Episode 140: When Product Meets Customer Success, Miracles Happen with Bryan House, Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path
In this episode of Product Thinking, Bryan House, Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, joins Melissa Perri to explore the close collaboration between product and customer success in building a customer-centric organization.
You’ll hear them talk about:
[01:27] - As the Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, Bryan has a unique role that extends beyond product and UX design. He now oversees sales components, account management, and the entirety of customer success, which includes renewals, expansion, global services, and onboarding. Before his arrival, the company's product and engineering teams rarely engaged with customers. So Bryan introduced a more customer-centric approach to meetings and product strategies, and realigned the R&D department.
[06:09] - Under his leadership as Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, Bryan introduced key strategic transformations by unifying the product and sales teams, ensuring engineers were focused on building valuable, real-world features. This union gave engineers a clearer sense of their end users, allowing them to see customers as distinct individuals within specific companies. To further embed the customer's perspective, the annual R&D offsite incorporated insights from the customer success leadership, ensuring product development was truly customer-centric. Moreover, Bryan facilitated direct interactions between customers and product managers, building trust and nurturing a proactive rather than reactive relationship. Finally, by adopting Amazon's six-page process, Bryan ensured the company's strategic narratives were clear and grounded in real business outcomes.
[17:54] - For a Chief Product Officer unfamiliar with overseeing customer success, here's a streamlined approach: First, secure a proven Customer Success Leader, someone experienced in relationship-building and project management. Next, it's essential to prioritize metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and expansion, understanding that CS uniquely combines relationship-building with the art of selling. Highlighting natural sales intuition within your team is key as it promotes organic growth by addressing customer needs. If current roles seem misaligned with your objectives, don't hesitate to recalibrate to meet company goals. Lastly, work to reframe the perception of sales. It's less about pushing products and more about influence and service, offering personalized solutions to customers.
[22:15] - Bryan believes that product managers should enhance their storytelling skills. Embrace your role as the subject matter expert for the product you're building. While the customer might know their business well, you possess expertise in your domain. Don't hesitate to showcase that expertise. A common misconception among product managers is that selling the problem a product solves is solely the responsibility of product marketing. But in reality, a product manager should be intimately familiar with the problem and its solution, often knowing more than anyone else in the organization.
Quotes:
“My belief that I've learned in a couple of spots now is that your customers, particularly in recurring revenue businesses, only want to talk to the product team once they become customers”.
“Bringing the voice of the customer into those discussions around product development and where we're going became critical and really became a very positive influence on the R&D team in terms of how they thought about what they were working on”.
“The way customer success works really well is if you have the ability to move to the other side of the table and you're a partner, and by bringing the part of the product manager for the important service, it really feels like you're developing and investing in that partnership”.
“I fundamentally believe in my heart that people buy based on relationships and that the organization that has the best relationships with our customers is in customer success”.
“The biggest thing I try to remind, particularly junior product managers, is that the customer knows their business better than you do. But you are a subject matter expert in this. Don't be afraid to flex your muscles and explain to them”.
Episode Resources:
Other Resources:
Melissa Perri - 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.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're talking all about product management and sales, which I know is a huge hot topic out there for our listeners. So, we're joined today by our guest, Bryan House, who is the Chief Experience Officer at Elastic Path, which is a composable commerce company. So, Bryan actually has a really interesting role there where he oversees not just product and UX, but also customer success. So, we're going to dive in and talk about how he oversees those things and how sales, customer success, and product can work together better. Before he was at Elastic Path, Bryan was instrumental in shaping neural magic, and he led Acquia through a billion-dollar acquisition.
So, before we get Bryan in here to talk about all things sales and product, we're first going to do our Dear Melissa segment, where I answer a question from our audience every single week. And today's has everything to do with product and sales. How timely. I chose well. So, let's see what we got written in today.
Dear Melissa, what is the best way to facilitate tight collaboration between customer-facing teams, customer success and sales, and product? Product wants to talk to customers but wants to be strategic and not reactive. Customer success wants to protect their customers from too many repetitive research requests that go nowhere. But they want customers to see that product hears in response to their feedback. It seems like we all want what's best for the customer, but it's hard to get in a state of flow together. Would love to hear what processes and tools can make this better for all of us.
