Episode 165: The Story of SpotHero & Breaking into Product Management with Matt DiBari, Chief Product Officer
In this episode of Product Thinking, Matt DiBari joins Melissa Perri to discover the secrets of product management in high growth companies. Together, they discuss effective user research, the different mindsets in B2B & B2C, essential skills in high growth companies, and breaking into product management.
You’ll hear them talk about:
5:25 - Matt explains whether there is a clear distinction between product managers and user researchers. The process of user research at SpotHero is handled by the product designers. Product managers collaborate closely with the designers and take notes during research sessions. The insights are then shared with the engineering team to ensure everyone understands the customers' needs.
13:02 - SpotHero has 125 people in the product and design teams. Managing both B2B and B2C marketplaces has challenges as the needs and time horizons differ. Matt explains B2B and B2C teams share goals that benefit both sides, such as increasing ratings and reviews. SpotHero ensures both teams understand the importance of collaboration and how their work impacts each other.
19:29 - High growth companies have a unique perspective, decisions and rules are up for debate. Matt reveals this differs from big established companies in that rules are unchallenged. The key difference is an attitude shift, in a high growth company people are looking to make things faster and more efficient without too much reflection. To find people who thrive in high growth environments, Matt looks for candidates who are curious, self-starters, and have a track record of influencing others. He asks questions about their messiest projects, their ability to learn and teach themselves new things, and their experience in influencing higher-ups.
36:54 - Matt encourages individuals trying to break into product management to start showing an early interest and start spending time with product managers. Candidates that shadow and proactively seek mentorship tend to perform better during recruitment processes. Demonstrating initiative is key, successful candidates have previously asked for recommendations of podcasts or books that’ll aid with their deep dive into product management.
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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 Perry.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're joined by Matt Dabari, who's a Chief Product Officer at SpotHero. SpotHero is a growth stage company that is taking on a lot of transportation problems, and one of them you may have encountered as you try to find parking in a city. Matt is an innovative product leader who spent nearly 15 years in the industry, and we're gonna talk all about SpotHero's growth, how they navigated COVID when people were out and not moving around so much, how they came back from that, and then how does he lead his product teams? But before we dive into that, we are first going to start with Dear Melissa. Dear Melissa is our segment where you can ask me all of your product management-related questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and drop me a line about which question you would like me to answer on a future podcast. Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, product startups get a lot of feedback from various avenues. There are mechanisms to gather feedback. However, what is the best way, tool, or mechanism to get feedback? How do you use the system to sift through and implement the feedback received? How do the best product companies do this?
So there's always different types of feedback that you are getting when you do product management. And I think it is important to first kind of classify what types of feedback you're getting and where they're coming from and why they're important. So you might need to go sift through all the feedback in a product strategy push, where you wanna go and ask questions about certain personas, how they're operating, how they're not operating, who's gonna be great for your organization or who's not gonna be great for your organization. In this case, you might be sifting through all the feedback trying to find trends, looking through key insights, and then you're going out to do more research. In other cases, you might have specific feedback about a release or about a product that you just put out there. The first step here is to contextualize your feedback. What type of feedback are you looking for? It's important not to implement everything that you hear from your customer. You have to think about in what context is this important. If you're getting a bunch of feedback that something is broken or something is not working for customers from a workflow perspective or from some feature that you have in a product, that might mean iteration at a team level where you take that feedback and you say, hey, in a new version of this or in our next sprint or in our next release, let's actually try to solve this problem because we believe it will lead to X, Y, and Z metric. In other cases, you're doing a bigger product strategy push.
And in that case, you might need to actually sift through all your feedback and try to figure out what trends you're seeing there. So first step here, no matter what, contextualize, right? Where are you looking at this feedback and what was it coming in from? And what are you looking at? And why did you collect the feedback? Did you collect it in sales? Did you collect it in an interview to ask specific questions? What were the questions that were actually asked? Typically, a lot of people are storing these in a repository, which I would totally recommend. Something like Dovetail is going to be really helpful because you can query it and start to get insights out of a lot of different research depending on the questions that you're asking. So first, store all the feedback somewhere, whether it's coming through sales, whether it's coming through your customers directly, surveys, whatever it is, store it somewhere. Then as you start to need feedback at specific moments, that's where you're going to start to look at the feedback and implement it. So for example, if you're planning a sprint, you might look at feedback around the product that you're looking at and say, can we solve that in this sprint? If you're looking at a full product, you might be looking at generalized feedback from that product strategy perspective where you're looking for trends and different personas, and you might need to go a little bit deeper or go through a lot of feedback to try to figure out what's going on there. The big thing is don't just jump at feedback because it's coming in. The best product companies are not reactive. They're strategic. They're looking at the feedback. They're constantly understanding it, but they're contextualizing when they receive the feedback. They're looking at the feedback.
