Episode 116: Beyond the Basics: Non-Traditional Approaches to Product Management and Leadership with Yasi Baiani

Beyond the Basics: Non-Traditional Approaches to Product Management and Leadership with Yasi Baiani

There is nothing more valuable for the product team than the voice of the customer and really understanding what problem you are solving. In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa Perri talks with Yasi Baiani, Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing at Cleo. They explore product management in some non-traditional senses, as well as how to set up a winning structure for your product teams and what good product leadership looks like.

Yasi Baiani is a highly accomplished executive in product and strategy, startup advising, and investing, boasting a proven track record of delivering state-of-the-art products that are widely adopted by millions of people and defining new categories and markets. Under her expert leadership and strategic guidance, Cleo successfully launched two new product lines, Teens and Eldercare, which unlocked a market opportunity worth over $270 billion.

In addition to her role at Cleo, Yasi is a Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Raya Capital, where she advises founders and CEOs on business and product strategy and invests in technology and health tech companies. Furthermore, Yasi is an investor through FlyBridge HBS Alumni Fund and a Global Leadership Advisor at How Women Lead. Her impressive achievements have earned her recognition as one of The 27 Most Impressive Harvard MBAs by Business Insider, and she has been acknowledged three times as a LinkedIn Top Voice in technology and digital health.

You’ll hear Melissa and Yasi talk about:

To successfully launch a digital product, the product team and leader must collaborate closely with all other teams. The focus should be on effectively bringing the product and its user experience to the market. Achieving a remarkable digital solution requires establishing excellent touchpoints with all stakeholders. 

It's important to ensure that the internal structure of the organization doesn't affect the external experience, which should be seamless for the end user. The functions must operate so seamlessly that the end experience is solid and effortless for the ultimate user.

The COPA model is an excellent framework that emphasizes the importance of complementary skills among team members. The acronym COPA stands for Complementary Skills, Ownership of OKRs, Process, and Alignment of the product and engineering team structure.

If the product team consistently falls behind and struggles with delivering on the roadmap, it could indicate issues with the engineering team's performance, weaknesses in the R&D processes, or a lack of clarity regarding your objectives and how to achieve them. 

This can be identified through three key indicators: product quality is not there, there is a lot of confusion within the team about who does what, and falling behind in delivery. If you notice any of these signs, you should investigate the root causes and take steps to address them in order to improve the overall performance of the product team.

The essence of product management lies in the art of effective influence and collaboration throughout the company. It's a challenging role that demands a deep understanding of the business and the ability to shape its direction. To be successful, you must back up your vision with relevant data and information and be willing to partner with other teams to understand their constraints and leverage their strengths.

There are four components to make a product strategy successful. First of all, you have to involve multiple functions. Secondly, be super customer obsessed. The third piece is the competitive advantage of the company itself. The last piece is stakeholder interviews to understand how everyone sees the growth of the company and their vision and align them.

Teamwork is essential to developing exceptional products, and every team member must perform their job effectively to create a winning product that resonates with the end-users.

An excellent product leader prioritizes the customer above all else. They immerse themselves and their team in the customer's voice through frequent touchpoints to build a customer-obsessed team. Understanding the customer's needs is key to effective problem-solving and creativity. Additionally, a strong product leader is process-oriented, values data and analytics, and possesses the power of influence.

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Resources:

Yasi Baiani on LinkedIn | Twitter

Cleo | Raya Capital | How Women Lead

Transcript:

Melissa Perri - 00:00:01: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today we’re going to talk about product management in some non-traditional senses. So not pure SaaS. We’re going to talk about physical products and products and services and all those complicated things. We’re also going to talk about how to structure teams well and what good product leadership looks like. And I’m joined by Yasi Baiani, who is the senior vice president of product and marketing Cleo. So welcome Yasi.

Yasi Baiani - 00:00:26: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Melissa Perri - 00:00:28: It’s great to have you here. So, can you tell us a little bit about your career as a product leader? You’ve worked at some really amazing companies, had a great journey over the past decade. How did you get into product management? And what are some of the things that you’ve done so far?

