Episode 184: Building Products for Product Managers with Trisha Price
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer at Pendo, a trailblazer in harnessing customer-centric innovation and integrating cutting-edge technologies into product development. Trisha, with her extensive experience in leading product teams and championing AI-driven solutions, shared her unique perspective on balancing immediate customer needs with long-term strategic goals.
In our compelling conversation on the Product Thinking podcast, Trisha explored how Pendo utilizes AI and LLMs to address real customer pain points while fostering a culture of experimentation and creativity. Her insights into creating a dynamic and innovative product environment, as well as her approach to implementing effective processes, offered a fresh perspective on modern product management.
Dive in as I unpack more of Trisha's strategic wisdom and actionable advice for navigating the exciting intersection of technology, customer experience, and product innovation.
You’ll hear us talk about:
10:57 - Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Insights
Pendo's vision, since its founding, has been to be a comprehensive platform for product managers, not just an analytics or digital adoption tool. Trisha highlights recent developments, such as the launch of Session Replay and Listen, the latter being an AI-driven tool to help prioritize customer feedback. These advancements align with Pendo's goal of continuously executing their vision. Trisha is excited about the ongoing execution of this vision, emphasizing the integration of qualitative and quantitative data. By combining usage data with customer feedback, Pendo aims to proactively address customer needs and enhance their product offerings. This holistic approach ensures that product managers can make informed decisions and prioritize effectively.
28:58 - Balancing Short-term and Long-term Needs
Trisha discusses the challenge of balancing short-term market needs with the long-term vision of the company. She emphasizes Pendo's core value of a "maniacal focus on the customer," which means prioritizing and addressing any bugs or issues that negatively impact customer experience. Trisha believes that solving current customer pain points and innovation can coexist. For example, when large language models emerged, Pendo's team quickly brainstormed how these models could address existing customer frustrations, such as the time-consuming task of summarizing customer feedback manually. This approach not only solves immediate problems but also leverages new technologies to enhance their product offerings. Additionally, Pendo fosters innovation through hackathons, allowing the team to work on creative ideas that often end up integrated into their products.
31:30 - Maintaining an Innovative Culture
Trisha explains the importance of maintaining a culture of innovation at Pendo. She highlights the significance of hackathons, where the product, design, and engineering teams have the freedom to work on their ideas. This practice not only fosters creativity but also demonstrates the company's commitment to valuing and implementing innovative ideas. Pendo also emphasizes the importance of leadership engagement, with executives actively participating in reviewing hackathon projects and awarding the best ones. This recognition and involvement from leadership reinforce the value placed on innovation. Additionally, Pendo ensures that every idea is evaluated based on its potential customer value, maintaining a balance between innovation and customer-centricity. Trisha underscores that creating a culture where process and customer value drive innovation is key to sustaining a dynamic and forward-thinking environment.
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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 Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're excited to have Trisha Price, Chief Product Officer at Pendo with us. Trisha brings over 20 years of experience in product development to Pendo, where she leads the product strategy and execution, helping companies elevate their software experiences globally. Her work impacts major clients like Verizon and Salesforce, driving innovation and business value through product intelligence. Today, we're talking about how Trisha leads the product management, product marketing, and product operations teams at Pendo, and what that looks like for them to work harmoniously together. But before we start talking to Trisha, 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. And today, we even have a question about consulting, which is going to be exciting. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what questions you have. Pro tip, if you leave me a voicemail, I do prioritize those and answer them faster. So I love to hear your pretty voices. dearmelissa.com, tell me what you're thinking. Let's see this week's question.
Dear Melissa, you seem to have moved directly from product manager to educator and consultant. Do you have any advice on how to land the consulting work after working with your direct contacts?
So when we talk about consulting work, there's lots of different types of consulting work. There is teaching and education. You run courses, you run workshops, you educate people. You can either do that internally at companies, or you could do that to individuals. There is interim and freelance type work, where you come in and you just just play the role. So you act like almost like a full-time employee, working on either a project or just filling in for somebody. A lot of people do this for maternity leave. A lot of people also do this when you're trying to hire an executive. So for me, I did a lot of that playing an interim chief product officer role. I've also done that earlier in my career as an interim product designer and product manager at other companies as well. Product leaders at different companies too. Lots of different styles to doing interim or freelance work. There's also deliverable type consulting. Deliverable type consulting is when you are scoping out something to leave behind, like a product strategy or a roadmap, or you're defining, let's say, the roles of an organization. You are coming in specifically to do a task. This is your McKinsey type stuff, right? Recommend something, leave a deck behind, or something else. Maybe also build something, right? You could be specifically coming in to be engaged to build something concrete. So what I'm trying to tell you is there's a lot of different types of consulting. The key to landing it is figuring out what type of consulting you want to do. And I've done all of these things. I know for me, I liked interim chief product officer work because we actually got to get in, get our hands dirty, do a lot of fun work there. I like the product strategy work. We can leave that behind. But I also didn't love that I wasn't implementing it when we did do those types of things.