They're constantly understanding where they're receiving the feedback and how it's going to help them win. And they're not just turning on a dime and doing whatever the customer asked for. They're trying to make sure they understand what's necessary for their business to succeed. So we listen to the customer, we digest that information, and then we choose appropriately how to act. We're not just getting inundated with feedback all the time and jumping and reacting to it. So that's the most important thing that you could do as a startup. Because if you start reacting to all pieces of feedback, you're going to become a custom software company and you're going to start to build things differently for every single client. And that's not a scalable software company, right? That's consulting. You don't want to turn into a consulting company. So that's what I would really say is make sure that you're looking at the feedback at the right moment and not just all the time, right? Not like constantly reacting to it. You can read through it. You can get some insights out of there. You can park it. But just don't react to every single piece of feedback that you receive. All right, now it's time to go talk to Matt. Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at hustlefund.vc/mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome, Matt. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Matt - 00:05:45: Thanks for having me. Been listening for a long time. I'm glad to finally be on it.
Melissa - 00:05:48: So you are leading the product teams at SpotHero, which I think is a really interesting company that is all about mobility. Can you tell us a little bit about SpotHero and maybe the journey of how it got to where it is today?
Matt - 00:06:00: Our co-founders started this after getting a bunch of parking tickets around Wrigley Field 13 years ago now. They were sick of trying to get home from the office and compete with all the Cubs fans and getting stuck on the street and getting tickets. So they figured there's got to be a better way to buy, reserve, prepay for parking and guarantee spots. And we grew from a little Chicago company to a nationwide company. And now we're in over 300 cities across all of North America.
Melissa - 00:06:25: When you have a really fun growth story, I became introduced to SpotHero when I was working with Insight Partners and Insight invested in you. I got very excited because there was a lot of cool things that were going on back in 2019. You had this ability for people to go and park and pay for their garages. I used that extensively in New York City when I lived there because we could never find parking. And it also helped me with figuring out how to move my car from one side of the street to the other, which I did every day. But you also had these physical components where you could go into garages and Bluetooth in and Bluetooth out. Can you tell us a little bit about from when you came into Spot Hero until now, what's changed? What's different about it?
Matt - 00:07:03: Yeah, so I joined 2019-ish, right, when I think you were peeling off. But yeah, we had, at that point, an aggressive labs plan, right? One of the most important things, and we still live by this ethos today, is give drivers the right of way, right? And one of the things we were really experimenting with with the labs group was different IoT-type devices to make the gate experience better, right? So instead of having to pull a ticket or scan a QR code, what if it just went up and down, right? Or what if we had things at the spot telling you exactly which spot to go to and cool things like that, which were all really interesting and cutting edge and a really cool thing to experiment with. And then COVID happened, and you have to kind of reevaluate which of those things really matter and which of those things, as a mobility company, when people are told to stop moving, which of those things should you continue to fund? And some of those we did kind of pause and or sunset, which were, you know, not the most fun decisions, but they're things that you have to do when those things come up.
Melissa - 00:07:51: During COVID, I'm sure everybody knows this, a lot of places that relied on mobility or people getting out of the house or going to places, a lot of places died. But SpotHero continued to grow. You are still huge in North America, all over the place. What did you do to kind of refocus the company and ensure that you could survive COVID?
Matt - 00:08:10: One of the things, like we were a big commuter business, right? To your point of like, hey, I work in New York trying to get in and out of the office every day. Having a spot where I'm pointed the right way down the right one-way street was really important. We were huge in commuter. During COVID, we had, I love my product design team. We have a great set of researchers that were out doing a pulse check with businesses and people. What are they expecting once things opened back up? And what we heard a lot was, hey, I moved to the suburbs or to the exurbs. So if I do go to work, I will drive more. So we had this hope that like, whether commuting will be hybrid or less, there'll still be a lot of people that are going to drive to some degree. But we did know that the signal was, hey, it's not going to be five days a week. It'll also be weird hours. So like the standard nine to five or eight to five parking is not going to be the future, right? Because I might want to be home for a kid's soccer game or breakfast with the kids, whatever that looks like. So we had to start looking at what else you're going to do, right? Because a lot of people bought cars. A lot of people still need to move around. And what we kept hearing over and over again was the drumbeat of, I don't want to spend as much time on physical goods. I want to see people. They yearned for people.
So we leaned in heavily in their event travel space, whether that was people driving to check out new cities or flying, depending on their comfort level. So we built up more partnerships and more coverage for those kind of segments of airport travel or multi-stays in Chicago, New York, big cities. We also leaned heavily into the event segments. We heard everybody say, I'm going to start going to games or I'm going to start going to plays or, hey, I'm trying to have dinner with friends. We started getting more inventory and getting more coverage. Right. Nights and weekends, other non-commuter transient hours. And again, we started building that up before lockdown, shutdown started ending. So we were poised to kind of ride that wave when things opened back up. And we're still riding that today. I mean, our business is infinitely bigger than it was during the shutdown. But, you know, we're two, three times bigger than we were pre-COVID and largely built on that kind of event and other transient and other segments for us that are just testaments of people wanting to get out of their house and us helping make it easier for them.
