Episode 138: Strategies for Product Management in Fresh Markets with Chris Andrews, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product at Rendered.AI

In this episode of Product Thinking, Chris Andrews, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product at Rendered.AI, joins Melissa Perri to unveil the challenges and strategies involved in building products in new markets, as well as the unique aspects of product management in these markets. They discuss how product managers can introduce new market opportunities, the role of product management in new markets versus saturated ones, securing success in early-stage ventures, and navigating innovation in larger organizations.

You’ll hear them talk about:

[04:55] - Introducing new market opportunities in product management differs from traditional lean startup methods or enhancing existing products in large firms. Many users struggle to see the value in entirely new tools or technologies. It's more than just picking between familiar products; it's about helping them envision revolutionary changes in their workflow. This mirrors the innovator stage of the technology adoption curve. The key is to find and collaborate with forward-thinking individuals, using their success stories to appeal to a broader audience.
[08:38] - Pieces of product management differ when introducing a concept to a new market compared to a saturated one with great competition. The perception of risk varies, both within the organization creating the product and in the eyes of potential customers. For companies developing products in an established market, the dynamics and challenges differ. As someone who serves as the Chief Operating Officer and has had experience across various company levels, Chris has a broader perspective. It's not just about product management in isolation. Over time, especially with the shift to subscription models, product managers play a more pivotal role in influencing every phase of the customer journey surrounding a product.
[10:00] - For early-stage ventures, securing executive buy-in, especially from the CEO, is crucial. Whether launching new products in established markets or exploring unexplored territories, top-level endorsement is often the difference between success and failure. On the customer front, it's vital to cultivate early adopter evangelists. These are more than just users; they're champions of your product. As the venture progresses, these advocates become foundational in nurturing a dedicated community around your product. While mature markets allow for data-driven strategies, early stages demand genuine supporters who grant you time to prove success and viability.
[23:51] - In larger organizations, navigating innovation can be challenging. If a company isn't proactive about disruption, it'll be disrupted from outside. The key to maintaining focus on new markets lies in sustaining positive relationships with stakeholders. Beyond innovation, relationships are pivotal. The approach should be evidence-based, inclusive, and consistent. Think of it as a plane taking off; maintain momentum to achieve success.

Episode Resources:

Melissa Perri – 00:00:37:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're joined by Chris Andrews, who's a Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product at Rendered AI. Before this, Chris was the Group Product Manager for Geo-enabled Systems team at Esri. And Chris has also served as the Director of Product Management at IBM and was Senior Product and Product Line Manager for M&E Cloud Services at Autodesk. Chris has written articles around topics such as synthetic data for the rendered AI medium. He is due to speak at an upcoming webinar on using synthetic data to improve accuracy of scalable machine vision in manufacturing. And today we are going to talk about a really interesting concept, which is about not just building products in zero-to-one companies, but also building products in zero-to-one markets. So welcome, Chris.

Chris Andrews - 00:01:25:

Thank you very much, Melissa. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Melissa Perri - 00:01:28:

Can you tell us a little bit about this concept that you told me about, zero to one companies like Peter Thiel talks about versus zero to one markets? What does that mean?

Chris Andrews - 00:01:38:

Sure, I was introduced to new markets and new technologies in my very first role out of college. My background was in the sciences and geology and biology, but I'd been a programmer forever, and I taught myself this new technology called Geographic Information Systems, GIS. That plus programming skills got me a job as a developer at a mapping company in the mid 90s that was building parcel-based software for realtors. That was new, the company was new, I was employee number one, and the whole concept that a realtor could use a digital mapping system installed on Windows 95 on a desktop back then was also quite new, and I'd say a little ahead of the market, to say the least. One of the things that I also did though, while I was there and often helping out realtors understand what digital technology was at all back then, I put a map on the internet as a way of showing off something that we could possibly do to sell more capability for our users. I didn't really think about it much at the time, it was kind of something that was a curiosity that I was interested in, but that little app actually got me my next role when the first company went out of business, and that role was actually implementing some brand new software from a company called back then ESRI, which allowed you to basically connect the little widget to a database that spit out maps on the web. And a very forward thinking consulting company had won a project at the Jacksonville Sheriff's office. And I happened to be one of the only people I could find who actually had even thought about putting a map on the web.