For interim work with the chief product officer roles, I actually got to implement it. So try to figure out what you like doing, what do you not like doing. The biggest lesson I've learned from anything in consulting is to scope out what you're doing. You have to be very concrete about what your goals are, what you want to achieve, and what that means and what that looks like. So when I was approached to do different types of consulting, I would say, what's your goal? Are we hiring somebody? So for instance, with the Insight Partnership, I was usually coming in to be an interim CPO. And we said, we've got three months to six months before we hire a chief product officer. Somebody else is coming in. What do we want to accomplish in that time? What's the most important thing we could do? And we would scope that with the CEO and say, hey, we need a roadmap, or we need to hire a couple product managers, or we need to figure out org design, and we would concretely work on that. I knew that I was not going to be the person who was going to be there forever, so I'm not going to come up with the next 10-year product strategy, right? I'm going to get the things that need to get done to help move the business metrics done and make sure the team is swimming. And then I'm going to leave behind a lot of really good work for the CPO so that they can understand things like their customers and their personas and the user research we've done and the metrics and where you can get the data and set that up so that they're successful. In this situation, my goal is to make an impact in a short amount of time. I'm going to scope it out that way of what we're going to concretely do, but then also make the next person successful, set them up for success so they can hit the ground running when they came in. I also used to hire the CPOs as well.
So I would look for the right person, get them in, make sure it actually continued when I left. So that's an example of an interim role. With transformation work, the biggest thing I've learned here was you will eventually leave. Who is going to run that transformation continuously? And a lot of times, organizations want to hire transformation consultants and they want them to go do the work. They're saying, hey, you're in charge of actually transforming this company. A consultant cannot transform the company. The leaders have to transform the company. A consultant can advise the leaders on transforming the company. They can help you do that, but you can't hire somebody in to run it all unless that person has the authority to actually make change, which means they have to be a C-suite exec. That's usually what happens there. So you have to be an advisor to the executives. Are you being set up for success? Do you have the authority to help them actually move forward? Are they willing to move forward? With transformation, it could go on for a very long time as well. So you have to start thinking about how do I put my time in here wisely? How do I make sure that I'm being effective and that the pace of transformation is matching the effort that I can put in? These are all things that I would think about with your time and how much you want to do. So the key to landing here is scoping and it's asking yourself all these different questions. It's basically saying, do I really understand their problems? Have I asked a lot of questions up front once I get in touch with my direct contacts? And what can I do to help? And I've turned down a ton of consulting work too because I just don't think I could help in that moment.
So you should be saying no just as often as you're saying yes, because if you can't leave an impact and you're not doing what you signed up to do, nobody's going to hire you again. So that's how that really works. And I think scoping and figuring out what's the right thing to do and what's the most important things to get done, is really the key to landing it. So you can think about that as what's the right vehicle? Is it being here three days a week? Is it advising through coaching with executives? Or is it running a workshop for somebody? Like try to figure out what medium you're going to do to reach the goals. Start from that perspective. So I hope that helps. Now it's time to talk to Trisha. 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. Hi, Trisha Welcome to the show.
Trisha - 00:07:35: Hi, Melissa. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me today.
Melissa - 00:07:39: Of course. Can you tell us a little bit about your career journey so far and how did you come to Pendo?
Trisha - 00:07:45: As you know, I'm the chief product officer here at Pendo now, but I actually started off as a software engineer. I right out of school, I was a math major, actually an undergrad. I went back later for computer science, but I started off as a software engineer and remained fairly technical for probably about the first six to eight years of my career. A lot of my career has been in financial services. And so I got my first job at a product company. I don't know, somewhere around probably 2002, 2003. And that job was, again, as a software engineer. From there. What I realized when I started working there was that what I loved was whiteboarding and solving problems and driving value to the company. And like that was my first shift right from writing software as an IT professional versus building the actual product that the company sold. And that was really exciting to me. And this was before product management was really a widespread role. We certainly did not have anyone called product managers at that time at the company I was at. This was Eagle Investment Systems. So I would get on a whiteboard with some of the experts who really knew fixed income accounting.