Melissa - 00:10:06: What did you do to go and figure out what the sentiment was that you should really lock down on? It sounds like there was some kind of customer research involved if you're hearing these things. What types of stuff did you encourage?
Matt - 00:10:16: Yeah, so the biggest thing was we got a very large segment size of former SpotHero users. Pretty much everybody was a former SpotHero user at that time. And we started sending them the same survey every six weeks and doing sentiment analysis on that. And then also just digging through the verbatims with some natural language processing just to understand like, okay, we're seeing these same themes coming up again of travel or wanting to get out of the house or sporting events. And then we also just, like I said, talked to our parking partners, talked to our event partners and started hearing about individual tickets for sports climbing up, talking to friends in the restaurant industry that were saying, yeah, we're starting to hear and see from people about reopening restaurants or getting ahead of reservations and things like that. So it was a combination of mass, quantitative, and then also just qualitative conversations with a lot of businesses and kind of triangulating the two. And they were all kind of saying the same thing, which made that easy at the end of the day.
Melissa - 00:11:07: So I feel like when it comes to surveys, a lot of people have learned to kind of stray away from them because people don't answer, right? What did you do to make sure that you're going to get quality feedback from those surveys?
Matt - 00:11:18: I think in some ways we're just lucky that people think highly of our brand. So when they see stuff come from us, especially I think during COVID time, people probably hadn't heard from us for a while. And they're like, oh, Spike, I remember you guys. And they were happy to open it and happy to give us feedback. Our acceptance rates or open rates or click-through rates on surveys better than anywhere else. I don't know that, but I know that if we do a couple thousand pieces, we'll get a good 25%, 30% response. And that's enough to give us a good signal of what's happening. And then we back it up with qualitative. We go back and actually talk to people and make sure that that's true.
Melissa - 00:11:51: When you go out and do the user research to back it up with, you know, talking to people in person or online, I guess, who's kind of doing that research? There have been a lot of discussions lately about user researchers versus product managers when it comes to user research. How do you kind of do it at SpotHero?
Matt - 00:12:03: Yeah, so I'm big on as little handoffs as possible. So typically when we do that, our product designers are all full stack. So they do research through UX, through VizD that we seek out. Or if we don't find them, we train the ones we have to do all. And while they're doing the surveys, usually the person taking notes is the product manager, their peer, their partner. So that way there's not any interpretation or handoffs from the researcher to the UX person to the product manager. Knock all that down and let everybody hear it as quick as possible. I know we actually use the videos or the audio or the verbatims straight to engineering. So again, we try to get as little interpretation out of that system.
Melissa - 00:12:39: So mostly it's the designers out there doing a lot of the user research, but the product managers are sitting in. And then you are sharing all that information back with the developers so that they are kept abreast of what the customers are talking about.
Matt - 00:12:49: Yeah, because it's all about building that empathy, right? You want everyone to feel that pain or that excitement, whatever end of the spectrum it's on, because I just think it makes everyone more creative and more excited about the work they do.
Melissa - 00:12:59: I really like keeping it tight like that too. And especially with the scaling team, how big is SpotHero from your team size? Like how has it been growing too?
Matt - 00:13:07: Right now we're at about 125 across product and eng. So, you know, really healthy group. About a quarter of that is product management, product design. So we are very active and out there because we think that's really important. Again, we try to spend, as a marketplace, it's fun, right? We've got to deal with both sides. So we've got some people that are really well-versed in talking to our B2B partners. And we've got some people that are really well-versed and their background comes from B2C. And that requires a step, I think, just a higher level or more people because you just have to deal with two different needs all the time, right? Like that high-turn, high-touch consumer side where you're competing with Amazon, all the other big e-commerce companies who set really great expectations of one-click shopping. And then on the other side, right, having the B2B, which parking is not the most advanced industry yet. It's come a long way in even just the five years I've been here. But it requires a very different touch, right, when you're talking to someone who is not using technology products every day to solve their business needs, right? They're face-to-face with customers and dealing with tons of steel and concrete and moving cars around. It's a different animal. So, you know, we have to be really versed in both those sides of the world. And it takes a lot of DMs and Project Engineers to do it right.
Melissa - 00:14:14: And when you're looking at your team and trying to figure out like who's going to be on the B2C side versus B2B, are you hiring for experience there? Are you training? Do you have like very clear distinctions between like B2C team sits over here or are people more crossover?