Yasi Baiani - 00:00:43: Yeah, absolutely. So, I kind of think of myself as a product and strategy leader, and how I stumble upon product was non-traditional. I think similar to maybe many different people. They all come from different backgrounds. I’ve been kind of leading different products and product teams in companies like Teladoc, Livongo, Fitbit, Athenahealth, and most recently at Cleo, which has been really fun. And where it all started has been different. I became into product as an entrepreneur myself, so I started a company while I was at business school at Harvard, which was the company that basically connected people for sports and sports activities so they can find local activities or partners nearby. And that, kind of, was my first entry to the product and how you build and craft something for the end users, basically from nothing, how that discovery works, how you go out there and talk and realize what to build and when.

Eventually we decided to wrap up active Pepper, after a certain amount of growth, we still had challenges to grow it in every location we wanted to launch. I kind of reflected back on that experience, and as a CEO founder, you wear a lot of different hats. And what I found, like, when I reflected back on that, I’m like, what did I enjoy the most? Like, sales process, partnerships, hiring and building an engineering team and product team, crafting a product itself. And really, a lot of the, kind of, R&D part of my role kind of stood out to me and really understanding and doing discovery around what people want. How do you find that product market fit? How do you scale a product that was really resonated with me versus some of the kind of partnership and sales type of activities of the CEO and founder role. And that’s how I kind of found my way into product and particularly health tech product. And from there, I never looked back. I love what I’m doing. A lot of it is kind of matching my personality and my skills. And I have had really fun building products that have been used by millions of people. So it’s been a really awesome journey.

Melissa Perri - 00:02:53: What I really love about your career and what you’ve done as a product leader too, is that you have not worked primarily in SaaS. Like, you’ve jumped around to a bunch of different things. And on this podcast we get asked a lot about unique situations where you’ve got products that are physical products, like how do we manage both software and hardware in the same company or things with services or not just pure SaaS. So can you tell us a little bit about how your journey as a product leader has been different than those of typical SaaS product leaders?

Yasi Baiani - 00:03:24: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that kind of stood out in my career when I get gravitated towards companies is the mission. So a lot of the companies I’ve joined have been really mission oriented. And with that a lot of times it comes that it has something beyond just a digital solution that they’re offering. Most of the times these companies have service component would it be the clinical teams and doctors or kind of experts and specialists? And also in terms of Fitbit has been component of hardware and software. So always in my role as a product leader, I’ve been partnering up with the rest of the organization. You always do that. Even in the SaaS company you’ll do that. But I think in a company that you have digital solution in addition to something else, it’s even more important because a lot of times we think of our role in those types of companies as basically chief experience officer.

You’re not only laying out the strategy and the product, but you’re also laying out the end-to-end experience all the people and constituencies that you’re touching. For instance, when you’re building a product for a company that has service component, not only your end user are your clients and who buy your product, you also have people who are end users and using the product. For instance, in terms of Teladoc, we had members who are using our product, we had clinical people and doctors who provide the services, and we have internal people who are enabling those things. So all of those are our constituencies and we have to think about all of those people experiences and touch points. It’s very similar at Cleo. We have our guides and experts who are delivering services to our members. We have our members who are the end users and we have amazing clients like Salesforce, Pepsi and the rest of the amazing companies like Red Bull that they buy our product. So that’s kind of like how we think about that. It’s like an end-to-end experience. And as a result, the product team and the product leader have to work exceptionally closely with operations team, with a clinical team, with, of course, engineering, we always work super closely.

But also in terms of Fitbit, for instance, working really closely with the hardware engineering team not only the software experience team, but only hardware engineering team, and really think about how do you bring those products and experiences to the market. So the touch points are broader, the surfaces are broader, and in order for you to deliver an amazing digital solution, you have to make sure that you have those really awesome kind of rest of the touch points. So a lot of times myself and my team very much think about those experiences. We influence them, we’ll shape them to make sure that, for instance, not only when member come to our digital solution at Cleo and use our product, they have a great experience, we collect the right data from them so we can better serve them and surface the services we offer. But also how do our guides approach them, how do they work with the members, how do we have data float from our internal tools and what our guides are using, with what the members will see and what member will receive. So that’s kind of the holistic experience, which is different, but it’s also more challenging. It’s not just a digital solution that you’re looking at. It’s basically the whole business that you’re impacting as a product team. 

Melissa Perri - 00:06:39: So as a product leader in those types of companies too, a lot of people ask me about structure and I’m curious, both at the team level, but also at the executive level, when you have these different components, are they overseen by one person to bring the whole experience together? Do you have multiple stakeholders? How do you typically set that up? 