That's what we were working on. And we would get on the whiteboard and draw pictures and figure things out. And then I would go back to my desk to code. And what I realized was like the joy for me was not in the clever implementation and the coding, but it was in the problem solving and the way that felt. And so that was sort of one of my aha moments and began my journey on the product. From there, I worked in several other roles. I actually have run sales engineering and I've led a sales organization. But my true love was product. So when I had the opportunity in the fairly early days of nCino to come and run product and engineering, I jumped at it. And I was there for six years from the very early days until a year past our IPO. I had a lot of fun hiring, scaling, building, innovating there. And then came to Pendo about two and a half years ago, to be the chief product officer.
Melissa - 00:09:57: What made you excited to join Pendo? It's a place that I'm sure everybody listening to this podcast is familiar with. They're probably using Pendo. What got you excited about it?
Trisha - 00:10:06: A couple of things. First, to be the CPO for the company that builds product for product, a little bit meta, a little bit exciting, right? And it just felt like I was going to get to not only build a team and work with a team of the best professionals in the industry for product, but all of my customer time is other product people. I probably spend 30, 40% of my time meeting with customers and I get to hear about their challenges. We get to sort of commiserate, laugh, high five together because we're just so used to solving so many similar things. And that was really appealing. On top of that, I knew I was coming to a best of breed product with best in class executive team. And that felt like an exciting choice as well.
Melissa - 00:10:51: So when you're looking at Pendo's strategy right now. What are you excited about? What are you working on?
Trisha - 00:10:57: I think even from the very early days when Eric and Todd and Rahul founded this company, they created it with the vision of being a platform for product managers, not to be a product analytics tool only or an in-app guidance tool or a digital adoption tool only, but to really be a platform for product managers. And that continues to be our vision today. As you know, we launched Session Replay at pandemonium last year. We just launched Listen, which is our latest tool on the qualitative side, allowing you to really, with an AI-driven product, Listen to your customers and help you properly prioritize. We're just continuing to execute on that vision, and we have a lot more we can talk about today that we're heading in, but we're really excited about that.
Melissa - 00:11:47: The landscape of product analytics tools, I feel like has grown over time. Google Analytics was the first one I ever used, you know, back in like 2010, 2011. And now we've got Pendo, we've got all these new AI startups, which are really cool. They're popping out to help you get stuff out of Salesforce and do things to understand your customers a little bit better than just tracking them around your app. How are you really looking at the shape of what is happening when it comes to enabling product managers and people inside of companies understand their customers better? Like, where are you watching that landscape going?
Trisha - 00:12:20: Well, I think what you brought up is the fact that to be a strong product platform or product analytics tool, you need the qualitative and the quantitative. And that's what you were getting at, right? Because if you only have the quantitative, the usage data, that's important. But how do people feel? What are they saying? What are your salespeople saying? What are your customers saying? Right? Not just Salesforce, but what are they saying in gong calls? What are they saying in reviews out there? And what are your customers asking for? And I think that the whole world, especially with AI now, is moving to this proactive. Let's not wait until right before renewal when a customer is jumping up and down and yelling and screaming for something. Let's be constantly combing our support tickets, the sales world for what all these themes are. And I think also when you just think about what's happened in the last year or two with LLM, the qualitative piece of the puzzle is a really natural place to use an LLM to start to see those themes. And we are doing just that with our listing products. So we're doing both. On the quantitative side, our machine learning team is building recommendations and insights so that you can know what to focus on instead of always having to go ask the system a question or build a report.
It's proactively going to tell you if you focus on this feature and adoption of this feature, you're going to get the outcomes you need. You're going to have better retention. You're going to have less churn, right? These kinds of insights and recommendations. And then on the qualitative side, using the LLMs to really comb for these enhancement themes, sort of a heat map to drive what your roadmap would be. But for us, it's not enough to just have a summary of what all of these different data sources are saying. Then you got to prioritize them. And an LLM can't necessarily tell you where to prioritize, but your customers can. And so we're actually going one step further and taking all these themes, taking all these summaries, and then helping you use our analytics and in-app messaging to prioritize those things. So go target the users that matter. You're trying to solve a new user problem, ask your new users. You're trying to make the admin experience better, ask your administrators. And we can do that by using the analytics in Pendo and the in-app messaging and bringing all of those pieces together. And that kind of comes back to the original comment around a platform.
Melissa - 00:14:50: There's been a lot of talk, I feel like, with LLMs and with ChatGPT about, and all these products, right, being able to gather these insights where they're saying, is this going to like replace user research or is this going to replace like product managers? Since you build the product for product managers, right? Like how should product managers be thinking about how to do use apps like Pendo in their everyday work? Is it replacing some of the work they're doing? Is it adding to it? What's the goal there?