Matt - 00:14:28: It is a different mindset. So I think there is a skill or something that you are hiring for. People can transition across, I think. But typically, your B2C product managers, product designers are people that are looking for that higher turn. They're looking for that instant feedback. They've maybe read Lean UX or some of those books about how to do multivariate testing. And they're used to, let's test something, get to that thing quick, make a pivot. You can be less precious, I want to say, with what you're doing because you have the ability to reset with the new audience that marketing is bringing in tomorrow. On the B2B side, right, you maybe have 10,000, 20,000 customers. And everyone is super important. And their cycle time of how you roll something out and train them and get them comfortable with it is just very different. Your feedback cycle time is longer. Your reward system is longer, right? If I'm a consumer side PM, I may roll something out in the course of a week or two and feel really good about it.
You don't get that on the B2B side. So there is personality. There is style differences. And yeah, so we do seek that out and look for that when we are interviewing or talking to people for sure. Also. I find the B2B side is the place where I can take internals like from other departments a lot better, right? Because they can speak the language there. They have an easier transition path. And we're B2C. I tend to look for more product professionals, people that have done it elsewhere and are bringing fresh blood. So I kind of, I always think of the team as like a pendulum. I want some amount of internals that know the industry really well. And I want some amount of people that just know product really well. And they tend to fall on one side. The pendulum swings back and forth enough times. I end up with all the internals mostly end up on the B2B side and the product pros that are doing. What I would call standard e-commerce can come from anywhere because that's there's patterns that exist.
Melissa - 00:16:03: When you're managing a team like that, you know, the B2B side, as you mentioned, along with the B2C side, they've got kind of different cadences, I imagine, for product development, for testing, for the way that you communicate with customers. How do you kind of manage that from a roadmap perspective and from a process perspective and communication throughout the organization? I see so many companies struggling with this and products that are multi-sided or built in different ways.
Matt - 00:16:27: Clearly, when you're doing quarterly roadmaps, like I think most of us still do, you look at a B2C team slide and it's like, oh, we're trying three different things and we're going to get to this outcome. And then you look at the B2C side and you're like, we're trying one thing and we're putting all of our eggs in one basket. And from the business side, you get people that are not moving any faster. There's just a lot less risk in that side. So it's a lot about communication and expectation setting. I'm like, well, you don't want us to take a risk with the 5,000 or 10,000 customers that this impacts. You don't care if I take a risk with the 100,000 people that are going to see this test tomorrow. Like it's just, it's a different expectation setting. But it is hard when you put those slides up back to back and you're doing kind of an exact roadmap run through and they're looking and saying, well, that team seems a lot busier. It's just, it's different, right? The fidelity, the data accuracy is just so much more paramount on one side than the other, even just like the QA and testing. So it really just comes down to communication. The hardest part is actually when the teams work with each other because you've got a B2C team that's like, hey, I need this data or I need you to start getting this thing from our B2B side.
I need you to get our operators to provide this. It's like, okay, even if I build it quick and roll it out. And get them to all adopt it. That's a three or six month horizon. And the consumer side is like, but can I just have that tomorrow? And it's actually those teams that struggle, I think, the most with working because their time horizons are just so different. The business, you can get to understand it, but the teams themselves sometimes get lost in that. Or again, thankfully, they're very driven to their goals, but the other team's goals just have much longer time horizons. So that's where I feel the most pain. And it just comes with, again, trying to get them to shared understanding of what the other side's going through. And sometimes they help each other out. You get some awesome engineering. There's that can work across the full stack and can go help and speed up on the other side or bring some creativity to the other side. Or you just kind of sometimes just go, well, we can use partial data and get halfway there quickly. But yeah, there's definitely a struggle there. That's one of the, I call the fun challenges of marketplaces is getting kind of, you're basically running a giant B2B software company and a giant B2C software company at the same time. And the challenges that are, I think, are the most interesting because you get to do both.
Melissa - 00:18:19: You mentioned you're trying to create like a shared understanding with people about how both these sides works. What have you seen work well to build that shared understanding? What tools do you use?
Matt - 00:18:28: My favorite things is getting them both to align on the same goal. So let's say I'll use a pretty standard example of we're trying to drive more ratings and reviews. So we want consumers to give us more ratings and reviews. We want to increase the percentage of those so the number that we see is more accurate and we can give more information to other consumers to make a better decision. But when you're starting to ask people to grade your other customers, you have to have a communication loop that lets them know what people are saying about them and making them feel like they have a way to respond to those or answer those. So each team may have a shared goal of getting some sort of adoption rate or their own individual goal of adoption rate, but their shared goal is actually the success of ratings and reviews. So how many people are looking at them, how many people are answering them? Because one side can't go faster without the other, right? One side's not going to hit their goal. The other one doesn't participate. That's one of the beauties of marketplaces. If you really cut it horizontally from time to time, you'll start seeing that neither side survives without the other one. And you have to just find the goals that link those two sides together.
