Episode 198: The Cupcake Approach: Validating Product Concepts with PJ Linarducci
I recently spent some time with PJ Linarducci, the Chief Product Officer at Thumbtack. We spoke on a recent episode of the ProductPJ's impressive career, covering various roles in product management, including significant time at Meta, where he developed a keen understanding of what it takes to drive impactful product strategies. His insights are particularly relevant for those looking to innovate within established industries.
During our conversation, PJ shared his unconventional journey into product management, highlighting his initial reluctance and how he eventually embraced the role as a powerful avenue for influence and change. He discussed the unique challenges he faced transitioning from a large organization to leading product at Thumbtack, where he could leverage his experience to reshape the company's approach to home services—a sector he describes as being stuck in the 1990s.
PJ elaborated on the shift in Thumbtack’s value proposition, moving from merely connecting consumers with service professionals to empowering homeowners with the knowledge and tools to manage their home projects effectively. This ambitious strategy required not just innovative product development, but also a cultural shift within the organization, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and user-centric thinking.
Whether you’re a product leader, aspiring manager, or simply interested in how technology can transform traditional industries, you won't want to miss this enlightening conversation!
Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is PJ Linarducci, the Chief Product Officer at Thumbtack, where he leads the product management, design, and analytics teams in helping millions of people confidently care for and improve their homes. Before Thumbtack, PJ held pivotal roles at Meta, where he contributed to the growth and success of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and at PayPal, where he worked on advancing payment solutions. But before we talk to PJ, it's time for Dear Melissa. This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. I'll answer them on an upcoming episode. Today, let's go to the phones.
Caller - 00:01:19: Hi, Melissa. I just wanted to say a huge thank you for everything you do. And I wanted to reach out for some advice. So I've spent a lot of time in startups as a CPL and a PM. And while I love the energy and the chaos that comes with them, I'm starting to feel the weight of the financial instability that often comes with it. And after experiencing financial struggles at several companies, I'm eager to transition to like a more stable environment, ideally at a fan company where I can focus on product and execution without constantly worrying about the next paycheck. It feels like having a CV full of startups makes people think you're not an impressive product manager or that you lack the credibility that comes from working at a household name. So do you have any advice for where I could start in order to transition effectively to a bigger company?
Melissa - 00:02:12: So when you're moving from a startup to a fan company, you really want to demonstrate what you've done to release products. And it kind of depends what level you're moving into. If you're looking for more of an entry level or individual contributor role, I would really highlight here how you have done some releases, you've gotten things out to customers, you've built functionality, and you've iterated on it. So can you talk about in your resume, the outcomes that you've achieved, the stuff that you've overseen? One benefit of being in a smaller startup is that you get a chance to release a lot more than you would in a large company. Some large companies take forever to release. Unlike Amazon, Amazon releases all the time. But some larger companies, it could take longer to release. There's a lot more bureaucracy that goes into it. So some people there may only be releasing a couple times a year. Have you been releasing a lot? Have you been building out a lot of functionality? Can you show how that's solving problems for your customers in the right ways? If you can do that, I think that really demonstrates your product management capabilities to a fan company. Now, the other part of this too, is I'm not sure what your experience is or how you learn product management, but you want to make sure that you're going back and showing that, you have a framework to do this. You want to come and apply it to a fan company. You want to just move into a bigger company so they have more stability. You can work on great products, but you're looking for that structure and you're really looking for something that's a little more robust than maybe the startup sites you've been at. I wouldn't really worry about the names of the companies or the startups there. If they're not well known, it's okay.
But you do want to talk about the size, the number of people you're actually serving. And when you're applying for roles in larger companies, you want to see if you have an edge for it. So for instance, do you have some domain experience in some of these startups that might be great for particular roles or particular divisions of these larger companies? Can you talk about that? Can you apply it that way? That could give you an edge over some other people who are applying who are not coming with those experiences. So I've seen a lot of people successfully move from startups into bigger companies. It's not impossible by any means, but really focus on your resume, on what you are bringing to the table from a product perspective, what you've done, the outcomes that you've achieved and make sure you're positioning it as I just want to go to a bigger company where there's some more structure so that I can really focus on doing great product management. And I think everybody will understand that. All right. If you have questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com. And now it's time to talk to PJ.
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Melissa - 00:05:10: Welcome to the podcast, PJ. It's great to have you here.
P.J. - 00:05:13: Thanks, Melissa. Excited to be here.
Melissa - 00:05:15: So you've had a great career in product management spanning many decades. Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to this field?
