to have an incredible amount of focus, right? And then this is where there's a temptation to be like, okay, so if we have to bring focus, it's either one thing or another. We either go after the big thing and put 100% of our eggs in that basket versus like, okay, so how do we keep growing this thing that, you know, to your point, the cash cow? I think it's really more of an experimental approach, which is you need to kind of get to that build, measure, learn cycle around the new things before you actually allocate hard resources against it. So what I would say is allocate maybe at least 10 to 20% of your capacity to really experiment and asking your team to think about what are the ways in which, by the way, either new disruptions or how your existing value proposition can get affected. So that's something that we're doing right now, which is Quantive, we are the leading platform for helping organizations scale their strategy, and the major ways in which organizations scale their strategy through the implementation of OKRs. So again, the OKR market has seen lots of ups and downs. But in addition to sort of the OKR, which is our core, like strategy execution is our core business, we're actually also investing in understanding how we can elevate. How do we help address the strategy gap between people who are doing the bet creation, linking it to execution, and how do we close the gap on measuring the effectiveness of the bet that companies are trying to make?
So the challenge is if we just say artificially, let's split this amount of capacity versus this amount of capacity, it's going to change. It's going to change because you're going to be at some point, you're going to have more insight about what it actually takes for you to run that innovation project. So I guess my advice is start with some allocation, but don't be tied to it. Be a little bit more flexible as you decide to realize, hey, you know what? The innovation track that is not about existing is actually consuming more of your capacity. And that might be okay. That will actually force you to make a better decision about how you should think about existing capacity. When you're talking about the enterprise, though, again, I still feel like it's the same because enterprises may have more resources. However, it's not unlimited resources either. And you have a book of business that you have to protect. So again, I would say give yourself some room to learn what you actually need. Don't cement on it and then always be making those trade-off decisions about, okay, so is this more aligned with what we're trying to go versus, hey, you know what? We have to keep the cash cow feed or starve the cash cow in order to generate this to power up the stars. Right. So I'm just trying to make sure I'm not mixing the BCG growth. I think that's the cows and the stars.
Melissa - 00:23:42: I worked at the CTO. We would talk about sacred cows all the time. We were talking a little bit about this, and I want to expand on this area. You mentioned how product leaders always need to be looking at what's evolving the market. Otherwise, we'll be disrupted. And especially today, things are changing so fast. You mentioned generative AI. There's a lot of movement out there with the pace of technology. How do you think that's affected the skills that are required to be an exceptional product leader in today's day and age?
Ying - 00:24:11: So the one thing that I'm sure about having survived, I want to say maybe a handful or maybe like a dozen of these disruptive innovations. So I'm going to bring this back a little bit. So hopefully you don't mind. Remember when robotic process automation, RPA, that was super crazy. Remember when we talked about blockchain and at some point you're like, does everybody need distributed ledger? Right. So there was blockchain. Remember chatbots? I think people try to forget about chatbots and they just thought, hey, you know what? Chatbots have always been super smart. I have a collection of like research that basically said people think chatbots suck. They're stupid. They don't know what they're doing. So here we are. Generative AI. By the way, last year wasn't the first time generative AI has been around. Generative AI has been around for quite some time too. Remember when we talked about, hey, you know, it's a queue, it can take pictures. And then we're like, that's Hollywood. That's their problem. Until, hey, by the way, my grandma's using ChatGPT. So I'm going to go back into the foundations of product management, which is really understanding what is the problem you're trying to solve for and why. Why is it interesting for you to solve for that problem? Because technology will come and go. Generative AI today, something else tomorrow. I don't even know what the technology is. It's going to be.
But what I do know is at the end of the day, it's the PM's job to really understand how does that kind of help enhance the experience that I'm trying to deliver for the personas or for the jobs to be done? I'm trying to do it here. How does that actually create more value to what it is that can be accomplished today rather than, hey, you know what? Yeah, I can tell you. Sure. Go pick up a course. Learn LLMs. Sure. That's going to be helpful for you. Learn about the technology rather than not learn about the technology. But I think it's more useful leaning into old school framework, such as jobs to be done. Really understand how do you understand what is it that people are trying to hire your software for? Good old behavioral research, which is developing empathy and an understanding of the context of which your users and your buyers are kind of coming from. And then being able to lean into those skill sets in terms of understanding how does new technology or new things is going to fit into the current business model that you have. So again, I would say lean in more on developing your market, your market side of the brain first, and then maybe learn about the technology second. Because then I think you'll see the places where it fits and the places that it doesn't. Going back to our point about does everybody need a distributed ledger? God help us all. I don't think so.