Melissa - 00:19:23: You think about doing goal setting across the organization and trying to bring those things together. What's kind of your key? And so are you looking at like, what are we going to do for this next year? How do we actually plan it? You mentioned you do quarterly type planning stuff. What's kind of your go to for setting strategy and thinking about it?
Matt - 00:19:38: You mentioned at the beginning, we're a high growth startup, so we would be naive to assume we can set a year plan and it would be accurate. But what we do as a company level, the exec team gets together and kind of sets a lot of the strategy for the year. The product team actually does it at the same time. And I kind of make sure that the two match up by the end of the planning session before the year starts. And then every quarter, we revisit it and do a whole series of pivots and realignments. So product leads a lot of that discussion and make sure that we are connecting multiple times throughout the year, whether it's at the roadmaps or in mid quarters when we started to kind of see that. So, you know, is that little a agile? Probably. But we set goals at the start of the year and then we readjust them every six weeks to 12 weeks, depending on state of the business. Because, like I said, we do move really fast.
Melissa - 00:20:23: Are you having like those discussions too? Is there like an executive meeting where you go through the goals and you look at those things and then you try to figure that out? Like what types of conversations do you have there?
Matt - 00:20:31: Yeah, so exec does that every month and then product does it every six weeks. So we get the feedback and then we, the exec team, provides what status product takes that and then gives pivots and we adjust back and forth at a really regular cadence. Again, I think part of that's our speed and velocity. I've been at bigger companies where that's a little slower or the cadence is much more, especially like a SaaS company that I was part of. Those business plans don't change as frequently as we do here for sure.
Melissa - 00:20:57: Yeah, you did come from a very large company to SpotHero. You came from cars.com, right?
Matt - 00:21:02: Yeah, I was there for five years. Yeah, they're about, headcount-wise, 10x the size. So very big org, very established org. They were original.com right back in the 90s. So, you know, very different way of approaching things for sure.
Melissa - 00:21:16: What was most surprising for you, you know, moving from a large company like that to high growth company?
Matt - 00:21:21: One of the things that I learned and now I definitely look for when I'm hiring people is that when you're at a big established company, there's a lot of things that are just accepted as rule of law. So like, hey, don't challenge that. That's an established thing. When you're high growth, right? Every, not every decision, but every rule is up for debate because everybody's, will it make us go faster? Will it grow us faster? Cool. Challenge it. Let's make a new decision. So there's just an attitude. But then the other thing I'll say is there's also just the availability of data and things like that, right? If you want to understand a customer base or look at what happened historically, right? There's probably a big analytics team, or you have maybe a bunch of people that are administering all your tools like Agile or Jira or Mixpanel or what have you. Then you go to a small company like, oh, wait, that's my job. I have to go make sure that Mixpanel is plugged into segment and that this is happening. And if I want the data, I've got to go make sure that I can go pull it or I can find time on one of the few analysts. The analysts that are stretched super thin, I can find time on their plate.
So it's the resources that you have available, whether that's actual software or people that you have to be just much more of a self-starter and much more of a go solve your own problems kind of space because you don't have all those extra people that are spending all day looking at those things. Or you're asking questions that are the first time they've ever been asked, right? Because when you're growing, sometimes you don't have time to stop and look in the rear view mirror. When you're big, you spend a lot of time on that. So sometimes you're asking questions that seem obvious, but no one's ever thought about them before. So now you've got to go create the whole library around it of research and data and everything else. So you've got to just be much more of a self-starter or be much more willing to get your hands dirty. And sometimes people, when you ask them that question in interviews, they're like, I haven't done that in 10 years. I'm going to opt out because I don't know how to do that anymore or I don't want to do that anymore. So it's super fun if you love that, but it can also be intimidating if you haven't done it in a long time.
Melissa - 00:23:09: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take? It's called Product Institute. Over the past seven years, I've been working with individuals, teams, and companies to upscale their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product dilemma. Visit productinstitute.com and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code THINKING to save $200 at checkout on our premier course, Product Management Foundations. What do you do to kind of screen people to see if they're going to be a fit? Because I've met a ton of people who have worked at large companies who go, I want to go to a startup, right? Like, I don't want to be the large company anymore. I want to go to a startup. And then they get there and they're like, what? And it's because of all the reasons you just listed. What kind of ways do you see if they're going to be able to deal with the chaos and with the unknowns before they get into the job?