Great timely question. So, one of the things that you're really gonna wanna look at here is how do we get the feedback loops going between customer success and product? So that's really, really important. So, in our book on product operations that just came out, Denise and I have talked about how we set up good cross-functional collaboration. And a really big part of why product operations came to be was to help these connections and these feedback loops become more standardized in companies. So, one piece of this is looking at how do we make sure that the information that sales is learning about what customers want and what they hear, customer success teams too, about what's good, what's bad with our products from current customers, we want all of those pieces of feedback to get to the product team. And a lot of times that's not happening right now. So what sales is doing is they're being reactive and they're like, you're not listening to us, you're not looking at this. But it's hard to get that information because they usually anecdotally just drop it off on your desk and say, build this.
You say, it's not on the roadmap. And then you get into these wars. So, one key part of this is making sure that we as a product development team can actually take into account all the feedback we're getting from our customers, which doesn't have to be just from user research where we go out and talk to them directly. There are many different streams of information that we can get through our customers, but that live internally. So, sales is talking to customers every day, so is customer success. Where do those things live? Find out what systems they live in, connect to them, figure out how you get that information out in a nice orderly fashion so that you can look at that. Now you can tell sales and customer success, we're up to speed, we hear what they're saying, we're reading your notes, we're on the same page. The second part of that feedback loop is going back to sales. This is what we did with that information. Here's things that we could prioritize, here's things where we couldn't prioritize, here's where we need to dig deeper and actually go do user research. But look, I exhausted our other options already. I already looked through all the interview notes we did before, I've figured out what you've talked to them about, I've taken that into account and I have some really targeted user research things that I need to do to make sure that we can build this right. Sales and customer success like that, they'll work with you on that because it's not just about you asking questions that might already be known.
So really think about how you do that two-way communication and how you can use what is also internal right now, what you have access to, to learn more about your customers. Another piece too is about idea management. So, if sales and customer success have ideas, where do they go to live? How can they see the status of those ideas? What's gonna be on a roadmap and what's not? So, you need routine check-ins with them, where you show them, this is what's upcoming, here's what we're building, and you create some guidelines around what they can sell and what they can't sell. Many companies that I've worked with in the past, and we write about this in the book, we've done things where we've classified the state of development in things like experiment, alpha, beta, GA, where if it was an experiment or alpha, it could not be talked about or sold. If it was in beta and GA, we told salespeople, you could tell people it's coming, here's timelines we're thinking of, here's these other things, but they knew not to go out and try to sell things ahead of the roadmap. These types of processes make everything so much better when you start to put them into place. We found that the collaboration between sales and product became much tighter. We found that people were not getting as mad at each other anymore. But I really firmly believe in product operations because of these things.
So, I hope you check out our book, go to productoperations.com to learn more about it, but you can also buy it on Amazon, it's called Product Operations, so pretty easy to find. Today, we're going to hear another way to handle this as well from Bryan, who does oversee both customer success and product and also UX. So, let's head over to talk to Bryan. Facilitation is a skill I see as a fundamental difference between good and great product managers. Yet it's often overlooked. Great product managers focus on guiding clear conversations and steering stakeholders to the best outcomes. You can develop these facilitation superpowers in Voltage Control's facilitation certification program. Ready to unlock your greatness? Apply today at Voltagecontrol.com/product. 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. Hey Bryan, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.
Bryan House - 00:06:55:
Great, thanks Melissa, great to be here.
Melissa Perri - 00:06:57:
So, you have had a nice, long, illustrious product career, and you've recently joined Elastic Path as their Chief Experience Officer. Can you tell us a little bit about Elastic Path and what made them bring you on?