Yasi Baiani - 00:06:59: Yeah, that’s a great question. And different companies do that differently. So I think sometimes the chief product officer looking overseeing multiple of these function to make sure they all come together in a right way. So it’s like, it’s still a very cohesive experience. We also seen it like in some companies, they have COOs looking at both operation and product. So that’s another way to kind of set it up. There are companies that kind of set them up differently. You have the kind of chief product officer on one side and you have the COO or the chief clinical officer on the other side. And they kind of work closely. So each of those kind of structure could work and it kind of trickled down. Depending on how you structure it, it will be different.

What’s really important is to make sure either way, as Amazon also famously talk about, that you don’t want your internal structures show up on the external experience. So your end user should not know how you’re internally structure and work. At the end of the day, these functions have to work so closely and so seamlessly that the end experience is very seamless and a solid experience for the ultimate users. So kind of in terms of how do we think about structure, so a little bit depends also what talent you have in place, what kind of teams you have how you wanted to kind of structure that. But the way I personally like to think about the structure of the team and that’s relevant both for product and design and other kind of functions that I lead right now. At this point I run a multidisciplinary team and also it’s valid for how you organizationally structure the teams.

I like to kind of think about this as like a COPA framework which is basically complementary skills among the team members we have, would it be within the product or with their counterparts on the other side, would it be the hardware team or the operations team to make sure they have complementary experiences while everyone is still strong within their own area. So C stand for complementary skills, ownership of the OKRs. I like to structure the product team such that they can own the OKRs. So it’s a lot more clear what initiatives they pick so that they can actually impact the kind of areas that they want to impact rather than every time you have to decide about the initiative specifically that empowers the team more. The P in COPA stands for Process. I like to think of it’s not just about the structure of the team but how do you structure your processes around the team and or structure your teams around your processes so that you actually have an effective product and development process that’s valid for partnership between product and engineering. It’s valid around the processes within the product team but also it’s important around like what are the processes and touch points and communication between product team and the rest of the organization. And as you have this product experience more broadly because it’s a whole not only digital component but also services component, those processes and touch points become so much more important to make sure everyone is moving in the right direction and really hand in hand. And then the last piece is the alignment, alignment of the product team and engineering team structure is really important because when you think about if you have scrum team or if you have different types of structures, how do you make sure you structure your team as independent as possible? I know some organizations have shared engineering resources for instance, that’s one model. But I’m personally much rather to partner up with the head of engineering and structure our teams in a more independent Scrums again with the clear OKRs they own and they can impact and really allow them to move fast when you have shared resources.

I’ve always seen it gets really complicated in terms of when someone moved from one project to another project, who owns what, who needs to be experts in what area. It just makes things so much more complicated both from product and engineering perspective. So I’m personally more fan of independent teams but they can run faster and more in an empowered way.

Melissa Perri - 00:11:01: I like this COPA framework. I think that’s a really neat way to think of it. So, you mentioned before too, when you don’t organize correctly, you could see or you don’t work together, let’s put it that way. You could see the internal organization, the outside of the product for some of the companies and people listening to this. What are signs that your structure is impacting  the way that people are doing your product? Like, what should they look out for and go. I am observing these things. Maybe it’s actually an internal structure that’s not aligned correctly.

Yasi Baiani - 00:11:36: Yeah, 100%. There are multiple signs. One is product shipping with low quality. If you have a lot of bugs and issues or you are getting into the kind of launch time and you realize, we missed this thing, or this part of the group didn’t do what we needed to. For instance, if you’re launching a feature that has dependency on operations, an operation cannot deliver at that time, either someone didn’t communicate with them or didn’t realize that if you have this AHA moment that things have to stop because something went wrong, you need to look and really identify what was the root cause of it. And a lot of it is like the COPA framework. The process might be the problem or the structure might be the problem. So you really want to kind of diagnose and identify and fix that. But that’s one area that you’ll see that a lot of times is when you see people finger pointing and it’s not clear who owns what. So your structure and your accountability and your RACI are not clear for the team. So they think someone else own it, they think that another one owns it. So it’s not clear who’s owning what and who’s the decision maker and who’s the responsible and accountable person. So getting that RACI and accountability right is so key. But if you see a lot of confusion around who needs to drive what, it’s a moment to pause and say, okay, is our structure not correct? Is our OKRs are not clear, our processes are not clear. So that’s another area.