Matt - 00:24:04: Yeah, I love asking stories about some of their messiest projects, which either turned out well or bad, right? You could say, hey, this was messy and it turned out great. And here's what I did to get it there. Or here's what was messy. And I love hearing from product people in interviews about what products they killed or sunset or things where they stopped throwing good money after bad and how they got to those decision trees. And when I hear them start listing multiple different titles and people that were part of the working group, I just pause. I'm like, we don't have half of those people. What did they contribute? And could you do that yourself? Because you're probably going to have to here. And that's like I said, that's when people will opt out. They will say, oh, that's not for me then. Or you get people that are like, no, that's part of why I want to go here, right? Is I want to get my hands deeper into the problems. I want to I don't want to have to wait for seven meetings and six people to get pull information and agree to something. I want to be able to make those decisions myself and go fast. But it's good to ask those questions about some messy project and get into all the people that were involved, especially from product, which is such a role where you have autonomy and empowerment, but you also don't have any authority. You're not anyone's manager. You're not anyone's boss. You're trading a lot on influence. And. Which. You start asking about the big group that they influence before you start seeing, oh, you did or didn't have a lot of control over what that group was doing. And then you can say, is that a problem? And if it was, they might get excited about going somewhere small.
Melissa - 00:25:13: That's a good one, too. I like the question that you were just saying, too. How much influence did you have over these people and was that good or not? I think that's something somebody has to remember to ask in the next interview. So when you're looking at your team and designing your team too, how do you think about hiring product managers? What are you kind of looking for in backgrounds? What's your process for getting people into the right role?
Matt - 00:25:34: As someone who's been in a product role for 15, 20 years and came from a, yeah, I guess non-traditional, I don't know if there's a traditional background. I say that knowing that there's no undergrad that's product management, right? People can argue about the merits of an MBA for it later. I do tend to look for people, especially for introductory roles, more junior roles, either from the industry that we're already in or people that have operational or consulting backgrounds because they tend to just be much deeper into the problem space. I look for people that are really curious about problems because that's the crux of the job, right? Where's that natural curiosity? So I'll ask people things in interviews like, at your last job, what was something that you were super interested in and just started just pulling data and didn't need to on your own, right? Did they show that curiosity? If they don't have a good answer for that, because again, maybe they didn't have that kind of, I was an operations person. I didn't have that ability. I'll ask them, what's something you're passionate about that you taught yourself over in the last couple of years, right? And you'll hear, I get wild stories about people that like, oh, I taught myself the drums or by just watching YouTube videos. And I'm like, okay. There's that curiosity and that, what I like to call the ability to learn to learn. You've taught yourself how to learn because this job every day, you have to learn something new. And if you figure out how you learn, you'll do great in this role, right? You'll figure out how to be good at product. And especially if you pair that with curiosity, where you're going to want to learn stuff every day anyway, because you're not going to be able to say like, oh, what are the last three projects you led? And can you tell me the successes of when they went to market, right?
They don't have that. But if you can search for kind of those innate softer skills of like that curiosity, that ability to learn. And then lastly, again, if you're talking about an intro role, you probably didn't have a lot of influence in your last role. Give me times when you turned a manager or a director or a VP or whatever level around on something, right? Where you saw something going wrong in the business or saw something going right. And you're like, we need to do more of that or we need to do less of that. And you convinced your higher ups, right? I'm looking for people that have that ability to sell an idea or convince someone that's not in their direct line that we should change or do something different. Because that's this job every day. Once you're into it, right? You're working with a manager or a chief marketing officer or some VP of something. And you're looking for people that are in sales, right? And you don't have any control over them, but you definitely have to influence them. So, you know, those are the kind of the softer skills that you seek out and look for that show that somebody is ready to kind of move in. And I tend to see more of that in operational people and some consulting people. You get a lot of that in salespeople, but then the reward system is completely wrong for them. And my history is when you find one that is cool, the reward system could be changing. They're awesome. But those are the ones that are hard to find for sure.
Melissa - 00:27:56: That's interesting about the salespeople part of it with the reward system. I didn't even think about it.
Matt - 00:28:00: Yeah, they're great at empathy.
Melissa - 00:28:02: Yeah, and they're good at talking to the users usually and trying to figure out what their problem are if they're a good salesperson, because that's what they do. If they're not a good salesperson, then they're just going to be selling everything. One thing that I thought was interesting was the consultants piece. I haven't actually heard a ton of people. I do actually think I've worked with a bunch of consultants who made great product managers, but I don't hear that from everybody. They kind of look at consultants, I think, as people who move from project to project. They're not Builders. Builders, you know, there's that kind of reputation in the industry for consultants. Why consultants? What have you found is good about them?
Matt - 00:28:30: Yeah, to me, I think that's a debate of is product a fully execution role or is it a strategic role, right? If you're a consultant, and again, you're the right fit for product, let's put that on the table, right? You're probably somebody who's really good at asking five whys and going down the well and getting all the way to the root problem of things and understanding and building empathy for your customer. If you can get through that part and you can set a strategic vision, here's what it looks like when we... Get this solved for you, right? Like, I can teach you the execution pieces, right? We can get you to a place where you can own something for two, three years. Yes, there is this fear with consultants, yeah, that you haven't had to go back and do a V2 of anything you've ever done. But, you know, that's something I think that you can, with the right ones, train that into them, right? Because you're just reaffirming their, hey, you went down the well, you found the root problem, you solved it. And guess what? There's another one right behind it. And they get to do their whole process over again. And that's what I like and find exciting about them is they're great at understanding root problems. And then they're usually good at selling that strategy and the execution, especially time over time over time. We can figure that out.