Bryan House - 00:07:10:
So Elastic Path is a composable commerce software company. We help companies build commerce solutions by connecting best-for-me architecture so they can bring in sort of the commoditization of commerce technology and sort of all the point solutions, bring all those together very easily, very quickly, and cost-effectively to build the right commerce application for your business. And I've been Elastic Path for a few years now. I actually joined as a result of an acquisition, and Elastic Path did a few years ago of a company called Moulton. Moulton was an early-stage company that was in the headless, API-first commerce space. I was actually a small investor in it through a venture firm I was involved with and knew the CEO very well. I actually worked next to him for about six months when I was working out of the venture firm, and we developed a relationship and then eventually joined the firm alongside, initially to run product, and that has expanded into my role as chief experience officer.
Melissa Perri - 00:08:08:
So, you were telling me a little bit before we jumped on here that your role as a chief experience officer is actually really different than anything I've run into before. You don't just own product and UX design, but you also own a lot of the sales components and the account management pieces too. Is that right?
Bryan House - 00:08:23:
Yeah, that's right. So, I run customer success and through that we own all the renewal business and expansion into our existing accounts. And I'm also responsible for global services, so, for all implementation and onboarding. So essentially, I own the entire customer journey past the initial contract signature. And the reason for this is, you know, it's funny, I was talking to my friend who was the CEO before I joined. And at the time we used to talk to him about this sort of ghost in the machine, if you will, where we were really struggling to get product and engineering teams talking to customers, right? And closing the loop between sort of what you build in the factory, if you will, and what's happening out on the front lines. When I joined the company, I could see it firsthand, is the customer success team sort of protected their customers and we used to hire product managers who were experts in their field, so there wasn't a belief in the need to talk to customers. I came from previous role at a company Acquia, I ran account management, and so I deeply involved with customers there. And one of the things that really noticed was how little we talked about customers holistically in the business.
So, I changed the way we ran exec meetings, and how we talked about customers and sort of burning issues there, what's happening in the front lines? And I changed the product organization and had the opportunity with change in leadership with customer success to bring that in, right? And there's something that's a little bit unique in my experience because I've been in management roles, not every product leader has certainly done that. I was in a position to take over customer success and felt very comfortable with expansion and with renewals. But what I fundamentally, my belief that I've learned in a couple of spots now is your customers, particularly in recurring revenue businesses, only want to talk to the product team once they become customers. They want to understand, what's coming on the roadmap? How do they influence it? How do they influence the product user experience and design? Provide feedback and get what they need for their business. And so, we fundamentally shifted the whole R&D organization to be around that sort of customer focus. And the balance there is you still have to have a vision and a strategy. It's not about becoming a feature factory and letting customers design the product for you, but also giving them a loud voice inside our R&D organization. So, an example of this is every Tuesday we do a sort of an initiative review of all of our ongoing development initiatives. In that, we actually track the customers or prospects that are actually waiting on those capabilities that we're delivering for that. So, it brings it top of mind, customer success sits in that and said, hey, wait a minute, what about this? They have a launch in three weeks. We need this and make sure they go live, that kind of voice at the table, if you will.
Melissa Perri - 00:11:13:
So, when you implemented these changes and brought together the product teams and the sales teams, what did you observe in the way that both the teams were reacting, like their behavior and how they collaborated together?
Bryan House - 00:11:24:
There's a few things that jumped out that were pretty substantive changes. First, engineers and we're just having a squad architecture, squads always want to know that they're working on features that are actually going to get utilized. Nobody wants to work on something that doesn't deliver value. We're all familiar with the skeptical engineer, like, are you sure someone wants to use this? Really helped bridge that gap because it made the customers much more tangible. It got us out of the abstract into like, it's a particular company. It's Rebecca at this company. It's Steve at this company, right? And they became tangible. Secondly, we actually brought our customer success leadership to redo an R&D leadership offsite and so, bringing the voice of the customer into those sorts of discussions around sort of product development and sort of where we're going became critical and really became a very positive influence on the R&D team in terms of how they thought about what they were working on. I think from a customer's perspective, it was easy because now suddenly you had, hey, I'll bring the product manager for this set of services to our weekly call, right?