And this turned into a three to four month effort that actually ended up with a working production application that was even deployed to squad cars over the web throughout Jacksonville Sheriff's office. And for context, they are one of the largest, still one of the largest city county Sheriff's offices in the country. Back then they were doing almost a million calls for service for a year. And so I was young and I didn't even know what I had built. But very quickly then, the company I was working for and then the subsequent companies that I worked for ended up starting to see value in putting maps on the web for customers. I was really involved in the explosion of web mapping back then. Used products from a couple different companies. And that plus the need to be putting this new capability to digitize and zoom in on and show maps on the web into the hands of people like realtors, police officers, tax assessors, folks who never ever actually use a GIS. That need to simplify that technology, distill it down and make it part of the workflow of accomplishing the day job of these everyday people. That left a long term impact on me in terms of what I think about, what I focus on and how I think about connecting new technology into existing markets that then lead to a whole new market opportunity within that market.

Melissa Perri - 00:04:51:

So what do you feel like is different when it comes to product management? Doing, creating these new markets or these new market opportunities inside of these areas. What's different than just lean startup like we talked about with zero to one or working for a larger company enhancing existing products?

Chris Andrews - 00:05:10:

One of the most interesting things about these opportunities is, especially when I was earlier in my career, I didn't really saw there was opportunity to make somebody's life better, their job easier. I didn't really see that as an opportunity to magnify that to thousands or even millions of people. That's what's happened over time. One of the things that you'll observe is that for most of those potential users who could benefit from that tool adaptation of a new technology or widget, they don't actually think that there's going to be value there. But in a deeper way than simply convincing somebody to buy a different kind of soccer ball, say, or a different kind of running shoe, they know what running shoes are for. A soccer player knows what a soccer ball is for. So in the case of moving them from one of those commodities to a different type of the same commodity, it's simply feature function, cost, benefit, comparison, and getting them to realize they will benefit in some way over moving to this different type of the same thing. When you are convincing people that there is. An entirely new capability that may seem completely irrelevant to their job today, but which has the opportunity or potential to completely transform their job in just a short amount of time, they have trouble seeing that kind of hypothetical future.

So what you end up doing in that type of market, and I think it's captured very well by the classic technology adoption group in some ways, where I would classify this as an innovator stage markets. What you end up doing is you end up finding a few evangelists, people who are forward thinkers who are willing to experiment, who actually may have a very high tolerance for failure, and who actually may also have very low expectations about how it comes from trying something new. And you get them on board. You work closely with them, prove out some of the value of the workflow or tooling change that you're thinking about packaging as a product. And then you use those few early wins and proof points to then start building out stories that will appear to the early adopter and the early majority stage customers in that adoption group. I'm not actually describing anything that is fundamentally new or earth shattering. It's more, I've come to realize that there are significant differences when building products, pitching ideas for early stage markets, then pitching a product into a later stage market that is just a different twist on an existing product or solution in that market.

Melissa Perri - 00:07:56:

Which pieces of product management do you feel like are different when you're doing, you know, introducing a concept to a new market versus something that has a ton of competition? Like, is there any areas of building these products you think that spikes or becomes more important than the other one?

Chris Andrews - 00:08:15:

There are different types of perception of risk, maybe, both from in terms of like within the organization building the product and in the customer mind. So for an organization that is building a product in an existing market, these days, my role these days is Chief Operating Officer and I've had to experience multiple levels of companies. So it's hard for me to just break it down to only think about the product management part. In fact, I've grown to realize that especially with the move to subscription models over time, really product managers are more involved with influencing the whole life cycle of the customer journey around products than ever before.

Melissa Perri - 00:08:54:

Let's talk about broadly at a company, what becomes more important and what should you be concentrating on?

Chris Andrews - 00:09:02:

So for early stage efforts, you absolutely need, which you find with early stage efforts, and this is true both for new products in an existing market and a big company, and also new products in new markets, both at small companies and big companies, you really need to get a couple different kinds of executive buy-in. You have to have, especially in a small company, but also I've seen this in very large companies, you have to have CEO-level buy-in. Something that's really new. If they're not excited about it, it's unlikely to ever happen. And there are multiple patterns by which you can fail by not having great C-level buy-in. And I'd say again, it really does come down to the CEO. On the customer side, you really do want to have those early adopter evangelists that you want to try to cultivate. They really need to be evangelists. They need to be people who will talk about what you're doing in the market. They need to be seen as respected implementers of existing capability by others in the market. And so a lot of getting early stage efforts going is kind of finding those lighthouse accounts, key customers or evangelists, however you wanna phrase it, to really get you going.