P.J. - 00:05:21: You know, I tell people I was a really reluctant product manager. I moved into tech and I was on the business side and ran all sorts of different business side functions, you know, finance, operations, business development. And I was always invited over to the product side and I never really found myself drawn there. I had this misconception that PMs were these unicorns and they're either extremely technical and I had a technical degree, but I thought like they're really in the weeds of the technical work or they're these like futurist imagineers. And neither of those sort of more extreme archetypes really resonated with me. But it took me a while to realize that there's lots of different PM archetypes and there's a lot of ways that you can lead product teams to build great products and have a lot of impact for users. And I realized that a lot of what I could bring in terms of creating clarity and organization and driving business impact was really valuable in a specific set of product worlds. And so once I got comfortable with that, I really leaned into, I jumped into product management, leaned into it. And I found that it's sort of in many ways the closest thing to, you know, they call it a mini CEO role or general manager role. And I was really excited about the level of flexibility and the ability to influence the organization that comes with the title of product management. And so I think that's what really, you know, brought me in and keeps me in. And, you know, I get passionate about sort of building things that create real value for users. I get excited about having a job, that my day job has actually changed the business, not just to operate it. And, you know, I feel really lucky to be able to play with some of the most powerful tools in the business, which is the R&D roadmap. It's a great power and a great responsibility that comes with shepherding those investments.
Melissa - 00:07:07: So you spent quite a few years at Meta doing product leadership, and now you've transitioned to the chief product officer role at Thumbtack. Can you tell us a little bit about your time at Meta and then what led you to want to join Thumbtack?
P.J. - 00:07:18: Yeah, I grew up and cut my teeth at Meta, really. So I joined in, like I said, in a business capacity role and then moved over to product management into an adjacent field, adjacent part of the product, and then grew from there. And over the course of 10 years, I think I had four or five different content areas. I really enjoyed that. And I would encourage product managers in larger companies to jump around, try lots of different things, one of the advantages of a large company. And then about three years ago, I got really excited about making a shift. I felt like I learned a ton at Facebook and I wanted to apply that in other places. And I got really excited about the product area that Thumbtack is in. Home services is still stuck in the 1990s. I get really excited about applying a modern technology approach to what is currently a really fragmented $600 billion industry. You know, your home is one of your largest and most complex assets, and it doesn't come with an owner's manual. And we have the opportunity to tell homeowners sort of what projects to do, when to do them. And one of the most critical pieces is helping them find the right approach to work with when they need to hire somebody to help them get things done. And also, my entire career has sat at the intersection of consumers and small businesses. And I get really excited about bringing technology that's really simple to use to small business owners so they can scale their business and they can spend more of their time on their craft, or in the case of Thumbtack, their trade. And less time worrying about becoming an expert on Google advertising or building websites or apps. I want to empower people to do what they're great at and what their passion is, and help them get a lot of the administration out of their way.
Melissa - 00:08:51: So with Thumbtack, what were some of the challenges like when you walked in? What was the state of the company and what were you excited to tackle?
P.J. - 00:08:58: You know, one of the biggest challenges for me when I came in to Thumbtack was changing my mindset from one of many product leaders to the singular lead for the product organization. And I think it took me a while to wrap my brain around the true level of ownership and agency that comes with that role. The role requires a lot less time justifying decisions or aligning with internal stakeholders. When you're in a large company, that's a lot of what you need to do. And that frees you up to really put your energy into focusing on, are you delivering the best possible solution for end users? And reallocating my time and my energy was a challenge, but also a big unlock. After several months in, I sort of realized the opportunity in front of me. The light bulb went off and I realized I can just run a lot faster. You know, another sort of mindset shift for anyone considering that kind of a jump is there will always be stressors in your job. That's just part of trying to solve big problems. But one of the things I find really rewarding is the change in the type of stressors. You know, I used to, as one leader among many in a large company, I used to worry the things that kept me up at night was whether or not someone in some room I'm not in is going to make what seems like a simple decision that ends up flipping the cable over for me and my team. And I don't worry about that at all right now. And instead, I worry about are we building the best possible solutions for customers and are we building the business as rapidly as we can for all the stakeholders, including all of my team members. So a different level of, you know, there's always going to be something that keeps you up at night, but you have the opportunity to choose what will keep you up at night. Choose the thing that really matters.
Melissa - 00:10:35: It's got to be nice to have that space to feel like you could just run to instead of hitting bureaucratic walls or stuff like that that we get with a lot of large companies.