So, customers got all this benefit because that's the people they want to talk to anyway. You know, it helped us develop really powerful relationships. The way customer success works really well is if you have the ability to move to the other side of the table and you're a partner and by bringing the product manager for the important service, it really felt like you're developing and investing in that partnership because the customer is always like, oh, your product managers must be so busy because they are. And so why am I so special that I get to talk to the product manager? So, we've had great examples of this. You know, alternatively, what happens is product managers and engineers usually only get to talk to customers when there's something on fire, right? And there's a crisis, right? And everybody is on edge. And so, the fact that you're able to do this in a much more productive, positive environment really makes everybody feel great. So those have been the biggest pieces. The last piece is I'm a big believer in sort of the Amazon six-pager process as a way to work through ideas and strategy and bring great documentation of why we're doing the things that we do. And while being so much closer to our customers and to the sales pipeline, it enabled us to really tell stories about our strategy that were tied to business impact and outcomes that, you know, in tangible ways that sometimes aren't nearly as clear where you're taking educated guesses based on market size and addressable market, things like that.
Melissa Perri - 00:14:01:
Have you seen with this any challenges you think of bringing the teams together that you maybe didn't have in other organizations not structured like this?
Bryan House - 00:14:09:
You know, I look, I think you have people of all different skill sets and sort of different maturation points in their career. And so sometimes you walk into a buzzsaw, we have a big customer who the CTO joins weekly calls as they were going into launch and he caught one of our product managers not quite as prepared as he should have been and let him know it, right? That's one of those moments that usually happens once in your career. I think from a product manager perspective, there is downside risk and that you're more exposed, right? Usually, you like being insulated from that but you know, I think the flip side of that is from a customer success person, there's a fantastic ability of sharing the burden of that because oftentimes our people that are on our front lines in tech companies, they're talking to customers every day, they see a view of the world that few people behind the scenes actually get to see. And so, sharing that I think is actually enormously valuable and raises the organization's IQ when it comes to the importance of customer success and implementation and global services in general.
Melissa Perri - 00:15:12:
So, I can totally see some sales leader out there hearing this and going, I should own product too, right? We should put them together, like put it underneath me. What would you say, you already mentioned, like you have a background in sales, so it made it natural for you to be able to take this and it was easy to do that. In what situations would you say that it doesn't make sense to bring this person under one leader? Or I guess, where would you be wary and advising that?
Bryan House - 00:15:40:
Sure. I mean, I think the biggest pushback I've gotten in my career, and I made a big move when I was at Acquia, a CMS company. When I ran account management, I was accountable for expansion, but I didn't have authority over expansion because sales ran expansion. And so, my team was effectively driving leads to the sales team and they weren't very good at closing them because they were doing their day job. And so, I demanded authority and got it, careful what you wish for. What that meant is I had to redesign the entire sales organization because what I did is I quoted all the account managers and we took over all expansion. So, then sales became new logo acquisition and then expansion was on my team and I bring all this up because the feedback I got at the time and I still hear a lot. And I've heard recently was, oh, but your CS team doesn't know how to sell. You know, that's what we had salespeople. And I fundamentally reject that, like there's salespeople do amazing things and I'm a big believer in Dan Pink's sort of always, ABCs of selling, attuned buoyancy and clarity. And buoyancy being the hardest piece in any sort of new logo acquisition, new customer acquisition piece.
But I fundamentally believe in my heart that people buy based on relationships and that organization has the best relationships with our customers is in customer success. I built an account management organization that's sold and partnered with CS. There's a bunch of ways to structure that. It's software when there's a complicated deal to be done, they bring in sales management anyway. So, I think there's plenty of support network in there. So, I think that's the biggest problem and challenge I've experienced with this. From a product management perspective, I think there's a little bit of, a lot of product leaders like to be that separation from sales or from customers, right? Like there's an insulation and, I think what's fundamentally changed in that is the shift to subscription-based businesses, right? So, where you have to earn your seat at the table every single day, that is the fundamental change that really changed my thinking because I was a perpetual licensed business. Slay the elephant, you win the beast and celebrate. And then somebody collects, what we had one person doing support and maintenance revenue and a company that did like $500 million in revenue. You can't do that in a SaaS business.