You need to build relationships with them such that they'll stick with you. Because when you're starting out and you have a hypothesis, if you're good at it, if you've done it a few times then you probably have a pretty good hypothesis, a pretty valid hypothesis, but you still need to go through and to bring the community along. And early on, you have a small community, but of highly invested potential, both backers and consumers. And that's really different from a later stage market in which you might be able to go buy customer lists and actually, you know, do more kind of statistical demand gen and growth marketing efforts to say, Hey, we've got something new, it's red instead of green and red is better and you know, use what I'd say are later markets selling evangelism techniques, education techniques to get the market to adopt it. Early on, you've got to have people who are going to stick with you in a way that gives you the time and runway to find those early successes and demonstrate value in a business model that is sustainable.

Melissa Perri - 00:11:23:

So when you're talking about developing these relationships. In a company that's getting started with this, imagine it's very small, in larger companies, we've got sales, we've got marketing, we've got all these customer relationship managers. Whose responsibility is it to manage those relationships, work with those lighthouse users, make sure that everything's working for them? What does that look like?

Chris Andrews - 00:11:45:

I'll tell you upfront that for zero to one products and zero to one markets. There's no difference between a big company and a small company. And a small company may feel different because you don't have the noise of the rest of the company going on, but I guarantee you, you feel just as alone as a product manager trying to kick something off in a 4 to 10,000 person company as you do in a startup. The difference may be that in the rare case in big companies that have an innovation culture, they may actually have some program that funds your effort, but there are often really stringent requirements in terms of like hitting milestones that actually feel a lot like venture capital type milestones. So again, I'd say that there are certainly differences in terms of like company healthcare and things like that, but in terms of the actual activity, the day-to-day action of product manager getting out of something brand new, new niche or new part of the market that isn't really recognized today, it's very similar. The product manager, whether or not they're a domain expert, and I don't actually always advocate that PMs are domain experts, but whether or not they're a domain expert, they will need to either have or go out and find key industry contacts that they can kind of cultivate as those stakeholders that then become the prospective customers and users, partners often in that early kind of piloting phases of new efforts.

The product manager is going to have to go and get the investor buy-in that they need. So whether that's the seed staff in a big organization or whether that's literally seed fund type investors in a seed funded startup. Very similar process where those stakeholders, those investor side stakeholders are rarely experts in what you're trying to build so that there's some relationship of trust and buy-in that has to be built there. And then the product manager or the company founder needs to figure out the right cadence and professionalism with which to keep them informed in a way that is healthy about both the good and the bad. And then also brings them along so that they have the right opportunities to provide input and help. There is no guarantee that it's always going to work. I've been in situations and seen some where. People attempted to pull me off of products that I knew were going to be a really good thing when they could be delivered. And in other cases, I've had what, in one case, I can recall, I coached one of my staff through what is absolutely one of the best product pitches that I've ever seen. We had buy-in from the community. We had buy-in from even an internal kind of channel community. One of the executives in the line simply said that he didn't feel like we needed this for three to five years. And when we walked out of that meeting, I just turned to my colleague and said, you know, in three to five years, the market's gonna be gone.

And from it'll be gone in terms of being a first entrant. And sure enough, it's three years later. And that's definitely happened. Other people have stepped in and provided what we were pitching back then. It is not an easy, there's no magic and it's a lot of work. And there's also high risk. If you are in an early stage market with early stage products, there is a lot of risk that people will shut you down, that you won't be able to get funded. But it does work, right? It happens all the time. And in my experience, I've got multiple products that fit that definition of characterization out there in the market today. And I'm working on another one right now that I think, you know, I can see in five years, this is going to be a completely done, feel accepted technology. We're already seeing lots of evidence of product market fit. And we see, get back to the adoption curve, what you find is buyers have certain behaviors, users have different behaviors, like they both are in that curve. And what you find is you start out with kind of like a Gaussian peak, that mini bell curve in the innovator stage, buyer behavior, but then it starts to flatten and spread. You start to see some early adopter and then early majority type buying behavior. And we already see all of the above in this market, the rendered AI.