Another piece is like really slow development. If you have a lot of challenges shipping things and you’re constantly falling behind as an R&D team to deliver, it’s most likely some version of process and structure issues that you have. So really looking into that. And I always say a lot of CEOs or founders ask me, I wanted to hire the best head of product. How do I do that? How do I search for that? How do I always hire the best product managers? I always encourage them and give them all the clues on how to do that. But what’s also important, product has so much dependency to other functions to do their area well otherwise. And that is particularly true with engineering. In an organization that you have services and hardware and other components of the product experience they have so much more dependency to all those functions. So it’s not only enough to invest in product team or hire the best product people because if they’re not combined with the best engineering team and best processes, you still have the same problems. You won’t have the velocity you need. So going back to your question, if I see that product team is always falling behind and they have issues with delivery or always behind in their roadmap, there’s some version of either engineering team is not highly performing or R&D processes are not strong and solid or our structure of the teams. And again, like RACI and those clarity around Okrs and who does what and how do we achieve those goals are contributing to that. So like three signs, product quality is not there. The second is a lot of confusion within the team who does what and the third piece is really falling behind in delivery.

Melissa Perri - 00:14:32: So clear. And I think you were getting into one of the questions I had next, too, which is like you’re an outstanding product leader. Let’s say somebody wants to bring you onto their team. You mentioned I’m looking for quality of the other teams as well. What are you also looking for in a leadership level? I know you mentioned that many companies can structure services and products and the ownership of that by a leader in many different ways. But what have you seen work best that’s going to even if it’s not just one structure, what are the qualities that make each one of these structures actually work better in those organizations?

Yasi Baiani - 00:15:08: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s a bit different in different stage of your career, what you’re looking for and the type of impact you can have. Like for instance, at this point of my career as an executive, I look into how product focused the organization is, how R&D focused the organization is, how much they’re willing to invest in the R&D, even if there might be some other components like services, that is critical part of the offering. So that’s definitely something that’s top of mind. What’s the role of the head of product and head of product? We all know it could be director level, it could be CPO level. But who’s the driver and decision maker for the product? What’s their role and where do they sit? What seats they have at the table? For instance, are they part of the executive team? Are they not part of the executive team? That also tells me how much impact you can have and how much as an organization, you value product. So that’s another thing to think about. The other thing is the structure of the engineering team and or operations team. Again, sometimes engineering team report to the CPO, sometimes product reports into the CTO.

So thinking about some of these structure, it tells you something about the view of the organization and how they build product, a lot of them. If their product is super technical, you may put the product team under CTO. If there are other components of experience and strategy, you put the rest of maybe teams under CPO. So again, looking at those structures, it will be telling to you. Also at this point in my career, given that I work very closely with CEOs and generally report to the CEOs, I look at the CEO’s mindset. What kind of a CEO is this person is like a clinically driven CEO? Is it a technology driven CEO is like a very much sales and marketing and commercial driven CEO? And that will also tell you how much the CEO will be involved in the product decision and shaping that with you or they won’t. And then depending on what type of a product leader you are, that kind of impacts how you make your decision if this is the right fit for you or not.

At a kind of director level or like early VP level career, it’s a bit different. Again, some of these things are coming into the consideration, but it’s a different structure. Generally, if it’s a larger company, you still reporting to a CPO or head of product, you may not directly report to the CEO. And also like structure of the teams might be different, but again, some of the same questions still are very much valid. Is this an organization, a product driven organization, and then assess that based on if this is the right fit for you or not. And maybe you are also coming from operationally driven background or engineering driven background. So maybe actually a very good fit. But it’s a healthy type of question to ask to really understand what is the kind of nature of the product and company and how does that match what you’re bringing to the table and then kind of make your decisions based on that.

Melissa Perri - 00:17:54: When you were talking about the product vision piece too, I think that’s really important. So we talked about how the CEO might be involved in it. Specifically for hardware and services companies, I’ve seen a lot of companies struggle with who owns the product vision, right? Like, if you’re Fitbit, we take that as an example. What do you do for who’s going to craft the outside and how’s the software going to go on the inside? I’ve seen places where nobody talks to each other. It’s like the hardware goes over there and the software goes over here. How do you work together as a team and as leaders to make sure that everything is accounted for there and the whole product is going to be successful?