Melissa - 00:29:30: What I really love about what you said was the execution versus strategic parts too about product management. And I do agree with that with consultants. A lot of them are used to really diving into what the problem is deeply so that they can go and then execute or build a strategy around things. So they ask a lot of questions, which I think is really important for product management. Some people only see product management as this kind of operational or execution role. And I think that's where some, let's say, angst in the industry about product managers, to put it mildly, is coming from, where we get people saying like, oh, product managers suck and they don't know what they're doing. I see that come from this like agile, this kind of holdover from agile transformations where everybody was taught to like go manage a backlog, but not actually put the strategic part on it. But when you bring people in and teach them to be product managers, how do you ensure that they don't end up just as execution people, just as like owners of a backlog?
Matt - 00:30:25: You know, one of the first things we do is always start them on like, however, how you feel about it. Okay, our training, right? And I'm getting them to start thinking about objectives and thinking about longer term goals. And because, yes, you can manage a product sprint to sprint, but you're never going to get anywhere. You'll make it better. You'll solve bugs and defects and you'll make it, you know, maybe a point better on conversion. But you're never going to get anywhere. So we really tell them, hey, half your time is on strategy and half is on execution, right? We set a time even percentage just so that it's in their head, right? That clock. And then we really make sure that they understand, like, most of your job and the way you're going to get the best results is to think about that destination, right? That pot of gold, the end of the rainbow, whatever analogy you want to use that gets people excited, right? And work with your leadership group, insider group and your stakeholder group to align on what that is, right? Whatever the destination is. And then, yeah, the execution will follow. And guess what? If you get your product designers and your engineers and everybody else excited about the destination, you'll get there faster and much more creative ways. But if you're just focused on the next step in front of you. You're not going to get all the way there. So we really make sure that everybody that is in our org is really focused on that longer term goal. Like I said, in our place, that may shift every six weeks. It may shift every quarter.
It may not shift every quarter. May shift every six months or annually. When you get everybody excited about the destination, you just have a much different approach, right? It's much more strategic. You're making much more tradeoffs along the way because you're not worried about, did I get to St. Louis before I got to California? It's, I got to get to California. This trip may go through St. Louis. This one may go through Colorado. I don't care, right? I just want to make sure we get to California as quick as we can. Yeah. It's a mindset shift, especially if you take someone from ops where they are more tactical, but you really have to start drilling that ended up from day one. It's about the destination, right? It's about that goal setting that you did. It's about that hairy, scary, okay, are you set that maybe it's a little stretch, but you know, if you're shooting for something hard, you don't have time to minute every little detail. And also if you get everyone excited about it, you don't have to do every little detail either because the team will self solve those. So some of it's in function and some of it's in building excitement and some of it's just, I think we also do a really good job of. Getting more product minded engineers that also are happy to fill some of those gaps.
Melissa - 00:32:30: That's a really good point too. One thing that I've been hearing from a lot of people who are right into the Dear Melissa segment where I answer questions about this is, how do I stop babysitting almost my engineers? They ask me questions constantly. They want everything. You tell me I need to go be strategic, Melissa, but my developers are like, hey, I want everything written out into the tiniest little detail for me in a Jira ticket. Otherwise, I won't touch it. I won't start it without you doing that. How do you think about balancing teams and where a product manager should give credence for a developer to go out and make decisions versus where do they have to make concrete decisions there?
Matt - 00:33:09: Yeah, I mean, I think first off, right, you can't ever sacrifice quality. So if it's something where like I'm not writing good acceptance criteria that maybe control for some of the edge cases, you can't abdicate that. But beyond that, it is really about having those conversations in different planning or grooming and sizing of here's the goals of it, right? We're trying to get a story or get this feature out that does X. And as long as we're all aligned on what that is and everyone's excited about that. And yeah, maybe we have some awesome visual designs from the designer or some great mockups that give them great framework for it. But just remind them of that every chance, right? Like, does this get us closer to that? And it may take a little while of you asking that question. Do you need me to answer that to get closer to that? Does it need to wait for a cycle of me showing up to stand up? And then at a certain point, I'll even tell PMs to stop going to stand up, right? If that's all you're getting is this little minute questions that are not allowing the team to move faster, like you become a bottleneck, stop going to things. Make the team kind of self-form around you. You know, because what happens if you go on vacation for a week? What happens if you have a baby and you're gone for three or six months, right? Like that, you've got to be able to survive without you holding everyone's hand. So start by just not showing up to every stand up and not answering every question and instead answering it with the get us closer to the goal. And you'll get engineers that actually start getting excited by that, that want to have kind of some of the handcuffs off, right? And have some more freedom. You'll also maybe end up with some engineers that opt out, which is sad, but I think you end up faster for it.