Melissa Perri - 00:15:57:

So it sounds like in these larger organizations too, there's a lot of politics involved in getting these new products out the door. You worked for Autodesk, you worked for IBM. They're not small companies. Can you tell us a little bit about, maybe walk us through one of the products you launched? How does it start? Who comes up with the idea of, let's go explore this market inside the company? Are they planning for that folio-wise or is there just a little innovation hub going on? And then how do you wrap your arms around that mission and kick it off when you're in a big company and you have to worry about the politics or people blowing up your budget and say, move on to something else?

Chris Andrews - 00:16:38:

That's a great question. I can say that my experience is, you know, I spent 14 years between Autodesk and Esri and both of those companies, Autodesk was around 5,000 people when I joined, Esri was right at 4,500, 5,000 people when I left. If you add the channels into them, then they actually are very similar sized companies. IBM is a whole different scale. IBM has kind of innovation groups. They changed how they were doing promotion to general management based upon how products were initiated and they worked out. I've been less than a year there. I learned some great things, but I would say my experience there is different from my experience in Esri and Autodesk. In Esri and Autodesk, both of those companies tend to be like a lot of companies their size which is they're heavily driven by the engineering organizations in different ways. It creates a couple of interesting circumstances, including a lot of things that you read about in books like Innovators of Lima and also another book that I read that I loved two years ago called Tee Topologies where that's all about that ideally companies should be structured to reflect the best architecture of the optimal architecture of the products that they're shipping. In fact, what ends up happening is in many organizations, the products end up getting structured more like the company is structured. That ties directly back to your question about politics and how things get started and sustained.

In the case of the product that's now called InfraWorks started out as something called Project Metropolis years ago at Autodesk, that was actually created out of a VP's Lisa Campbell out of her strategic realization process. It was proposed, I believe, by a woman named Don Weigel who's now the VP of product at Nearmap and that ended up kind of the idea was created. It was substantiated by one of my good friends, Liam Spoon and Bob Bray and a couple other former colleagues. Then I was hired under the team as kind of a doer as a junior product manager and then in Autodesk's classic way, the shuffled things and I became the lead. Then I kind of fought for my own and the product's existence for the next three years. I resisted a lot of organizational change after that. That was very different from playing Esri in which I had a lot of opportunity. The way that Esri works is much more somebody like me could go and do the classic kind of shadow negotiation tactics that you read about in MBA school stuff and get enough people interested across engineering and even some of sales and other professional services and then go get somebody assigned to do it and start it off. That's in a large way. That's how our product out there now called GeoBem, our part is GeoBem was created. I actually created this first mock-ups and had somebody from Esri UK build out a demo for me so that I could pitch it to Jack Dinger and at the time I can't remember if Carl Bass was still there. I think he might have been at Autodesk. It really depends. You have to feel out the organization you're in. It will require a lot of individual heroic effort in a sense, heroic in the decision-making label of heroic and you do have to go get that executive buy-in and that's what it really becomes all about. You also have to bring along your peers and some of your colleagues who work for you because without, if you don't bring along enough people just because the CEO says it's a good idea sometimes it doesn't mean it. It still doesn't mean it will happen. So enough politics of it. It's bringing along the whole community.

Melissa Perri - 00:20:12:

So you just described two different ways of working too between Autodesk and Esri. And you could do kind of the sleeper move at Esri where you're like going out and finding all the people and be like, let's do this. And in other places, I feel like sometimes they dedicate specific spots to innovation and then they say that team will come up with it or the portfolio plan it almost. What have you found works better in larger organizations? Like I find that large organizations have a hard time actually making capacity to do the work you're talking about which is really important because if you're not going out there and disrupting yourself, you will be disrupted. Is that how I kind of feel about those things? So what do you find works to make sure that companies are focusing on new markets and what would be the right method for being able to build that into the culture?