P.J. - 00:10:43: And I think one reflection on this is if I could go back to my prior self and share some wisdom, it's that I think environments are more malleable than we necessarily think. And I wish I could take this new learning, this new mindset and go back to my former self and say, don't assume that things are the way they are because they're unchangeable. You never know what agency you have until you really try to change things. And I think I'm still learning every day how much agency and therefore how much responsibility comes with the seat that I sit in now. And I think I underappreciated the amount of agency I had even as a sort of junior product leader in a large company. I'm reminded of the story that Sparrow met with fleas in a jar. I don't know if you've heard this one before, but if you put fleas in a jar and you put a lid on it, they'll jump and they'll bang their heads on the top of the jar. And after a long... After a long enough period of time, they'll start jumping at lower levels so that they come up just the top of the jar, but they don't bang their head at the top. And then what happens is those fleas have children and those children grow up in that jar with the lid and they never learn to jump high. They only jump up to the top of the jar, but just shy of hitting their heads, even if you take the lid off. And so the analogy is like if you grow up in an environment where you believe you're capped on what you can change, you're going to try to operate within those boundaries. And sometimes you have to kind of just try banging your head against the top of the lid, to realize you can actually jump a lot higher than you thought, or you can change a lot of things in your environment that seemed rigid before you tried.
Melissa - 00:12:09: I love that analogy. That's really cool. I totally agree with this too. I work with so many large enterprises. And when I would go talk to the teams or some of like the middle leaders, I'd always get this, oh, well, we can't do that because of this, or we can't do that. One early on, like 10 years ago, I was trying to get people at a financial services company to go talk to customers. And I heard, well, we can't talk to customers. We're not allowed to. I'm like, okay, who says? But they were like, oh, this person says. So I go to that person and I'm like, hey, I need these people to go talk to customers. And they're like, oh no, they can't do that. I'm like, who says? And then they'd be like this person and go back up to the next one. I keep going until I got to the last person. They went, oh yeah, they can go talk to customers, but they just can't do X, Y, and Z. So I go back down and I'm like, again, but we can't do this. We can't do this. And then it goes all the way back down and people go, oh, I didn't know that. But I run into that mentality a lot where it's like, well, this is the way it is. We can't change it. That's how we do it here. You know, we're just going to have to live with it.
P.J. - 00:12:59: This is how it's done here is one of the biggest things to push back against. And exactly like you're describing, the only sort of way to fight against that is to ask why and ask why over and over again until you get to sort of our first principles answer. Because often these things can have a mind of their own and they become sort of company policies or they become culturally the way we do things. And they're often just a practice that was applicable at the moment or applied only to a specific situation and shouldn't be generalized as sort of how you build product or how you approach the world.
Melissa - 00:13:32: And I also think there are more leaders out there who are willing to change if it makes sense, right, than people give them credit for. So if you have a compelling reason on why we should do something differently and how it's going to help, I think people are more willing to listen to that than we think.
P.J. - 00:13:46: Absolutely. Part of a leader's role is to help people focus and give people frameworks in which they can operate. And that requires sort of intentionally narrowing people's focus or saying right now, this is what we need to focus on. Or for you to be successful, I think you should do ABC. And it's necessary for leaders to provide some sort of scaffolding. Otherwise, everyone's sort of floating around in space, not sure which way is forward. But it's dangerous for those sort of guideposts or directions to be misconstrued as rules or guardrails that hold somebody back. One way to, as a leader, to make sure that you don't accidentally communicate that is to be really explicit about what you're solving for. So if you start with, this is my end goal, and this is the context I have that makes me think to achieve that goal, we should do A, B, and C, and not get distracted by D, E, and F, then you do two things. One is you're making it clear. What you're trying to accomplish and what you think is the best path forward. And two, you're also giving the person permission to say, knowing what your end goal is. I have different information. I have different past experience. I have different ideas. And I think there's another way to get to that goal. And I understand that the guidance you're giving to do A, B, and C is not prescriptive, but it's in service of reaching that end goal. And I know what you're solving for. And then, therefore, I know when to propose a different approach because I know it is ultimately in service of the goal that you're aiming for.
Melissa - 00:15:08: I think one of the issues that we always talk about in product management, which kind of aligns with this, is the authority issue versus the influence issue. There's probably a lot of lower-level product managers out there saying, hey, this is really nice. You're a chief product officer. You could change things here. But how do you build that influence when you don't have authority as the top product person to help make those changes and to help convince people that this is the right way to go?