Melissa Perri - 00:18:01:
That's a really an interesting one. And I know there's a big discussion too, I think, in SaaS businesses where we do talk about the chief product officer or the person who's leading product owning the P&L as well. And I do believe it's a thing where the whole executive team should technically own the P&L together. That's what makes sense to me. But a lot of times you do have that separation where it's like no sales owns in P&L and then the, we'll optimize it in ways where we oversell the roadmaps like you were talking about, or we promise everything to customers and those things don't go over super well because we can't build it. So, I see where you have a customer success underneath you kind of brings you closer to that P&L piece, especially on the retention side and the upsells and the cross sells and new revenue from existing users. But it also probably allows you to look at the end-to-end journey of the customer and strategically insert your account managers or your customer success team at rather along the way where they need them instead of like trying to work on somebody else's process. Do you do that a lot?
Bryan House - 00:19:04:
I think so. We had an account, we worked with a customer who, through COVID, they saw their business grow 10x. It was just explosion, they're in the collectibles business. And they were having problems of scale and their products were being shut down in stores because people there are riots in stores, so, all of that went online. And so, they had problems associated with that. And so, a little bit of taking a customer success mindset to this, like we're in this together, let us into the boat, really changed the fundamental dynamics in that relationship. It wasn't adversarial, why doesn't your product do this? Why doesn't it do that? Because it wasn't really about our product, it was about their application, which consisted of many products. And so, it was interesting in those dynamics, because by moving to their side of the table into we're going to solve this together, then we're in the position to demand, why is it vendor X here? Why isn't vendor Y here? That's where the source of the problem. The problem today is we need them here participating as well. And that worked out. It was their big anniversary year for them. It worked out fantastic for the customer. But it was a great example of if you're part of the solution rather than part of the problem. It's easy as a vendor to develop an adversarial relationship with your customers. They're struggling. They're under pressure from their superiors. They are senior leadership team. So much of this is about changing that dynamic and using the combination of product and customer success and services to really change that dynamic.
Melissa Perri - 00:20:38:
So, if you were to give advice to a chief product officer who found themselves with a remit of, let's put customer success under you, they've never run a customer success team or sales or anything before with that, what would your advice be? What should they look at?
Bryan House - 00:20:52:
Sure. I think the first thing is obviously you need a strong CS leader. What we hire for on the CS team is someone, there's two ways to measure CS. There's MPS and then there's expansion and really focus on that selling side of the equation, but who are great relationship builders and project managers, those things. Then that sales intuition is the third piece of it. Look for a leader who brings that and has a track record of hiring for that. Then I think it works very easily. Certainly, they've been my experience here and at AQUIA, that playbook. At AQUIA, I had to change the job description because in the job description it said, this is not a sales job. Then I gave everybody quota, I was like, this is actually a sales job now. But, you know, and then what it became about was demystifying, right? Everyone has their own sort of interpretation of what it means to be a salesperson and in fact, demystifying that and talking about really sales is just a job of influence and we have influence around our lives all the time, I think makes it seem less scary to individuals, right? People have, it's easy to come up with negative perceptions of salespeople and that's not really fair. Salespeople are here to help you and that's why you can join Customer Six Sales.
Melissa Perri - 00:22:07:
Since you're a sales team and your product team all under you close together, do you do anything with the product team to help them become more educated about sales and their processes and how they all work?
Bryan House - 00:22:16:
It's a good question. I think the number of our product managers are involved in the pre-sales process for new accounts. So, I think they see how that process goes, right? Because it's really, can you find a problem to solve? Do you solve it uniquely well? How do you communicate the value proposition? How do you demystify sort of the sort of complexity associated with that? So, they work very closely with our pre-sales engineering team in the solution design phase of working with customers. So that's the biggest area. You know, I think the other thing that happens, we're building a new service for subscriptions right now. And I have a great product manager there. And one of the things he's done is He's out pre-selling that service as we're building it into the base, right? So, he wants to talk to customers as much as he can. So, we took our six-pager, we made a customer-facing version of it to help them understand what we're building, and then he's out there talking about this all the time. So, in essence, he's playing a pre-sales role without perceived as selling in a negative way because he wants to make sure when his service launches, he's got 10 customers using it immediately.