Chris Andrews - 00:21:04:

No matter what, set aside the new market or new anything. The number one thing that works is making sure that you maintain positive relationships with everybody involved. Efforts and it's not easy to try to fight for something in a low resource environment. And here a ton of pushback and in fact, have some people who you would think would think it's a great idea, but because there's a risk averse. Not be willing to buy in, but just keep pushing forward despite. Because it's not easy, it means it's also sometimes really easy to break relationships or get frustrated and overlooked by allies in some cases. If you overlook them, then they be on the other side of that, the camp. I think that's been universal. Whether it's the Autodesk pattern where they had more executive initiation of, of new efforts, or whether it's the Esri pattern where new efforts came a bit more out of grassroots, I'd say maintaining positive relationships throughout has been instrumental even to the point where at one point I had my product from Autodesk, which was originally designed to be competitive against Esri, later demonstrated on the Esri user conference main stage integrated into Esri software. And, you know, that would not have been possible if I hadn't maintained relationships, which then supported and other people introducing new ideas into a piece of the market that started to bridge across these two big companies and two big chunks of the, the AEC market. So the number one thing is maintaining really positive relationships. Then beyond that, it's being fair, evidence-driven, inclusive, and also constant in a way you cannot to get something successfully, you know, get a plane off the runway, you have to drive down it at, you know, at one meter at a time and you have to be accelerating the whole way. If you stop halfway through and then you have to restart your acceleration, it's just not going to happen. So finding ways to creatively be consistent and constant in your pressure forward, that's also critical.

Melissa Perri - 00:23:14:

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Chris Andrews - 00:24:31:

I confess to not being able to straddle the roles very well. You know, the Nathan, the CEO that I worked with, he and I have joked many times that distribution of product versus CEO that I implemented is different from what we expected, but it's also part of early stage stuff is this, you have to wear multiple hats and you. You rotate into where you're needed, which is what good early stage product managers do. I'd started a couple of very small companies that were more like hobby businesses. I'd been in small companies before. I used to be the president of a nonprofit founded to help people who had bills associated with medical issues. I had been in a more organizational role in other ways. And then at Esri, I was a level two at ZEC. I had a product team of 20 PMs and about 45 products. For a long time, I felt the desire to move to a company where I could help build and grow and. And influence the culture and organization. Through positive relationships, I happen to simply say congrats to a friend of mine who had gotten a new job on LinkedIn. And she asked me if I could chat five minutes later. And then we spent 45 minutes on the line. And she said that she had a whole bunch of small companies who were looking for somebody like me. So I interviewed with about 12 small companies, PO jobs, PPO products, and a couple of COO type jobs. When I got into the discussion with Nathan, we talked about just being product focused versus other things that he needed, including somebody to take on HR and benefits and even help with business development and sales and other things like that. And I immediately said, yeah, I'd like to do the COO role over just being a, that's CPO and then bring somebody in to do some of this other stuff. I'd like to have more primary influence over the growth of this organization.

So I got the job with rendered and then I found a book written. I think it's called the how to be SCA COO or something. It's actually a fantastic book. I started reading it. It's split into two sections. One has four chapters on like kind of the persona of a COO. The second section is like 12 parts of the company you should ask questions about. And the first section was so validating. After 14 years of how long along of being a product manager, product lead, whatever group, product manager, and I usually don't use highlighters, but I ended up grabbing a highlighter and starting to highlight every line that was directly relatable because of product management experience. There are many roles these days, which I would call more like feature managers than product managers. And that's something that I've never had to be. The product management I've had to practice over the years touches legal, contracts, occasionally facilities, hiring, business development, pricing, business models, and of course, user stories, and even UX, QA, and then management. So if you look at early stage, small efforts where the PM has to touch a lot of stuff to create the right conditions for success across a large organization or across a large market from within a small organization, then you will touch many different parts of the company that later make you actually really well-suited for general management. And that's what IBM had to realize.

And that's what I was exposed to there, where many of the division leads actually were intentionally pulled out of product management tracks, because they realized that certain types of PMs touched so many parts of the company. And then I've now been able to exercise and see that. The other day, I got maybe a few weeks ago, I was having to push process on some folks I've rendered. And Nathan was on the call, and I messaged him afterwards. And irony here is that I really don't love process. I only use it where it needs to be used to be expedient. And he just wrote back, that's what makes you a great startup COO. So I would simply say that the particular experience that I've had in the past, I think making something from nothing or from very little over and over again. Has been directly translatable to being one of two execs at a startup company in a rapidly growing part of the computer vision market.