P.J. - 00:15:34: You know, operating with authority is a dangerous crutch. If people have to do what you say, they will do it. And they might not give you the feedback that they have better, that they're doing something sillier. And if you're operating a position of influence as opposed to authority, you don't have that crutch. And therefore, you have to work harder. But in working harder, you actually get to the right answer more often. And so I always advise leaders as they're getting more and more authority to fight the urge to use that authority to drive decision making and always fall back on the skills that they needed as an individual contributor, which is to lead through influence. And that's why I think a lot of large tech companies do not have a reporting chain of like a general manager or a single decider. At Meta and also at Thumbtack, as we set up our R&D teams, we intentionally make product managers, eng managers, designers, and data scientists peers. And they lead that effort. And by structuring them as peers, they're incentivized to challenge each other's thinkings, bring their perspectives to the table, and really arm wrestle around what's the right path forward. And each person brings their own expertise and plays a different role in the team. But they're all expected to solve for that same shared goal and not to fall in line and do what they're told from one of the other members of the team.
And I tell product managers that the best way to drive alignment within the team, is to take advantage of the role that you play as the organizer-in-chief, the documenter of team perspectives. There's a lot of power in solving the pen as you try to converge a conversation into an answer. And product managers have this opportunity as they're coalescing with different members of their team and bringing together a single, call it a document, a roadmap, an update, whatever it is. And they have the opportunity to incept their ideas into their team members. And not to manipulate, but to take advantage of the seat they sit in, the broader perspective they have, form their own ideas, and then socialize it with their team members. And if you're doing that really well, very often, either your ideas get played back to you as convergence on those ideas, or by sort of incepting those ideas, your team members will react to those ideas and they will enhance them. They'll build on them. They'll make them better. And what you get back from the team members will be a better version of what you incepted.
Melissa - 00:17:54: Great advice for people out there. When you're helping your product managers to learn this art of influence, what do you encourage them to do? Or product leaders that you've worked with, how do you get them to start to be more effective with the way that they influence people?
P.J. - 00:18:09: One of the first things to do is to build a trusting relationship. And that comes from being vulnerable with each other and being really clear on what you're trying to solve as a group together. If there's sort of opposing tensions, different people want different things, or people feel like someone's guard is up, they're less likely to be influenced by them. And I think just coming at a conversation as a servant leader to say, part of my job here is to get us to converge. And that's my goal is to bring all of our best ideas together. And so if we can be honest with each other, build them a trusty relationship and share goals, I can offer the service of helping us converge together.
Melissa - 00:18:45: I want to change course a little bit here and talk about Thumbtack and how you thought through building out the product portfolio strategy when you came in here and also building out your team. So Thumbtack just recently released a bunch of new tools, a really major update from where it was before. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with this new direction as a company, what it took to really introduce it, and how to change from what you were doing before?
P.J. - 00:19:08: So Thumbtack has for a long time built a value proposition for consumers of when you know that you need to hire a tradesperson, an expert in a field, we will help you find the best person to solve that specific need. But homeowners in particular don't always, there's a lot of steps in their homeownership journey before they get to, I have a very specific tangible need and I need to find a pro. And if we really think about not just the hiring step, but the entire journey of managing a home project from, understanding what you need or want, scoping it, then finding the right person, then getting to done. That journey is much broader than just help me identify pros in my area and rank them by quality or value or speed or something like that. And so we had this opportunity to expand our value proposition to not just how to hire, but how to know what to do and when to do it to be a great homeowner or responsible homeowner. And it really taps into this core angst that we found, that many homeowners just feel under equipped to manage this most valuable asset that they have. And they feel uneducated and they feel like they don't have the ability to express what they want to accomplish in easy to use ways. And so we wanted to expand the value prop of the app from not just who to hire, but how to manage your home more broadly. And that really required a fundamentally different approach to how we built product versus what we had been doing previously, which was sort of more enhancing the delivery of the value prop that we had been offering to the market for the long term.
Melissa - 00:20:39: Yeah, so it's like a really big shift from almost being a marketplace where you just find people to, hey, we're going to put the user front and center. They don't know what to do with their home. Like, let's recommend stuff that they should be doing or how they should be keeping on top of it, which I love because honestly, this is my first home that I've owned. I'm like, everything breaks all the time. Like, what am I supposed to do with this? How am I supposed to keep on top of this? It's been a wild journey. How did you have to change the, you know, the strategy of the organization, the culture, the people, the way you operated to start embracing this instead of just seeing it as this one marketplace type opportunity, but something a lot bigger?
P.J. - 00:21:12: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think there's different modes that a product team needs to operate in. And at a company level, your portfolio has to have both. And you don't want to have one size fits all in terms of your approach to building your product. So if you are in sort of a more zero to one capacity, there's a specific set of approaches and tactics you want to take there. And if you're building on top of years of development of the core value that you're offering to users and have been for a long time, you want to make that better every single day that you come in. And there's a different set of approaches and tactics and structures that you would apply in that sort of growth style of working.