Melissa Perri - 00:23:24:
So, is he gathering people to test it out, get the early adopters? He's basically going out there and trying to find those people, which you're right, is a sales role at that point.
Bryan House - 00:23:32:
Exactly. And every product manager has to do that when they build a new product they need to go. How do they recruit beta users and alpha users? How do they get early feedback in there? That's the same process that a salesperson is going through. And you get a lot of skeptical people who are a buyer, who are busy and don't really want to, what's in it for me? That's a classic sales question. So much of this a belief that we sell all the time in our jobs. And so, we should just accept that's a thing we do and that's part of what the company asks of us.
Melissa Perri - 00:24:04:
Everybody's good at the sales stuff too as a product manager. And I feel like I go through these similar conversations with people when they're trying to get different users to opt into user research. I'm like, make it sound like a sale. Make it something for them. Tell them that they're going to get access to these new cool tools and nobody else will. And they get to do feedback. And they're special. Sell it that way. And I found that that's incredibly hard. Though, for some product managers, I do that every day in my job, but a lot of people don't. What do you help product managers learn so that they get better at this? What skills do you think you need to make sure that you could do. You don't obviously have to do all the sales stuff, but you could do these pitches.
Bryan House - 00:24:45:
The biggest thing is honestly, I believe storytelling, right? And embracing the story and recognizing that you are the subject matter expert for the thing that you're building, right? And I think people things like they're maybe anxious or shy or we all sort of suffer from imposter syndrome. And so, the biggest thing that I try to remind particularly junior product managers is you know this better than anyone. And the customer knows their business better than you do, right? But you are a subject matter expert in this. Don't be afraid to sort of flex your muscle and explain to them. And that is valuable. They'll take the meeting because that value that you bring is the subject matter expert. You know, I started out in tech as a product marketing person and you know that felt like that was my superpower sort of developed in my earlier my career. It was the ability to be credible in front of a tech person and a business person and really focus on stories and what's in it for the customer really became the thing that helped me sort of get ahead in my career. That I feel like is the biggest thing. And we've been talking about that a lot lately, right? It's not, you know, one of the traps for a product manager is to fall in, is to believe that that's product marketing's job. It's not my job to sell the problem that we solve, right? I'm here to manage the engineers or whatever. Like, no, you're the person who owns this, falls in love with the problem that we're solving and you're delivering a solution for. Be the person who knows more about than anyone else in the organization.
Melissa Perri - 00:26:16:
So how do you get good at storytelling? What would you advise for people?
Bryan House - 00:26:20:
That's a good question. I've had a couple of interesting places in my career where I've got to practice. I think honestly, practice is the most important piece. Early in my career, I brewed beer professionally for a living. For a number of years, I worked at a place right across the street from Fenway Park called Boston Beer Works. In 80 days of the year, we had 37,000 people across the street who wanted to go out to a bar before or after the game and who all wanted to drink beer. It turns out that we didn't have any of the beers that they wanted to drink. We didn't have Bud Light or Coors Light. Every day was sort of evangelizing. How do you get someone's attention when they're distracted and all excited? Tell the story of your beer. And honestly, I use that constantly. Can't tell you how many beer dinners I've hosted and conferences I've spoken at. And that was a great training ground. I use the skills every day in my job. And then the second experience I had that was really interesting was I was at a company that got acquired by EMC.
I lived like 10 minutes from EMC World headquarters in where their executive briefing center is. And no one else was in the area for this acquired company. They became the de facto presentation guy when they needed to talk about our product line at the executive briefing center. So, I used to keep a suit in my cube and say, we need you today at 2 o'clock. Talk about something. Oftentimes, I was talking about products I wasn't even responsible for. And it became this interesting game of presentation karaoke. I knew the general story, and I could figure out the details pretty quickly. But it was, again, remembering I know way more than the people in the room. The people in the room got flown in on a private jet, went to the Red Sox and a fancy steak dinner. They're sitting in the executive briefing center because they spend a lot of money with EMC. So, my goal was they're all at the time were on their Blackberries, they were spinning it with their thumb. And it was like, they are going to remember this presentation. They may not remember what the product was, but they're going to remember me. So, it was banging on the desk and jumping up and down and all sorts of things just to get them out of their Blackberries, to be honest. And those are both unique experiences where you got to practice in sort of a low downside risk environment, which was great. And so, I talk to people all the time, find ways to do that. It used to be like little head gatherings, meetups, places like that you can get out and tell your story, something that you know uniquely well, join a book club, whatever it might be, but get out and do public speaking because that's such an important skill as a product person in any role where you're a subject matter expert, your ability to tell that story and to be credible and to break attention deficit curve if you will.