Melissa Perri - 00:28:54:

And what have you found different, you know, moving from some of these larger organizations now to a startup and kind of you're doing the same thing, but now you're in a small company.

Chris Andrews - 00:29:04:

Yeah, it's not a satisfying answer, but in some ways, it doesn't feel that different. It goes back to what I said earlier, right? You can be just as lonely trying to get something new started inside IBM as you can be starting your own company. Now, of course, there are financial securities that happen in a big company. In many, you're pretty sure the paycheck's gonna keep coming. We're fortunate to be funded well enough that we haven't been worried about where the paychecks are coming from Nathan, the real wizard there, as he saw. He's doing his CEO job of keeping us. And moving forward in the right way, at the right pace. To meet our objectives and yeah, so that's been really good. So it's a weird thing for me because I started, like I said, the very first company I was in, there were two people who were the founders and I was employing number one. So I've had kind of an arc from startup to big companies and then back to startup. For contrast, when I was at IBM, that was the years where there were 440,000. So yeah, it was, I think they're down in the like high 200s or low 320s or something like that right now. But yeah, it was huge. And so it's the one thing I do like very much is the layers of influence are fewer. You know, it's not a, we don't have 13 levels deep of management. And I found myself in some cases in Autodesk having to convince. The person sitting next to me who was supposed to be my teammate of having to argue with their manager's manager manager.

Through my manager's manager's manager about what they needed to do to help me out tomorrow. And that kind of thing for innovation efforts is deadly at large companies. So it's for that reason why there's a lot of, I'd say this is one thing that Autodesk did fairly well is they recognize, they train employees, they introduce conflict-like high-performance teams, they did create some environments. And like more recently I've heard they actually have kind of an innovation council that funds startup efforts inside the company, which is that was, I predated that, but they did a good job at kind of at least realizing that the folks who could be successful together needed to be somewhat co-located within the company. And not just physically, but maybe not physically at all, but definitely organizationally. And I had the fortune of actually participating in two different startup numbers inside of Autodesk and how to get experience with both, sure. Another thing that I definitely, like I wanted to have the ability to influence culture, protect people in a way. I think when the pandemic shit I had actually started out right before the pandemic, I was really strongly considering looking for a new role in a smaller company and then make shit. I think I had a team of 10 or 11. I put off those plans because I really wanted to create a safe environment for. Psychologically, I would say environment for my staff members. I didn't want to cause additional churn by leaving. And then we actually grew from 10 or 11 to 20 over that time period. And something else I was pretty proud of is we went from during that time from nine men and one woman to 10 and 10 through kind of not the nutrition and then with other types of diversity actually being brought on that team too. But that was all through the pandemic as well. And it wasn't through any issue where any idea of like, we're going to go target hiring only women, right? That was not at all what we did.

What we simply did was just change kind of the criteria for considering being a successful candidate for product manager. And by doing that, looking in some different markets than just the GIS market, looking at some different types of career progressions, what that did is it really opened up the candidate polls and new types of candidates. But they ended up just kind of accidentally, we kind of fell into the situation where one day I realized, oh, look at that, we're 50-50 now in terms of gender diversity and they said there was also other diversity brought in at the same time. So that was a great experience. And then after two years, I decided, okay, it's time to actually just go out and be in a smaller company again.

Melissa Perri - 00:33:09:

I'm curious, though, it was a really great story about how you got to change the requirements. What did you change about the requirements? And what made you say, hey, people with this trait instead of this narrow, narrow trait could be a product manager too.

Chris Andrews - 00:33:24:

You know, to be clear, I had a phenomenal time at Esri in the seven years I was there, and I got a lot done. And Jack Dang ran somebody that I am the CEO of Esri. I loved seeing him at conferences, and he gives me a hug every time. And there was a lot of positive there. And I was able to do that because I had a manager at the time who unfortunately passed away, but who also, he was looking for new models to grow and to be successful as a product management organization. One of the long-time filters on some was they really did look for people who had, more than passing familiarity with geospatial technology. And yet, this was about something I said early in the conversation. I don't actually always think that the best PM is somebody who has domain expertise. Because, and this has been something that's been quite controversial when I've said it to teams before, you know folks, we aren't civil engineers or we aren't geospatial practitioners or we aren't police officers. We are tool makers to improve the job of civil engineers or map makers or police officers. So if you are a deep geospatial expert or an experienced police officer or an experienced civil engineer, what happens when you go into the sausage factory of making products and tools for those people, there are some that are successful and that make the transition from practitioner to toolmaker. But there are others that get really frustrated because they have an idea, their pattern, their workflow for doing things, and they want to try to impose that on the tools in general, and that doesn't work. So one of the things that we, one of the most important gates that we removed was who we would actually consider in terms of their domain expertise coming in. So that loan changed things because of the historical nature of the types of folks from the geospatial market that would apply to jobs. And it opened us up to other candidates from other adjacent markets who may have just a different distribution of gender. Person. Another gate that was removed.