Melissa - 00:27:12: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations. I see the same thing now as we were talking about with generative AI. Everybody's like, oh, I need an LLM. And I'm like, for what? What are you using it for? And it's funny because a lot of people will say, I think companies are all looking for the buzzword. So people ask, what's your AI strategy? And they're like, oh, yeah, we use AI a lot internally. And you're like, for what? And it's like, oh, to ask questions of ChatGPTs. That's not a strategy. Like, yes, I'm glad you're doing that. Everybody should be leveraging it. But that's still not a strategy for AI. It's a lot of, I feel like, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks right now, when it comes to that. Okay, so this is good advice. Do not concentrate on the technology first. Concentrate on the market first and then see if technology can actually solve that problem. What else? What else should people be worried about with this pace of change? You know, we're also talking lately about like ZERP, zero interest rate. We're past that. What have you seen change as a leader compared to those times versus what people expect of you now?
Ying - 00:28:36: It's actually been very interesting to me where I think a lot of us get these calls from recruiters that's like, hey, you know what? What we really need are strategic or very strong product leaders that have that go-to-market mindset. Which for me, it's kind of interesting because having been in this role for a long time, I'm not going to say how long it's been, but it's been decades at least. It's interesting to me that I've always thought of the PM role as the coming together of understanding of the business, strong understanding of the go-to-market, as well as being able to figure out what is the most effective way to actually execute on that strategy. And so for me. To hear after all this time, somehow people like us that sits at the intersection of understanding what does a good business looks like versus what you should build and how you should build it. It's actually more of a unicorn concept than I realized. So my advice is the best thing that you can do for yourself as a product manager is to really develop your business side of the brain. Pragmatic marketing has a good framework. I know everyone's like, oh my gosh, it's been around forever. But I think it has a really good depiction of what we mean when we say develop the go-to-market side of your brain. It comes down to understanding pricing and packaging. You don't have to lead it, but you have to understand how it fits. Strong understanding of the KPIs as well as the metrics that matter within your business. If you're in SaaS, I think we have all these lessons on NRR, ARR. You got to understand all the R's and how product kind of fits into the R's. In addition to obviously NPS, I'm sure that could be another debate for another conversation. But the importance of understanding what you're building and what you're trying to get to fits into the business.
So I would say, you know, you really have to start to take on that business owner kind of mindset where you don't have to own every single function, but you have to start to understand and put together all the dots in terms of just because you build it, people are not going to come. It's what you're building and who you're going after actually lean into the unfair advantage that you have as whatever organization that you have. And again, the model that I like to use is the lean model canvas. I don't mean the canvas itself, but I think the canvas is a good reminder of thinking about when you're talking about a product oriented company, especially in the SaaS context, it's not good enough to just figure out what is the product, the features. It's thinking about your entire organization as an asset of how you would show up. So again, I would lean into if you need something to kind of ground your thinking on understanding what I mean by that. Definitely take a look at the lean model canvas. It's a really good way to help you understand how the product itself is not detached from your organization's ability to reach the market that your product is intended to reach. So I would say really lean into that market, the commercial side of your brain, and then make sure that while you're excited about technology, what are things you can build, but don't lose sight of what should be the problem that you solve for. What is the impact? How do you need to show up as an organization? So that will save everybody, including yourself, a lot of pain, a lot of suffering in terms of, I built this. Nobody uses it. Nobody's buying it. We're still experiencing churn and things like that.