Melissa - 00:21:49: So what are some of those differences between zero to one and the growth style? And how do you balance that portfolio? How do you make sure like one doesn't take preference over the other?
P.J. - 00:21:59: So we can talk about sort of the zero to one aspects first. The thing to be careful of here is one is the sort of faster horse versus a car problem of when you're doing zero to one work, you really have to sort of take a leap of faith that build on your intuition to understand user needs really deeply. And then propose a specific novel solution that probably is not exactly what customers are asking you for. When you're building something new, customers aren't able to articulate product spec kind of language that we use, what the ultimate solution should look like. But they are able to articulate what their pain points are and what they want you to solve for them. And so another aspect is you want to avoid being incremental. Usually when you're doing something new, the steps you would take to launch this new great new thing may not be strictly positive. Every step along the way and you know, where as on growth style, you're trying to like with every change, make it, you know, 1% better every day with something new, you have to be willing to sort of go down to go up. You have to be willing to say some of these features will work together in concert as a bundle, but they may not work individually. And so you have to avoid the pitfall of you build a feature, you test it. You don't get signal on that one feature. But if it's part of this broader vision, you've got to power forward to the point where you had sort of your MVP. You're sort of, at least an initial version of the full portfolio of features to really test your idea because new ideas can't be broken into incremental features and tested independently. With this latest release, we started with asking customers through interviews, through data analysis and so forth. What was their core angst there? What were their needs? What were their emotions around home ownership?
And we didn't bound it to just using, you know, questions about how are you feeling when you're using Thumbtack, but just how are you feeling when you live in your home? Why do you feel when things break? How do you feel? What do you feel when you get inspired to make your home better? And so we really broaden the aperture of our user insights. And then we created what we call the cupcake approach, which was, you know, if you're ultimately going to build a wedding cake, you don't want to test, you know, just the cake or just the filling or just the icing. That's not going to give you a good glimpse of the result of the overall cake. Instead, we built the cupcake, which is a mini version of everything. So it's got a little bit of cake, a little bit of filling, a little bit of icing, and this was this concept of, you know, we can't be. We need to build the fastest path toward a feature complete release that gives us a full understanding. And then once you have the cupcake and you get product market with that, then you can double down and say, all right, let's make the icing sweeter. Let's make the cake fluffier. Let's make the filling sweeter. So it's not to say you have to build the entire product and go in on a cave for a year. But sometimes you need to build all the features to an MVP level to really get signal from the user as to whether or not that bundle, is serving their need.
Melissa - 00:24:46: That's my favorite analogy. I always tell people the cupcake for MVP. And I think it's a perfect analogy because one of the things as well with the cupcake, it's like you have to build enough value, like you were saying, but it's not necessarily what you're going to use to build the full product. So how do you treat that and scope that down into a cupcake? And what's, what are the principles that you help bring to your team about what's going to make that successful there versus THINKING really big on the full cake?
P.J. - 00:25:10: A critical first step is to identify the core customer hypotheses that you need to validate or invalidate and put as much energy as possible into solving the most challenging, most critical hypotheses first. And the path you take to validate or invalidate that most critical hypothesis may not be a product feature that ultimately ends up in the product, but it's helpful to sort of guide your path forward. I just heard this analogy for the first time. I forget. I wish I could accredit the person who said it, but if you were tasked with teaching a monkey to sing while standing on a pedestal. Where would you start? Too many product teams would start with building a pedestal because they would say, I know how to do that. I've got wood. I've got a hammer. I've got nails. I know what a pedestal looks like. Let me build the pedestal. You'll get the instant gratification. By day two, you've got this gorgeous pedestal and you're like, great. One of the requirements, the box is checked. I have built the pedestal. I've made progress. But if you want to teach a monkey to sing while standing on the pedestal, the first thing you need to do is figure out if you can teach a monkey to sing. The pedestal, totally relevant. And so how do you fight that urge to operate in your comfort zone, do the things you know how to do, seek that instant gratification internally? And instead, how do you say, what is the scariest, hardest aspect of this? And how do I tack that head on and be willing to say, all right, we've cracked this nut. Everything else is just details or we can't solve this piece. And there's no there there. And there's no value, therefore, in all the window treatment or the pedestal. But if we get the core essence or the core value proposition mocked in.
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Melissa - 00:27:14: When you were trying to think about that core value proposition and what you were testing there, what was your aspect of the cupcake that was really critical for making sure that this new phase was going to be successful?