Yasi Baiani - 00:18:33: Yeah, that’s really the art of product management, I think, and one of the hardest part of their role, because you need to be so good in influencing everywhere in the company and shaping that. But also it’s not like you just say, this is what I think and we should do this. You really need to have data, information to support your argument and vision but also partner up and understand the constraints or strengths of other parts of the organization. So I think at the beginning of my career I kind of did that process a bit but I somewhat stumble upon it. I was doing it, but not realizing that actually this is my craft and way of doing product strategy. But when I look back at it, it became my way of doing strategy. And now I do it very systematically. And any company I advise or anything I do, I always approach it the same way to get the strategy right. And that’s what I did at Cleo. I think there are four components to make a product strategy successful and if you approach it from that perspective, it allow you to really start building the organizational kind of alignment needed and have that end to end view of how to do it effectively.

One is that first of all you want to involve multiple function the product strategy that is only crafted from the product team. It’s a lot harder to get legs under it versus if you involve other teams. So what I did when I came early on at Cleo and we were trying to make some strategic decision, I asked our CEO that let’s involve most teams. I don’t want the product strategy just be shaped from product team. And that’s what we did. And we went through the four steps that became my kind of way of leading to an effective product strategy. Definition one is like collecting data internally. If you’re super early, you may not have data but most of the other companies have some level of data about the performance of their product, the performance of their business, so making sure you get that and also one thing that’s important around that is also build some alignment with executive around what OKRs matter for the business.

For instance, in environment we are now revenue is always important but margins become so much more important. Like maybe a year ago margins for most of the businesses was not as important like it was growth at all costs but now that margin is important. So having a conversation with your executive and teams is margin more important or engagement, where do we put that money? So build alignment not only just look at the existing data, but build some alignment on what OKRs matter for the business in this stage of the company in the next six to twelve months and really try to use that as a kind of framework that help define and craft a strategy. The second piece is be super customer obsessed. Get out there, talk to customer, talk to users, and for a lot of the products you have multiple constituencies.

For instance, for our case at Cleo we had our clients who purchase our product, they are end users, we have consultants who sell our product. So we talk to them. And we have our internal users, our guides and experts who deliver services to our members. So we talk with all of them understood cons and pros of our offerings, the need each of these constituents have and brought that voice of customer to product strategy kind of enablement. The other piece is the competitive advantage of the company itself and what the other competitors are doing. Of course, no one knows what their competitors directionally are going, but try to have a sense of that and more importantly, really deeply look into your own competitive advantage. When I was at Fitbit initially we did some of this and I spent a ton of time with our R&D team. And during that process I realized we actually have a golden opportunity because it was the first time that we were able to track heart rate continuously on hardware products. Some of our other competitors falsely claimed they do that, but when we dug in deeper into their product, we realized actually it’s a false claim, they actually do not have that technology. And I knew that that’s foundation for getting a good sleep stage in place. So we use that to build more and more and give more wind behind our sleep strategy. We said okay, if we do sleep and we can track sleep stages and we can show all this information, we can show sleep score and we can give them sleep insights that are actionable, that all makes sense and we are the only one who can do that. No one else has got into continuous heart rate tracking. So again, understanding what do you have as an asset in the company that really is your mode, your competitive mode and what other competitors have and decide your kind of strategic direction. And then the last piece is really part of that competitive analysis. When you do that, you also do market trend analysis, the consumer trend analysis. So you collect all the competitive and market information plus your own competitive advantage information.

And the last piece is really stakeholders interview really understand because CEO may want to go certain direction, CEO might want to go different direction, really understand how do everyone see the growth of the company and what is their vision and really try to align that with all the other information you crafted. So eventually I’ve done it at Fitbit with sleep, I’ve done it with female health expansion which initially we had a lot of challenges, we wanted to get into that sector, but a lot of our executives were male so they didn’t realize what’s the benefit of having female health tracking and fertility tracking information on your app? It just doesn’t make any sense. We collected data, we said first of all, 52% of our users are at that point women. Second of all, they all want to come to one app to manage all of their health not just go to different fertility tracking products or cycle tracking products. And with all the work we have done, we proved that. And what happened is when we got a lot of initially hesitations around getting into that area and to your point, our head of marketing was also a woman. So she and I partner up. We did a lot of user research, market research, we collected all the information. Ultimately we were able to convince our head of product at that point and CEO and the rest of the group. So we put engineering effort behind it. We built the product and within the first month that we launched it, we had over 2 million people using the capability which was really awesome.