Melissa - 00:34:26: It reminds me of almost like therapy when they tell you like the learned helplessness of like you have your family or your friends, right? Like that person who would just call you for something that you're like, oh, you could have Googled that. That's what it reminds me of, right? When the engineers are like, oh, can you come and like answer this little question? You're like, you could have figured that one out yourself probably. But I like that. I think it's the same mentality. It's the same thing like I think a therapist would tell you is like, tell them they're fully capable of figuring that one out on their own and then just do not keep feeding the beast, right? Like don't answer them. Do not give them the answer to it unless it's critical. Unless it's something that you do have to be involved in. But if it's something that they could figure out, let them go figure it out. It's not your job to tell everybody exactly what to do. I think that's a difference too between like engineering managers and product managers, right? Like we're not supposed to be an engineering manager and engineers have made it very clear that they do not want us to be engineering managers. So it's like we have to have that balance there where I can't tell you what to do every day.
Matt - 00:35:18: Yeah, I think too, part of that goes to the partnership with the engineering manager, right? When I think of the trio of like the PM, PD, engineering manager, one of the first persons you have to sell on that goal and that excitement is an engineering manager. And then expect them to kind of fill that gap. And they usually will, right? If you get them, again, excited about the solution, they've seen much more than their engineers. And they understand what good looks like or what great looks like. They'll fill that gap and keep it moving.
Melissa - 00:35:40: I think that's a good way to look at it too. One thing that you were talking about earlier was getting product managers from different backgrounds in as a first-time product manager. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who are not in product management yet. And this is super frequent question, right? How do I break into product management? So how, when you're going out and deciding like, hey, I can actually take somebody in and train them for this. What's that process look like? Are you putting a job description out there? Are you looking for people inside the company? Did you network with people? Like, how would you advise somebody out there to get noticed for this job or put themselves out there in the right way?
Matt - 00:36:16: For me, I have a hard and fast rule. This may not be for everyone. I always give internals a week or two before I post X outside. Right. And I make it very clear. I want to see someone inside grow into product. Right. I mean, I'm passionate about the industry. I'm passionate about product. I want to see more people get into it. Right. And I want to always fill every role with someone that's done it before. Right. I want to grow the numbers of us out in the world. So I always make sure that internals get a week or two, whatever I can tolerate before the speed of the placement has to be and give them a chance. But what I will say is the ones that tend to do well are ones that have found ways to spend a lot of time with the product manager already. Right. Whether that was job shadowing, there are people that have reached out to me and asked me for mentorship or, hey, what podcasts or books should I read to start thinking about this? Because I'm interested in my career planning. I do mentor outside of the companies I'm in. So I do kind of have a little bit of a network of people that I pull from or I will reach out to friends around me as well. If I do go outside of my, you know, the four walls of SpotHero that are, you know, leaders of other companies. Like, hey, do you have anybody that's interesting? I'm interested that, you know, I've got an APM job opening up, you know, associate product manager level. And, you know, do you have anybody that maybe was an intern for you before or something like that? So definitely, if you're interested in getting in, make it known. No one's going to know if you're at a good place.
No one's going to tell you no. Right. They're not going to say, hey, can I write shotgun on this project and learn something about it? What's a good podcast or book or blog? Or, hey, can I just pick your brain on something? Or, hey, I've got this weird project coming up. Is there a different approach I should take? Trust me, PMs have tried everything. We'll have some suggestion for you. And then it starts showing your interest. So, like, the number one thing is just show some interest. And then number two is spend a day in the life, right? Do some shadowing. Find a day where you can sit through a grooming and a sprint planning and feel some of that fun and pain in those meetings. And we'll notice you and we'll start letting you into the dorm more, right? Or, hey, we need somebody to find some data on this thing. Can you go look at that? Because it comes actually out of your department. And, you know, you start finding the people that are able to self-start a little bit, which is a big part of the role. And then when the openings come up, your name's already at the... The top of my list before we even opened it up.
Melissa - 00:38:14: Really good tips for people out there who want to do that. So thank you so much, Matt, for being with us today. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
Matt - 00:38:22: The best thing is just go to my LinkedIn page, send a note, send a connect, and I'm pretty active on there. So I'm happy to help answer questions about product or even entertain some mentorships or anything else for anybody that wants to get in or just want some tips or tricks.
Melissa - 00:38:34: We will link to Matt's links at theproductthinkingpodcast.com in our show notes. So make sure that you go there and check it out. We will also put SpotHero information there as well. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another fabulous guest. Make sure that you send all of your questions to me at dearmelissa.com as well, and I will answer them on a further episode. Thanks for listening.