P.J. - 00:27:24: We were operating in a world where for our core value proposition, we wanted to remove friction as much as possible. So what's the minimum amount of information necessary to ask of users to avoid friction or avoid this feeling of, oh, am I disclosing too much information for the value exchange that I'm going to get here? And what we realized was if you want an app not just to help you hire a pro, but to help you manage your home, you need to have a richer relationship. You need this tool to understand who you are, what your personal goals are, and what your goals are for your home. Is it a starter home and you just want to sort of minimize cost of ownership? Is it an investment property and you want to flip it with a good ROI? Is it your forever home and you want to build it out to your future vision? And all that requires... There's a trusted information exchange. And so we had to take a leap of faith that customers were willing to do this. In exchange for the value prop of we'll help you manage your home, can we ask for more information? And we were actually really shocked that when we built out the onboarding experience and said, we're not just going to ask you for your immediate need, but we're going to ask you a broader set of questions about what you care about. Customers were happy to offer that because we made it clear if you offer this information, this is what we'll give you back in return.
And it really sort of shattered a bunch of closely held beliefs, that we can't ask for anything that doesn't translate into an immediate product decision. You know, just as an example, we were actually reluctant to ask homeowners for their street address. We said, well, we don't strictly need it. We need to know the zip code in which you live so we can filter down to the pros in your area. But pro needs to know your address to show up at the house, but we don't strictly need it. So let's not ask for it. That's a very sensitive piece of information. And we were actually surprised when we tested it and said, for us to really give you the best guidance, tell us your address, may ask for it upfront. And users didn't bat an eye. Asking for that data, which historically maybe created more friction because it was being asked for in the context of a narrower value prop. With this new value prop, customers were more than happy to share that information. And so, yeah, that was sort of an important learning for us.
Melissa - 00:29:28: That's a great learning point there that, you know, if you give value in return and you justify your actions here, people are willing to do things. But I see the same thing that you're talking about. A lot of people are, oh, we can't do that. We're asking too much. It's too, you know, too much of a user. But if you don't have a value prop, of course, it's too much for a user. But if you're going to do something with it and they know how, I've seen a lot of users willing to do that. So you've got this zero to one side now of taking Thumbtack, really helping people manage their home. You also have the core portfolio, which is the whole matching it up with the pros. How do you manage and think about the strategy of the core piece of Thumbtack versus the zero to one?
P.J. - 00:30:03: Every good portfolio will have both that sort of expansion area, that zero to one, that higher beta, like try new things, high risk of failure, but incredible payoff if you get it right. And then there's the more core investments around, hey, this is what we offered in the market. This is what we're known for. This is why people come here. It's never perfect. How do we make it better every single day and compound the core value profit, the core business? And they require fundamentally different approaches. You still need strategy. You still need deep customer insight. But a lot more on the growth side of the house, a lot more of the success comes from great execution. And so there's a set of tactics that you can put in place to really narrow and get specific on what are users biggest pain points in the product today? How do you quantify and stack right at them? How do you attack them with full force? And how do you make sure once you have that strategy side of the house, how do you make sure that you're executing with incredible rigor to bring this disparate, group of people together and make sure that everyone's playing their position and really focused on one set of goals and really deliver rapidly as possible? Yeah, I truly believe that particularly in this type of work, execution needs strategy for breakfast.
You know, if you're trying to sail a boat and you want to go due north and the wind's coming from the north, you can spend all of your energy trying to put point due north and calculate, you know, exactly the direction you're pointing, but not go anywhere. If you're trying to sail directly into the wind, you're not going to make forward progress. Alternatively, you can kind of. Tack your way there. You can go a little bit northeast. And then when you drift a little bit too far east, you can tack and go northwest. But by doing that, you may not be exactly on target, but you're moving really fast. And by pivoting as you go and learning by doing, you'll end up at your destination a lot faster. And so I really put a lot of emphasis on speed and execution rigor in the growth work.
Melissa - 00:31:55: One of the things that I've seen a lot of organizations do is kind of get distracted by the innovation piece, right, in lieu of the growth piece, right, or the core piece. And everybody wants to work on what's shiny and new. It's really exciting. I see a lot of executives get excited about the shiny and new stuff. And then that piece that we make all our money from is something we're really, you know, like, it's just going, like, let's not pay attention to it. But how do you make sure people are still excited about the core and still investing in the core and still aligned with the strategy going forward there?