So that was one that I definitely passed up. I also changed up some of the pattern of when I would want to talk to a candidate and when I would review candidates. So in some cases I would change up so that we would actually talk to some of the candidates before recruiting them inside Esri. And that helped because then I could just say, hey, you know what, I really like this person. I appreciate your input. But in this case, I think this person has some potential. So that was one. Yet another thing that we did was we reached out into, I encouraged a few folks from my university to apply much earlier. And we did look earlier through some folks. What you find is a very disparate distribution of folks coming right out of school. Then later there have been a lot of articles in the last two years over women dropping out of legal or engineering or different demands, the sciences. And so if you can catch people a little earlier in their career, then you're catching a different distribution of people. So those are some of the examples without offending anybody in HR. Or in fact, I had Melinda, the HR person, who was awesome. And then my boss, the director of product management, third quarter, he was ecstatic because I had a very high success rate of bringing people in and then keeping them. So how was that? I only lost one person. In fact, the very first person I ever lost from a team voluntarily was somebody who got a much better, he got a great career opportunity and left for a bigger company. But other than that, I didn't lose anybody during that whole time at Esri.

Melissa Perri - 00:37:02:

That's awesome. I don't think it's necessary. I know you're saying I don't want to dis-HR or anything, but I do a lot of hiring for executives too. I find that if you don't understand product management, you might not ask a question in a different way to see if somebody can think systematically that would lend themselves to being a great product manager. So instead, you get HR or you get anybody who's just recruiting and it's not their fault, but they just go through the criteria like, do you have this? Do you have that? Do you have that? And it's like checking boxes. Whereas if you've done it before, if you've hired teams in this, you can say, oh, they don't have this experience, but let me ask them about the scenario or the situation and see how they think. And if they think in a certain way, I can teach them how to roadmap. I can teach them how to write a user story. That stuff's easy. It's the systematic thinking and the relationship building across the company and being able to have those kind of abilities, that kind of go-getter attitude too, that I think really makes somebody a great potential candidate. But you can always teach them the tools. So I really like that.

Chris Andrews - 00:38:05:

Really quickly, a great example is people coming out of consulting. And there is this period where they have to shift out of project thinking. I had to do it. I went from consulting into autodesk. And I still remember sitting at my desk one day and saying to myself, oh, so that's what it means to be at a volume box software company. There was like the first day that I really realized it wasn't associated with the hours, it was associated with volumes of users buying license. So yeah, I 100% agree with you. It is much more about work ethic and ability to influence people and organizational skills, project management skills in many ways. It's not, it's, you don't have to be a PM in a particular domain in order to be a successful PM in that domain in another company. That's a hard filter to try to apply.

Melissa Perri - 00:38:56:

Definitely wise words for all the product leaders out there who are thinking about hiring. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for being on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you or rendered AI, where can they go?

Chris Andrews - 00:39:08:

Can go directly to rendered.ai online. We build a platform as a service for customers in the computer vision market who need to solve issues with real sensor data. And we help them do that by allowing them to create their own simulated sensor data that is physically accurate and that comes fully lit. And yeah, if you want to put them in late-din as well, in the end, it was just Chris J. Andrews. And I'm happy to correspond with folks for sure.

Melissa Perri - 00:39:35:

Thank you all for listening to the product thinking podcast. We'll be back again next Wednesday with another Dear Melissa segment. So if you have any questions for me on product management, please go to dearmelissa.com, submit them there. Also, if you really enjoyed this podcast, and I hope you did, please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this, drop us a review and that will really help. Thank you and we'll see you next time.

Chris Andrews - 00:39:59:

Thanks very much.

Stephanie RogersSeptember 27, 2023