Melissa - 00:32:34: That's a good blast from the past. I forgot about the lean canvas and I used to teach it all the time, but I do think it's more relevant now for product leaders more than ever. And I remember when I did first start teaching it to product managers, everybody would complain because it's got these segments that say like cost structure and revenue streams on it. And they'd be like, I don't need to know about that. I'm just a piece of this large enterprise. Why would I have to fill that out? And it's so telling about how we swung so far from the business, I think, as product managers. And you're right. That's like one of these big gaps that I now see in product managers because we became so overtly either technology focused or we swung so far on the customer side, almost became user research focused. But we've always been supposedly right in the middle of business technology and customers and that business piece that's really getting passed over right now. So I see a lot of product leaders who are coming up the ranks and they don't have that business knowledge. And it's something that I'm teaching on CPO Accelerator. It's like, how do you actually understand the financial aspects of your company and what growth drivers are going to make it succeed and how companies win? And I think that's so important. One thing that we were talking about a little bit as well before we started was this concept of a GM role and a product leader role. And you actually played that role at HubSpot and you've also been a chief customer officer. What have you been seeing? Take shape with this hybrid GM product leader role. And how is it different than just a traditional product leader without the GM?
Ying - 00:34:05: Definitely agree. So I'm also starting to see this emergence of this GM and head of product kind of role. I think it kind of evolved from this need that organizations are realizing that just because you build it, like I said, it's not going to have an impact on the key metrics that matter for your business unless you're intentional about aligning what it is that you're doing with how you can actually go to market. Where are the competencies that you have in your go-to-market? And that's why to your point about we on the product side, because we originated and, to all of the movies, right, about, hey, you know what? Product managers have, I guess, skill set. We're good with people. I guess we have people skills. We're good with talking to the customers. We're good at bringing back what the customers need to the engineers who want to focus on solving the problem. And so, like, we're like the translator. But what we forgot in our process is that, like, by the way, that's really more project management, right? That's like, hey, there's something that needs to be done. Go get it done. As opposed to product managers, our job is to make sure that we understand the why. Why are we doing this? Should we do this? So I do feel like organizations are starting to realize that having somebody who is just focused on building the things and bring it to market is not going to help them be competitive. And it's not going to be sustaining their advantage without that connection to the key metrics within the business that matters. And that's why the general manager concept, it's actually more relevant, probably in non-SaaS kind of context. But we're bringing that into SaaS because of this need that we need to be able to have a single hand to shake when it comes to, we have this product.
How is it contributing to the key metrics within the business? How is it contributing to our ability to add more revenue? How is it contributing to our ability to maybe expand existing revenue? How is it helping us to drive stickiness of the platform and things like that? So I think organizations are starting to realize that more than just the chief product officer that can basically take what we need to do from the customer base and doing that user resource that you kind of talk about, translating into needs and requirements, into somebody who is able to really play at the middle of understanding the business, what is our go-to-market competency, and mirroring a portfolio that leans into the competency of where we have go-to-market. So I'll just give you an example. So I think a lot of organizations want to go upmarket. However, maybe their competency is really around small to mid-sized business. So if you bring in a product leader and you say, you know what, build me a product that is worthy of the enterprise segment, but you don't augment your go-to-market, guess what's going to happen?
You're going to build this product that you don't have the professional services team that can support the expanded services that you're going to need to serve the segment. You also have account executives that can't speak to an enterprise kind of persona, such as the CTOs and the CIOs of large enterprises that are going to come at you with like 500 different attestations that you have to pass. So this is why I think it's really important that this emerging role of like a GM and product kind of come together because you need to understand what is the context that you're going to be asked to deliver this product. And what is the right approach? Oftentimes people just want to build, build, build. As product people, we love building, but we need to be thinking about the business and really seriously consider build, buy, and partner. So I would say that's also another different differentiation, by the way, between enterprise and startups. Enterprise, you don't have the opportunity of being singularly focused in one niche area that you're gapping in your business. So you really need to pull yourself back and think about build by partner.
Melissa - 00:38:26: When you describe the GM role too, that we're talking about, a lot of people do see GMs as like the CEOs of their business lines. And I have one trend that I've been seeing a lot lately is that, and especially SaaS companies, a lot of CPOs are stepping up to be CEOs in the next SaaS company. And the way that you're describing it, it sounds pretty key to me. And that's what I've been seeing as well is that, you know, as a CPO, you do, or a GM in that area, you do have to worry about the go-to-market, the sales side, the product side, the technology side, all of those things to actually pull together and provide direction. Have you been observing that out there as well, where you're seeing a lot more product people take the helm and lead these companies?
