Episode 151: Reflections and Revelations: Best of 2023
In this special episode of Product Thinking, host Melissa Perri takes a look back at what we have learned from some of our top guests across product management, operations, and leadership.
You’ll hear them talk about:
Blake Samic - Initially skeptical about the relevance of product operations at Stripe, based on his experience at Uber, Blake's perspective changed upon deeper engagement with the company. He recognized numerous parallels in the challenges both companies faced, especially in scaling tech operations. Both were rapidly expanding, not just geographically, but in their product offerings and market strategies. Also, both companies shared a deep ambition in product engineering, with a relentless focus on shipping high-quality products. Stripe, in particular, set an exceptionally high bar for quality.
Hubert Palan - The evolution of product management is on the horizon, with a change towards greater standardization similar to practices seen in sales, customer success, and engineering. Historically, product teams have enjoyed a degree of autonomy, embracing individualized methods and tools, which fostered innovation but often led to inconsistencies and challenges in decision-making and portfolio management at a larger scale. The emergence of a product operations function signals a change in this landscape and the need for a more uniform approach to product management. Such standardization is crucial for enhancing predictability and effective leadership within the product organization, ensuring a balance between innovative autonomy and strategic alignment.
Jason Fried - Jason's approach to project management prioritizes flexibility and efficiency, as shown by the six-week work cycle. By limiting any task or feature to a maximum of six weeks for completion, Jason and his team relieve the stress and rigidity that comes from long-term planning, such as two-year roadmaps. This timeframe is not only manageable but also adaptable, allowing us to respond to changes and prioritize different tasks without being overly committed to pre-set plans.
Glen Stoffel and Caryn Fried - As product managers evolve towards CPO roles, a critical skill often overlooked for success is facilitation. While strong product professionals typically excel in vision and strategy, understanding the complex connections between different aspects of the customer and employee experience, they risk falling into the trap of control rather than collaboration.
Stephanie Leue - Recognizing the need for a shift towards a product-led approach, Stephanie decided to avoid past mistakes by ensuring data-driven and customer-feedback-oriented product releases and deprecations. Her strategy focused on four pivotal areas: people, purpose, process, and performance. She highlights to her teams that performance is a result of excellence in the first three areas.
Tom Eisenmann - Tom's book identifies six common failure patterns that startups encounter, divided into early and late stages. Early-stage challenges, occurring before a startup achieves product-market fit, include False Starts, Bad Bedfellows, and False Positives. In the later stage, post-product market fit, startups face Speed Trap, Help Wanted, and Cascading Miracles.
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Melissa Perri - 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome to another, and the last of 2023, episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. What a year 2023 has been. It does not feel like Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the takeover of open AI happened in the same year, but it did. We got Chat GPT this year. It has been wild. What a year in tech. We have been reflecting on the great insights and all the happenings of tech and all the stories we've heard from amazing product leaders here at the Product Thinking Podcast. And today we wanted to pull together a look back at some of our most memorable segments for you in this best of episode. We're going to first kick it off with Blake Samic, the Head of Product Operations at OpenAI, who spoke all about setting up product operations during his time at Uber and Stripe. Denise and I featured Blake in our new book, Product Operations, because he's an expert at scaling this new discipline.
Blake Samic - 00:01:33: When Stripe first called me, my initial mind was like, I don't know if product ops makes sense there. It's not exactly how I've been thinking about it in the Uber days. But then as I got to talking with them and just understanding where they were, how they were set up and how they brought products to market, how they dealt with feedback, I was like, oh, actually, there are a lot of similarities to the problems that they're seeing as it relates to just scaling tech companies types of problems. I think it just naturally puts pressure on the connection between your product teams and your kind of more go to market or compliance teams as you're shipping more things in parallel you're hiring more employees. You have more of this feedback coming back through weird channels that no one is kind of like streamlining and standardizing and so that all just sounded very similar. And the company was expanding globally. They didn't have presence in every city like Uber did, but certainly in many different countries, many HQs and different. regions and things like that. Another similarity I'd say is that both companies super ambitious, like product engineering. They want to ship a high quality product Stripe in particular, I think just like has a huge high quality bar. So a lot of similarities. And I think there are many similarities to how I thought about setting up product ops and some differences.