So, basically doing all this work and combining these different types of information together will allow you to come up with a strategy that everyone can understand. Get behind it. It’s not because just I thought this is a cool idea. This is a cool idea. But market supports it, data supports it, internal view supports it. Then it makes it easier to kind of build alignment and ultimately it’s all about executing the strategy too because you can go we go direction A but there’s a lot of craft of how do you bring the product experience what’s the design of that what nudges you have? So there’s a lot more still to be done to make that aggregate product and experience that will have adoption. But that strategic alignment and North Star that is one of the most important thing that any head of product can put in place is so critical to then allow everyone to kind of move fast in the next phases and next stages rather than constantly having debate and discussion that if this makes sense or it doesn’t.

Melissa Perri - 00:25:31: That’s such a good case too for having more women on your leadership team, especially if your customers are women. It’s like, hey, we found this thing that 2 million people will use immediately, maybe we should look into it. But that’s such a great story. So Fitbit might be a good example to dig into this. When you uncover the different things, like for example with sleep, you’re mentioning that you looked into the data and found out that their trackers could not actually do heart rate continuously and you could. Was that something that already existed in your hardware or was it something that you had to partner with your hardware team to say like hey, is this a capability we can actually do? And what does that look like when you’re coming up with this new idea? And I know testing cadences for software is very different than testing cadences for hardware. How do you work together on those things when you have different types of release cycles or different types of ways of building things?

Yasi Baiani - 00:26:30: Absolutely. I think at that point when I joined Fitbit, they were in the early phases of kind of getting that hardware, continuous hardware tracking on the hardware product. I would say it was more at the beta or prototype phase. But I spent a lot of time with R&D team probably so much with them. We were kind of hip attached spending so much time together. Because one thing was important, the kind of modes of Fitbit was the sensors was the hardware. And even though I was responsible for bringing software experiences to the product, at the end of the day, I knew that for me to bring the best and most unique experiences to the product, I need to really utilize the sensors. And eventually, as my role kind of got expanded, I would impact some of those decisions to make sure we have the right sensors in the right product with the right cycle. So we all built the right things. Because as you probably know the life cycle of product development for hardware is really long like generally 18 months before anything you decide and pretty much your PRD get locked down and you know what sensors are in the product, you know the look and feel of the product.

Software still has some cycles to provide the experiences but in order for us to launch any harbor product we needed to know what are the market features and experiences that’s going to sell the product, what is new in this product and how my team is going to enable that. So it was like a super close partnership between our R&D team, between our engineering team, our marketing team to bring some of that market and voice of the customer to our teams. But I spent a lot of time with the R&D team to kind of a lot of times we were kind of ideate stuff together. They would go hack some stuff and build them beyond just sleep but around our mindfulness about our breathing capability that we brought to the product. We had like breathing app but in order for you to track all of that we needed to kind of test product and prototype and then eventually bring them to actual productization. But it was like a hand in hand collaboration and ideation to kind of enable some of those from early on and I think communication was key and kind of everyone have that mindset that we are in it together and every function is successful if you do it right. Product was leading a lot of like what are the opportunities, what are the things we think we can sell and it’s appealing to consumer and all that and how do we enable the experience? R&D will bring their expertise of prototyping and what’s technologically possible. So a lot of their kind of research team brought that capability to the team and then with the marketing go to market strategy and how do we tell the stories and all that stuff. So we had some really cool case studies.

One of the other examples, like, pretty early on in my time at Fitbit, we were thinking about again, we were looking at data. We were thinking about multiple capabilities we wanted to bring to the market. And at that point, there was a lot of coverage around. Sitting is a new smoking. And we were looking at our data, and we were like, actually, despite the fact that people think people who early adopters of Fitbit are fitness junkies and they’re always moving and they’re always like doing activities, they were not actually even the ones that they do. They do work out in the morning. They sit like the rest of us, who work in front of their computers for really long boats of hours. And then they maybe do, again, activities. Some of them will do activities in the evening, but during the day, majority of our users are actually pretty sedentary. And we also look at some research and show that if you have movements every 30 minutes, you break your cycle, your metabolism increase, you reduce your risk of cardiovascular diseases. So the science and literature support that getting people to move is actually really beneficial for them.