P.J. - 00:32:30: A few tactics there. I think you're raising a really important point. Building a shiny new object in a way that nobody gets their hands on or ultimately doesn't fully can solve the problem is not value in the world. Maybe it'll make a headline here or there, but it's sort of a tree falling in the woods. You build a feature, but it's hidden in your app, and customers who need it can't find it. It's no good. You're not solving the problem that you came to solve. And so growth work, in my mind, is about helping users find that value in its fullest form as fast as possible. So increasing their speed to value of burning your product. And I think the product managers, the product teams that really thrive in that environment, are ones who really have a deep desire to remove friction or pain points from the product experience and to drive the business forward. One of the easiest parts about growth work is that you can ask customers very tangibly, what got in the way? Like, you started down one of our flows, and you didn't get to the finish line. What happened? What did we do wrong? Where did we lose you? And they'll tell you very bluntly, I didn't know where to go at this point. Or you asked me this question, I didn't know the answer. Or I just got exhausted. Like, see, I got to screen 15 of your flow, and I just got distracted. Life got in the way. The doorbell rang, or the dog barked, and I didn't have time to keep investing.
And customers will tell you exactly what's broken about your product or suboptimal. And so growth leaders really love that feeling of there was a problem that popped up, and 15.7% of our users ran into this problem, and now we've fixed that problem, and now the propensity of users hitting that is 1%. So that's a really tangible reward from sort of seeing those problems go from sort of top three problems to dropping down the list because you've made it better. And the other side is the gratification around sort of driving business metrics. So I love coming in every morning and looking at the dashboard of like, what's all the value that the team has created in the form of we track sort of some of the, all the AB tests that we have features that we ship that improve the product. And you have to take it with a grain of salt. There's limitations to that approach. But it's a crude proxy for the value that we're creating for all the stakeholders. And it's a really tangible way to come in every day and say, look, we've got all these people working on these initiatives. And over the last one to two weeks, we've created this much value in the world as measured through business metrics.
Melissa - 00:34:52: When you're bringing people in to talk about that, who's the audience? How much value your team's doing, what everybody's working on?
P.J. - 00:34:57: We sing it from the hilltops. You know, we have these open dashboards that anyone can look at across the org. It lays out sort of our goal tree from like CEO and board level goals down to different investments and their particular goals. And you can see how it ladders up. We publish this openly. And so people can see both the inputs and the outputs. They can see the inputs in the form of these teams are making these investments. They're trying to make these parts of the product X percent better. And here's how much value they've created there. And then we also show the output metrics, which is the, you know, the business result that we're getting. And they're not exactly one-to-one, but we show the linkage between them and say, look, we strategic our strategy is that we believe that we make these aspects this much better. We will get these output metrics to accomplish. And by publishing that, you can you can reward that work. You can recognize it and you can help. It's a form of communication. It communicates sort of what do we care about and what is our strategy to map our input efforts to the outputs that we care about.
Melissa - 00:35:54: How do you tell that story in the dashboard? I see a lot of people put a ton of charts, ton of things all over their dashboard, but they're not doing that linkage piece that you're talking about. And I think that's critical is the stuff that you see here is driving these results. How do you manage to tell that story? At the
P.J. - 00:36:08: At the highest level, we lay out what are our beliefs? So what are we trying to accomplish as a company? What do we believe will get us there? And therefore, what are our investments? And so you want to connect that dot between your ultimate outcome, the strategy, and where you're putting your money. And so, you know, in a tech company, the investment allocation is really, you know, we talk about our investment capacity in the term of, in terms of pods. So a pod is about 15 people cross-functional in nature. And we think about putting our money where our mouth is means assigning those 15 pods to the different strategies that we care about and how you allocate that engineering capacity, that product capacity is a manifestation of what you really believe your strategy is. So we write down our goals, we write down the strategy, and then we show how that maps to how we're allocating our AD capacity. And then really tactically, when we make these dashboards that say like, hey, are we getting where we want to go? There's a bunch of different details that really matter because the way you present data is a form of storytelling. So I've got a blog post that sort of lays out some of these tactics. But with our teams, when you're doing growth work, we lay out dashboards in a way that gives you historical context. So you can see, hey, is this, how has this metric been trending over a longer period of time, maybe before we started investing in it? Was it always trending up? Was it trending down before? Was it flat? And then, you know, we lay out for the period in which we're investing, obviously what's actually happening there. One of the things that makes a big difference is to lay out your path from the starting point to the end point.