Melissa Perri- 00:02:47: Keeping with our Product Operations theme, our next highlight is my conversation with Hubert Palan, the founder and CEO of Productboard, where we delved into the standardization of product management and how the product operations function creates consistency, which is vital to our success.
Hubert Palan - 00:03:03: We are going to see much more standardization of the product management process, especially at large teams and companies. You know, if you look at sales, if you look at customer success, if you look at engineering, there's like very defined and well understood methodologies that, you know, everybody follows. Your sales team, every sales rep has the same set of pipeline stages to push the opportunities through and they need to follow the same methodology for the head of sales to have a reliable forecast. If you look at engineering and you want to measure, you know, whatever backlog, you know, burn down charts, velocity and so on, like you need to have consistency in how people define the stories and the story points again. And we've been somehow in this world where the product managers and the product teams historically have lived in this like, don't dictate the way you're working and let everybody use their own tools and kind of don't interfere with the genie and innovation, Bottle of Magic that can happen in the team. And if you look at it from the perspective of a Head of Product who has 20, 50, 100, you know, product teams at large companies, it's just a complete craziness because there's no consistency in how the prioritization decisions are made. How to look at the portfolio of, you have these teams that you're investing, it's an investment portfolio and how do you decide what efforts to put where? You have no visibility, you have no consistency and so on. And so we're seeing that. The Rise of Product Operations function, right? Does the rise of the need for more rigorous approach to product management as a process. And that doesn't mean that the individual product teams like don't, you know, product managers, right? Can't have their own criteria, but there needs to be like a centralized standardized thing and so I do believe that we will see more of that because of the need for predictability and kind of leadership of the product organization as a whole.
Melissa Perri- 00:04:59: Product management can happen in many different ways at all these different companies and Jason Fried, the founder and CEO of 37signals, has been one of the pioneers in speaking about how they do product management. On his episode, he outlined how they ensure that product teams remain fresh and relevant without getting stuck in the details.
Jason Fried - 00:05:18: We work on what we call six-week cycles. So we've invented this system called basecamp.com/shapeup. We won't work on anything that takes longer than six weeks. A whole product might be a series of six-week cycles, but no feature will take more than six weeks. So we don't have to be so precious about what we choose to do because we're going to be able to pick another thing to do in six weeks. If you plan so far in advance, like we're going to lay out the roadmap for the next two years, just putting this huge amount of stress on yourself and indecision and you're locking yourself in to not being able to change, I'm not a big fan of that. So we're not really precious about the things we choose to do. If we get to it now, great. If we get to it in October, great. Get to it until next February, fine, whatever. We'll get to it eventually when we feel like it's the right thing to do.
Melissa Perri- - 00:05:56: I feel like that six weeks just made a bunch of scrum people panic.
Jason Fried - 00:06:00: Don't care. This is the key. So the scrum, like it's like two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, as long as it takes, but two weeks at a time. Now, six weeks is the most anything can take for us. And we only have two people working on it. One programmer, one designer. Two people have six weeks max. and most of the time it's like a week or two or three. But these are complete ideas and they need to ship at the end of that. This idea that you keep working in two week sprints forever like, what's the point of that? I don't get it.
Melissa Perri - 00:06:28: In product management, we talk repeatedly about the importance of soft skills, which Glen Stoffel and Caryn Fried from Camp 4 call tough skills. They came on the show together to discuss exactly what these skills are and how product managers can hone them.
Glen Stoffel - 00:06:42: Because I think within there is a really interesting place to explore. And as you're growing in from product manager towards the CPO, say, if I were to advise companies around the planet, the one skill they're probably not investing in that they should be, it's facilitation. And oftentimes, strong product people have great visions. Really strong opinions. They can see where the dots connect. They can have a great vision for how that customer experience is gonna work, how that employee experience is gonna work. But you can get caught in a trap of control versus collaboration.