Our data also supported the fact that our user base can benefit from that. Not only a small group, but a large group of our user can actually benefit from this. But initially, our head of product and our CEO were concerned about that. They’re like, this is not aligned with Fitbit’s brand. We kind of stand for a lot of activities and stuff. Like, we remind people to move. It kind of feels like off track from their brand, but they still gave us opportunity to do prototyping and test that. So what we did, I remember it was early days at Fitbit, so I was packaging prototypes and stuff and send it to a bunch of users. We recruited people. We crafted survey. We had multiple versions of the prototype that we built and we send out to end users. And what we learned after two months of testing, first of all, one of our designs really was promising, which was ten minutes to the hour. Remind people. And both qualitative and quantitative information came really strong in terms of, yes, I will use this. We were also seeing some qualitative, fun information that people saying this was a great excuse that I walk out of a meeting and say, I have to go get my 250 steps or I walked out of a boring conversation with my wife. This was the best thing you guys built. So there was some fun stuff like this, but also there was a lot of really meaningful information that people actually reacted to this because it was always ten minutes to the hour. It was always something that they now know, okay, I have to do my workout. Sorry, my walk. So we structured in a way that both from design of experience on the hardware and design of experience on the visual component, it actually resonated. And we realized, based on various prototyping, we did some of the visualization didn’t work. For instance, one of our designs were actually as you were sitting, you were accumulating lines like line will go higher and higher. And then it became a really sharp pointy, visual design. And people didn’t like that. They’re like that scares me. But in a visual design on the app, we actually show them stars.

Every time you move and you react to what we tell you to do, we give you a star. They love that. And we kind of time frame it within hours of clock design. So that really resonated. Anyway so what I’m trying to say is a lot of testing and validation and after we show the result 98% of people say they will use this feature and our actual data from prototypes show that people reacted to that and we were able to break down very long sedentary time for our users to very short period of sedentary time So that was the best behavioral change feature we had. And after our CEO and head of products saw that, they were like, 100%. We should not only build this for our product that we target towards more sedentary people, but we have to put it on all of our products. So it became a must have feature for all product and when we launched it, it got a lot of traction and was one of this feature that we sold to our corporate arm. But the point I’m trying to make is you have to align everyone with data and actual information rather than say, this is a cool idea.

Melissa Perri - 00:32:53: Yeah, that’s a really good lesson. I love that story. And now I know why my watch keeps yelling at me to stand up all the time. So you guys were the reason behind that. Love it. So you’ve had all of these different experiences at these really great companies working on so many different types of products what are the most valuable lessons that you’ve learned from leading product over the last decade?

Yasi Baiani - 00:33:18: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing is really to the point I was mentioning earlier, the product function is really building great product is a teamwork. It’s very much like a team sport. You need to have all the players doing their job well and they need to all be strong at what they’re doing. In order for the product to be an outstanding product that has, for instance, millions of users, like we had with Fitbit. So you need to have not only strong product team with all the right structures and processes in place, but your engineering team, your data team, your marketing team. Everyone needs to be strong, but also do their job well and do it on time for everything to kind of fall as you expect. So that’s the biggest thing. That’s why I spend so much of my time at this point in my career, not only just with my own team, but organizationally to make sure that we have the right structure in place, we have the right parties in place and everyone kind of like orchestrate work, very coordinatedly with each other. So that’s one thing.

The other piece is really building great products that get adopted by millions of people requires a lot of iteration, a lot of things. It’s not that easy. That’s why not every company will get to that scale. That’s why the prototyping mentality, the test and learn mentality, all that is so critical. Even a decade ago, we didn’t have as much opportunities to do prototyping with design tools. Now with Figma and other tools, you can do a lot of prototyping and testing and get user feedback without doing any coding. So I really encourage and I think that’s a key part of successful teams. They do a lot of that and get feedback and really make sure by time they build something they have so much confidence in that it will be a success. So I think that is really key building that mentality in the team. And I think one thing about product team themselves and PMs and product leader, one skill I feel like more and more became critical for me is communication. And the communication has multiple facets.