Melissa Perri - 00:29:00:
Yeah, I can definitely see that. I'm doing a lot of public speaking here. One good piece of advice I got right before my first talk I ever did at Lean UX NYC, is somebody told me, and this reminded me of what you were just saying, but like, speak as if you're reading book to children, like a children's book. And they said that that energy is gonna come off and it's gonna be really good on stage. And I felt like such an idiot when I was doing it. But I did, I was so overly dramatic. I had 8,000 cats in my presentations, which everybody started calling me the cat lady about afterwards. But I said, at least if I screw this up, they'll laugh. And they won't remember when I screwed up or anything. And they'll just remember that it was funny. And I tried to make it as funny and as engaging as possible. And that's what I kept doing just with all the memes and stuff. So, I think there's really something to that engagement of trying to get them out of there. So, I love that you said that.
Bryan House - 00:29:52:
There was a brand presentation, I ran a brand project years ago, and it was about that sort of like the dip in the curve typical presentation. And so, I think about that all the time and how do I break it up and use humor and pictures of raccoons and all sorts of things to just sort of catch people's break their attention dynamic, if you will.
Melissa Perri - 00:30:11:
I think that's a really good tip. So, if you're thinking about product managers giving presentations and having to tell stories, we talked a lot about going to the customer and trying to convince them and being able to sell it that way. Another big part for them is also being able to tell that story internally. And that's something that I hear from executives all the time. Like I have no idea what people were building. I don't understand like what I'm getting from this. And it's because they're not doing a great job explaining that story, I guess, of what they're actually building and why. What kind of tips would you give for product managers, especially when they're presenting to executives? Like what should they remember?
Bryan House - 00:30:47: I think this is a big reason why over the years of my career, I've adopted the six-pager, the memo process, if you will, because it forces a rigor of thinking in plenty of product managers, like, why do I have to write a book report? And I was like, A, you get artifact, but B, it forces you to go through the process of telling the story and doing it in an incredible way and getting feedback on that. It's an iterative process by design. So, I think there's that, you know, the other advice that we give is I know you're a big believer in this is fall in love with the problems that you're solving and bring that passion for that problem to the presentation. Demonstrate to your audience that you care about this as, you know, whatever that thing is, right? And I think the best product managers that I've seen from a storytelling perspective is to bring an enthusiasm and like a passion for what they're conveying, right? And so, I think that's actually easier in an anonymous environment than it is with your colleagues, right? Cause you know, you know, all these people, you spend all your time with them, right? Like you're much more nervous in that environment. Historically, I've been a guy who loves to get pushed into the deep end of all sorts of stories of being with friends as an altar boy and being like, hey, do a reading. Like, yeah, sure. I'll do that. And my friends were like, oh my God, I can't read public. So, like those kinds of things are, I gravitate to them and I sort of hang out and hire people that operate it with sort of without a safety net, if you will.
Melissa Perri - 00:32:19:
Yeah, I love a stage, but I'm actually like a massive introvert, which I think is funny, but I run into people who are like, I'm an introvert. I don't like to do the public speaking and like I'm a massive introvert. I just like a stage because it reminds me of drama club, like, when you go up there, you put a mask on and you tell the story as if you're a character and then you're trying to relate to the audience. I think that's a piece too that a lot of people don't get about public speaking or even just presenting within companies, right? Who is your audience? Like who are you actually talking to there? So, when you first started out with this storytelling, it sounds like you had to go against many different audiences, right? Like you're EMC people flying in, trying to go to the Red Sox game and hearing these pitches, not really wanting to hear them. You've got your executives, you've been a VC as well. How do you figure out what people care about? Right? Like how do you put yourself in that mindset before that presentation or before that speech?