Caryn Fried - 00:07:21: Even when attacked in a meeting, you would tip your head and you would feel something for them because you understand where they're coming from. You don't agree with their behavior, but you do understand where they're coming from and that change is difficult. That this is scary. I wouldn't necessarily have a therapy session with them right then and there. But when you're coming from an empathetic place, your reaction and your mode, I think, changes a lot.
Melissa Perri - 00:07:45: Becoming a chief product officer can be a roller coaster of a ride. Stephanie Leue’s episode was great to understand the fundamentals of becoming a CPO, and it also highlighted the necessity of prioritizing people, process, purpose, and performance.
Stephanie Leue - 00:08:00: It was March. It was my first day. And what we did is we released a new platform. So we had customers on two different platforms. We merged them, it was a big, massive project. We released it the day I joined, and then we went down for two days. So that was my kickstart with Doodle, actually. I got promoted to CPO in October. I was convinced that we have to transition that whole organization into a product-led organization and that we are not allowed at all to repeat the mistakes from the past but that as of this point, we only release or deprecate things once we have data and once we have customer feedback and once we've done discovery. So I focused on four key areas, which helped me to also structure the 10,000 things ahead of me. I focused on people, purpose, process, and performance. And that's how I evaluated the organization. So I looked on the purpose side. Has this organization a vision and a strategy? Does everyone know why they are working on certain things and how they help us to achieve success? Well, the answer back then was no. Process. If I asked five different people, will they be able to explain to me how we build products at Doodle? And is it a coherent story? I can tell you it wasn't.
Melissa Perri - 00:09:20: People.
Stephanie Leue - 00:09:21: Do they have clarity? Do we have the right rules? Do the people have a clear understanding of their responsibilities? Do they collaborate well? Obviously, that was like potentially the best area of all of the four areas, but also there was room for improvement. And I always tell my teams that only if these three things are in place and if I have a proper setup for my teams, then I can also expect performance. Performance always comes last. I discussed with everyone, got their feedback, evaluated it and then I created a Kanban board for myself with like all the actions I think we have to take in order to make progress.
Melissa Perri - 00:10:00: Last but not least, we had Thomas Eisenman on our show to talk all about how Startups fail so that you can avoid that.
Thomas Eisenman - 00:10:08: There's three early stage failure patterns in the book and three late stage by early stage, I mean essentially pre-product market fit. And late stage, you've got product market fit, we hope, and you're scaling. You may be scaling without product market fit, and that's actually one of the failure patterns. A lot of Startups fall into one of these six patterns. Some have the misfortune of actually hitting more than one of them. That's a surefire prescription for getting into trouble. The early stage patterns are false start, bad bedfellows, and false positives.
Melissa Perri - 00:10:44: Then there's a whole failure that comes from scaling and trying to actually grow. Yeah.
Thomas Eisenman - 00:10:49: Yeah. And a lot of PM's will be in an organization that will sound suspiciously similar to what I'm about to talk about. three patterns here are speed trap that's the number one killer of late stage startup. The second one is help wanted and then the last pattern is cascading miracles, where somebody is doing something audaciously big and bold. Bold, think Tesla, think SpaceX. So sometimes these things work, but often with a cascading miracle, so many things have to happen correctly and if any one of them goes wrong, you need all the things to go right and it's a miracle if they all go right.
Melissa Perri - 00:11:29: And there we have it, a recap of some of our top pieces of wisdom from top product leaders. We hope you enjoyed this year of the Product Thinking Podcast, and we cannot wait to see you in 2024. Remember to like and subscribe to our podcast so that you never miss an episode on Wednesday and also reach out to me and let me know what questions you have for our Melissa segment. We would love to hear from you in the new year. Happy New Year, and we'll see you next year.