Ying - 00:39:05: I think so. And this is where the trend that I'm seeing, especially in the startup world. There is a lot of this kind of CPO to CEO route, actually, as sort of the evolution of the role. And then at the enterprise level, that's where you're starting to see this GM and head of product role, where you have somebody who might be the GM of a division within an organization, but also have full accountability into the product creation process. So I do think it's the same trend. We're just seeing it manifested in two different pasts, so absolutely, it brings me joy to talk about CPOs as the new CEO, rather than sort of like, because again, it's very similar to the COO role. When you're talking about SaaS organizations in particular, the product role is very similar to the chief operating officer, because in order for you to deliver an offering from a software perspective, you need the entirety of the village. So how you show up in pricing and packaging, how should you think about FP&A? How should you think about contracts? How do you think about selling? How do you think about support? How do you think about marketing? So I do think that it is a merging trend. I think it's just manifested differently depending on startups versus enterprises.
Melissa - 00:40:32: If people want to start to look into becoming a product leader and then hopefully eventually a CEO, what do you think are the biggest things holding people back today?
Ying - 00:40:41: I think the challenge is, especially if you're kind of coming from the traditional, I don't even know what traditional is, but like I think the more prototypical definition of like product, there's almost like, oh, you know what? We don't, you don't have to worry about sales and marketing. That's not your job. You don't have to worry about it. And yet every time, I don't know if you hear this, but I hear this a lot from both my team, my colleagues and also people that I mentor that it's very hard to go to the next step from a leadership perspective because they get this feedback that they're not strategic enough. So as all of us know, it's like, wow, how do you react ? Well, how do you process that feedback, right? You're not strategic enough. And then it goes into this other discussion around, oh, you know, executive presence and whatever the case might be. So I think this is getting at the fact that when people say you need to be more strategic. So if you want to go on this CPO to CEO or, you know, head of product to like GM-ish kind of track, being strategic means that you have a strong understanding of how your business works. So that means you're in tune with those key metrics that matter, understanding how, what it is that you're doing contributes to those key metrics, and then having an active role in involving yourself with your partners. Because remember, if you're a large enterprise, it's likely very matrix. So you're going to have a sales partner and a marketing partner that you need to align with at a startup. Again, you have a little bit more shaping that you can do, but again, it still requires alignment. So I would say buckle up those things that we used to ignore on the lean model canvas that you're like, ah, I don't really need to. Be prepared to educate yourself. You can take courses.
You don't need an MBA. I know I probably just made a lot of schools angry, but you don't really need an MBA. It's really understanding the key levers within your business. Spend time with the CFO if you haven't. By the way, they're probably one of my favorite, favorite personas in a company. You can find me talking to our finance team any given Sunday because our finance teams are amazing at helping us understand what are the key levers within the business that this is how we look at the business. This is how we measure the effectiveness of our business. So spend time. Spend time with your FP&A team. They will love to see you, by the way. I'm speaking on behalf of lots of the FP&A teams that I worked with in the past, whether it's a small company or a large enterprise. Your FP&A friends want you to go talk to them. They will love to talk to you. They will love to tell you how things work. They will love to tell you about EBITDA. They want to talk to you about CapEx, OpEx. They want to talk to you about revenue. Just go. Go talk to them and talk to marketing and sales as well. Make sure that you have a really strong line of communication. But I would say, definitely tap into your finance team. They're there to help. They're really funny, by the way. So I'm hoping I'm crushing a lot of these prototypes of like, I don't know. I have a lot of feedback from my finance teams and finance leaders like, are we really that scary? And the point is, no, they're not. They're really great. So I don't know. If I have an unsung hero, I would just say finance. Trove of information. Amazing partnership. Go talk to them. They love. I hope I didn't just set everybody up for lots of appointments. But, so learn about the business. Talk to your finance leaders. Talk to your finance team. They're there to help. They want to help.
Melissa - 00:44:32: Yeah, that was super helpful. Amazing advice for us, Ying, in this episode. Thank you so much for being with us. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Ying - 00:44:40: I'm on LinkedIn and I'm also on Twitter. So again, you can find me, ychen42, on Twitter. And also you can find me on LinkedIn with the same handle. So hopefully we'll see everybody there.
Melissa - 00:44:52: And we will put those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com under Ying's episode so you can just grab them there. Thank you for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, you can submit all of your questions about product management to me at dearmelissa.com and I'll answer them every single Wednesday. We'll see you next time.