Bryan Perri - 00:33:13:
I don't know if I have a good answer for that question. I haven't really thought about it. For me, it's I, like you, I like a stage. I'm always warned people don't give me the mic because I won't give it back kind of scenario. And it's not because I'm particularly extroverted it's just, I have a comfort level with doing it. And I guess there's a freedom and a willingness to go up there and entertain. I presented at a million sales kickoffs. Sales kickoffs are always a hard environment. A, you know everybody, and B, everyone's hungover and tired or like last year, kickoff, I'm making them do jumping jacks and yoga because it's 9 a.m. Slot. I'm like, sorry, right? So, I know what I'm up against so I can plan accordingly. But I'm always looking for ways to disrupt their sort of status quo mindset, if you will.
Melissa Perri - 00:34:07:
And when you're like being in the executive team, obviously you have to be good at presenting back to boards and doing these updates and stuff. What have you found as the best way to tell stories to the boards or to your leadership team and how you talk that way? What types of things do they care about? What should you focus on?
Bryan House - 00:34:25:
One of the things, honestly, and this is where I think the value of having these customer-facing teams under me is so important is you can pepper it with anecdotes, right? So, you make it real, intangible. And I think that when you get out of the abstract and the theoretical into things that the kind of details that they're seeking for anyway. When you're talking to the board, they want to know what your customers care about. Why do they care about us? It brings all of this home to the value that they're trying to create in their investment company. So, I've always been actually thrived on that anecdotal peppering of storytelling within those sorts of executive environments and having a handle on that information is so important. And so, this is what I think I encourage my product teams to do is part of the opportunity they have to get in front of customers. You're creating a bank, a whip, on which you can draw constantly of anecdotes and stories from the front lines that no one else has, right? And that stuff is what captures people's attention. And so, those are the kinds of things to remember. I think that's at the heart of it. Then obviously, you've got to know your material, right? Command the room and command your material are the other two obvious ones.
Melissa Perri - 00:35:40:
So, I like the idea of peppering in those anecdotes. And I do find that anytime I've worked with executive teams or presented to a board or been on a board, I love when people tell stories about the customers. It's like, tell me about how they used this and it changed their lives. Like, tell me about when somebody got frustrated and it wasn't working. And I find that even though as executives and as board members, you really care about the numbers, the more you put those anecdotes in there about like a real person, the more they go, oh, okay, now I understand like what's coming from, right? They like to light up a little bit and it provides the context. Otherwise, you're just looking on a spreadsheet and managing towards numbers. That's just what they do all day. So, if you disrupt it, like you were talking about, pepper it in with some cool facts and some good good anecdotes. I really like that. I think that brings a nice color to it.
Bryan House - 00:36:29:
In some ways, it's humanizing the experience, right? So much of what we do in tech can be fall into the trap of being sort of rote and repetitive. And so, I don't think anybody does this, so that way they can go to another product planning meeting or go participate in another board meeting. I do it because I want to help people be successful at what they're trying to do, right? I'm an enabler. And so, embracing that and then sort of banking all the ways that that really does help people, that's where my reward structure is. And then I use that in storytelling anyway.
Melissa Perri - 00:37:03:
Definitely good things for people to learn. Well, thank you so much, Bryan, for being on the podcast with us. If people wanna learn more about you and your work and even Elastic Path, where can they go?
Bryan House - 00:37:13:
Sure, best place to go is my LinkedIn profile. My name is Bhouse on LinkedIn. So, you can check me out there. And I post, I write a ton of articles. So, I post them all my LinkedIn profile. That's my best place.
Melissa Perri - 00:37:23:
Great. And if any of you want those links, you will find them in the show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com and we will link to everything for Bryan there. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss one. We're out every Wednesday with a new episode. And if you have any questions for us as well to answer on our Dear Melissa segment, please go to the same website, productthinkingpodcast.com, and let us know what those questions are. We'll see you next time.