One is first of all the art of storytelling. It’s not just also you’re going to have a big stage and tell a story about your product launch, but it’s also like how do you tell story in every setup when you’re telling your engineers why you have to do this feature versus something else or why you should go direction X versus Y. That art of storytelling that every PM should be expert in is so critical. The other piece is like timely communication. And one thing that I always emphasize with my team is order of operation. Who do you need to inform and in what order and what do they need to know. The order of operation I think is so critical because if you just blast big email to everyone including your boss and CEO and your cross functional team and say a product is delayed, you can imagine what that is, one kind of communication. But if you go to all the right parties, like make sure you let your manager knows first and tell them why and explain to them, then your engineering habit kind of go through that order of operation and communicate effectively can change what the message is or how the message is received. So it’s really critical that art of communication and also I think the organizational structure around the team is really critical to make sure that head of engineering, head of product, like the rest of the leadership have the right structure for the team. It’s not just like expect the team to continue to deliver. It’s how you have this right structure and how you evolve your structure as a company evolves. It’s really important you can’t stay constant with your processes. I always have to evolve.

Melissa Perri - 00:36:53: Definitely some great tips to listen to. And the one thing I really want to call out is that I love that you said we got to be testing and learning even without coding, because I do think that’s really important. And I’ve had so many people over the years ask me, like, hey, well, we’ve got a complicated product, or we have hardware, or we have this. How could we possibly test and learn without building things? It’s not as simple but if even Fitbit is doing it then these people can do it too. So I really love that story. When you are thinking too what’s the difference between a good product leader and a really great product leader? What have you observed to be those defining key traits?

Yasi Baiani - 00:37:34: Yeah, absolutely. I really focus on kind of what in my mind is an outstanding product leader. First of all really is obsessed with customer, really focus rather than being competitor obsessed or CEO obsess or internal focus really ingrain themselves and their team into the customer’s voice. So kind of have a lot of touch points, bring that to the team and build a customer obsessed team. There is nothing more valuable for the product team than voice of customer and really understanding what problem you’re solving because that then gives you opportunity to be creative and then solve them most effectively. So that’s one thing. As a product leader particularly I think it’s important to be process oriented because all the reasons like we touched on process multiple times is one component of making a successful product is having a good processes in place. So, as an outstanding product leader can kind of come back and review the processes, diagnose issues and then kind of fix them and improve them with the rest of the counterparts.

The other piece is like data and analytics is another kind of really key component. I would say being data obsessed as well and really looking at the performance and that also is kind of tied to making sure they build a team and guide the team to be outcome focused rather than output focused. It’s not just about shipping something or shipping a feature or doing whatever everyone else asks us. It’s more about like okay, what does that thing, what is the outcome of that thing? Why do we do that and is that the right thing to do versus something else? That’s something that I think really makes the outstanding product leader and kind of ingraining that culture within the team and power of influence we talked about, like in my career I’ve been able to multiple times significantly sway and change the perspective of senior leadership and executives and how did I do that? It was really by power of influence but what gave me the power of influence is data research information to collect. So I think great product leaders really have that capability and can sway everyone else’s mindset to the right direction using the right tools. We talked about this communication art of storytelling, effective and timely communication is really key and also the strategic view, which I think, honestly, any PM I asked my team, everyone within our team should think strategically. That’s like a key component of any great product leader or PM.

It’s not just do the thing they ask, but think about how does that tie to the larger business, which then with that it comes that for PMs it’s essential to understand the overall business. It’s not just the slice that they’re in outstanding product people within each level, they understand as much of the business holistically versus just one slice of it. And that allows them to make the best product decisions that really serve the business and has the outcome impact that we all want.

Melissa Perri - 00:40:24: Great things for people to really develop, to become exceptional product leaders. Thank you so much, Yasi, for being on the podcast with us today. If people want to learn more about you or your work or follow anything that you write, where can they get in touch with you?

Yasi Baiani - 00:40:37: Yeah, absolutely! They can follow me on LinkedIn, Yasi Baiani, and on Twitter@Yasaman.

Melissa Perri - 00:40:44: Great. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s been awesome learning about all of your stories. I had a really good time hearing about especially Fitbit Sleep and in the women’s part of Fitbit too. I thought that was really cool. For those of you listening, Product Thinking podcast comes out every Wednesday, so make sure that you subscribe so you never miss another episode. And next week, we’re going to have another Dear Melissa where I’m answering all of your questions about product management. So please go to dearmelissa.com, let me know what questions you have and we’ll see you next time.

Yasi Baiani - 00:41:16: Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. This was fun.

Melissa Perri - 00:41:20: Thanks. Bye.

Yasi Baiani - 00:41:20: Take care. Bye.