So we always ask teams, draw what you think your path to success looks like here. Do you think you're going to have a big initial boost and then you'll kind of plateau and you'll get diminishing returns? Do you think you're going to need to build some infrastructures for three months? And so you're going to kind of bounce along the bottom for three months and then you're really going to start shipping products to users and start to see, user responses. And so you can draw these curves. Sometimes they're straight, sometimes they're concave, sometimes they're convex. And it's really a tactic in setting up your dashboards to help communicate between team members, other teams working in adjacent areas and leadership. What do you expect to happen by when? And it helps align folks of like, hey, if we're below that line, something maybe isn't going the way we planned. We should reflect on, is it a strategy problem or an execution problem? Other times you might draw the line where it says, hey, we're going to be flat for three months and then we're going to, and then we're really going to get on the gas pedal. And that gives the team some air cover to say, like, look, you know, we didn't expect to be 20% done and 20% into the cycle. So give us some time. We're going to, you know, we're going to build the building blocks. And then we expect in month four to really start shipping things at scale.
Melissa - 00:38:38: That's such a great communication point there too. I like the way that you're doing the charts because I think everybody thinks that product development is linear. You're going to build it, you're going to release it, it's all going to be great. But it's really bringing it back to not all of this is going to happen overnight. We can scale, we can be exponential, it doesn't actually have to be linear.
P.J. - 00:38:54: One of the arts of product management is everything's always a hockey stick chart. And you've got to kind of build up your case study examples to know what kind of hockey sticks are realistic and which ones are kind of bogus. It's not linear, but it's also not. It's rarely the case that you, if you have a six-month goal horizon, that you spend five and a half months building infrastructure. And then the last two weeks, you ship it and it's magic. And so helping teams really dial in, you know, how much not go to one extreme where we have to have impact on day one, but also avoiding the other extreme of, hey, we can build for five, six, nine months and then focus on the impact after the fact. There's a sweet spot in the middle there.
Melissa - 00:39:31: I think these communication tactics too are great for especially newer product managers or product managers actually anywhere in their career to really nail. What would your advice be, PJ, for aspiring product managers or product managers who are thinking about how do I become a CPO in a couple of years? How do I grow into this role? What would you advise them to start doing now?
P.J. - 00:39:50: My advice for PMs varies based on phase of your career. I think in the early areas or earlier phases, you want to build in your skill gaps so that those gaps don't hold you back. In later phases of your career, you want to find your superpowers and lean into that and use those to propel you forward. So just to unpack that a little bit, early in your careers, you need to be reasonably good at a lot of different things in product management. You have to understand business metrics and financials. You have to understand the technical systems. You have to understand the design philosophies. You have to translate and understand the company strategy. Any one of those gaps can prevent you from doing the basics of your job. You have to be competent in all of those things. Once you do that, you unlock this ability to play a translator role for your team because a lot of other disciplines are much more narrowly focused. And one of the biggest values you can add early in your career as a PM is to, once you close those skill gaps and you sort of speak all those different languages, you can translate, help your designers understand the business metrics, help your finance partners understand our go-to-market efforts. And really being that connector can be really valuable. Now, late in your careers, the assumption is that you can do all those things at a reasonably competent level, but so can all the people you're competing with for different roles. And getting, taking each one of those things and making it 10% better is not going to get you.
You know, that might get you from, you know, new PM to a mid-career PM, but that's what got you there isn't going to get you to the next level. The really senior roles require you to stand out from the pack. And so when you get to that turning point in your career, I really encourage people to say, look, you've gotten here because you're competent at lots of different things. Take stock of that, be proud of that, but then decide what is your really unique superpower? What makes you stand out from others? How do you build, how do you strengthen those skills? How do you build a personal brand around it? And then how do you use that personal brand to set yourself up so that you're taking roles where the things that make you unique and give you superpowers are the attributes that will, make that role a success. And the more you can find, you know, swear peg in a swear hole, where you really had something unique to offer that project that other people don't because it's not their superpower, the more value you'll create in the world and the more you'll thrive. And you have to be comfortable not being all things for all people will not be the best PM for every PM role out there, but really owning the strengths and setting yourself up to focus on areas where the strengths are most valued.
Melissa - 00:42:15: Such good advice for product managers out there. Thank you so much, PJ, for being on the podcast and for sharing your journey with us. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
P.J. - 00:42:23: Thanks for having me. I'm active on LinkedIn, so you can follow me there. I post writings from time to time. I'm happy to connect there and chat.
Melissa - 00:42:30: Great. And we will definitely put PJs in on our blog post. So you can go to productthinkingpodcast.com to find all of those links and also links to Thumbtack. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. So make sure you hit like and subscribe so you never miss another episode. And in the meantime, if you have any product management questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.