Trisha - 00:15:16: Our hope at Pendo is that it's taking some of the manual work off their plate so that they have more time to think. They have more time to talk to customers. There's no amount of data. There's no amount of research at scale that replaces going out and spending time with your customers, understanding what their goals are, what's their strategy two years from now, what are they trying to achieve this year, and how can your product help them. And so to me, I don't think it replaces product managers, but I do think it replaces some of the manual work that they've had to do. You know, maybe the manual work was on the customer support side where they were having to go through all their support tickets and find themes. But maybe it's in the product team. And to your point, in the user research team where they're really, they're not just doing the research, but then they're trying to summarize it and make sense of it. NPS is another great example. We have NPS in Pendo. When I first came here, I had people in our product operations team going through the verbatims every single quarter and telling us, what should we be paying attention to? What are these themes? Well, Pendo's AI does that for us now. But it doesn't mean that the product managers don't still need to read it, understand it, think about it, and plan for the future and prioritize. So hopefully it just gives them more time to do the work we as PMs always love.
Melissa - 00:16:33: That kind of aligns with my philosophy on how I think about product operations too. And you just mentioned that. Pendo was a case study in our book as well with Christine, and how she launched it. Can you tell us a little bit about what product operations looks like now at Pendo, where you've come from, what changes you've made?
Trisha - 00:16:49: Christine was on the forefront of creating product operations here at Pendo and for the industry. And I think to your point, it's really transformed quite a bit over time. And I think a lot of what they did in the beginning for us at Pendo was take some of that manual work off of product managers, help with some of the operational bringing data, telling them where to pay attention. But a lot of that is automated by Pendo and AI now. And so when we think about product operations now, we take a step back and we say, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve? Let's take, for example, a new product launch. We're trying to launch Session Replay. What's the goal? Well, the goal is that our customers are buying, using, and loving that product, and so what are all the things that the product operations team can help us do to achieve this? And one piece of the puzzle is program management. We used to, in product and engineering, often think about scrum masters and just getting code into production. But if people aren't using it, if there's no Salesforce CPQ to sell it, if it hasn't gone through enablement, if product marketing hasn't helped us with messaging and positioning, it's not done. I can tell you there was a couple of times, early in my time here at Pendo, where something was marked in our systems as complete.
And then I went into our product and I couldn't find it. And people said, oh, well, it's done, but it's not turned on. What do you mean it's not turned on? Well, it's not turned on because we haven't finished with all the go-to-market activities. And so we changed our concept of engineering or code complete to whole product complete. And whole product is customers using it and loving it. And so product operation helps us with, program management across that whole thing, setting the goals. How many people do we want signed up for beta? Do we want our lists oversubscribed? What's happening? How do you coordinate with customer success to run these betas well? And then on the other side is systems, systems like Pendo . We believe in at Pendo, we do this. Our product managers themselves can set up their dashboards, run their reports, have access to the data. It doesn't need to be funneled through an operations team, but the operations team does need to make sure that the integrations to Salesforce are working, that the Metadata is clean. So that every team, when they go in and they set up these dashboards are getting consistent data and correct data.
Melissa - 00:19:13: Somebody just asked me on my LinkedIn too, on a product operations post, if the product operations person was a program manager. And I think it's interesting that you've rolled program management into product operations. Can we talk a little bit about what do those program managers do? And are they different than some other roles that you have on the product operations teams?
Trisha - 00:19:32: Do have different types of roles in product operations, to your point. The people who administer the systems are not the same people who are program managers. They just all roll up into the same leader of operations. And so there are two different kinds of people. At Pendo, the thing they have in common is we do expect everybody to know how to use Pendo, whether you're a product manager, whether you're in systems of product operations, or whether you're a program manager. So the program manager is really there to help make sure that we hit the goals on time, on budget, as much as possible. But most importantly, that our customers are getting the value out of our R&D investment, right? That we're getting this product into their hands. And so that's the program manager's job. It's a lot of communication. It's a lot of removing roadblocks. It's a lot of coordination between teams. And thinking outside the box when something's not working. Do we need to add more resources? Do we need to extend our beta? Because the feedback we're getting isn't great, and we need to reassess our timeline. So that's really what their role is in program management. That's a little different than the systems people who are going in and connecting our integrations into our product or setting up our metadata.
Melissa - 00:20:50: The program managers, some people have this role in product ops too. They're kind of in charge of the experimentation, like setting up the alphas, the betas. Are they doing that piece or is that more of the product management job?
Trisha - 00:21:00: It's a mix of both. It really is. And we often think about our program managers the same way you would kind of think about a scrum team. It's a little less structured of exactly who has to do what and more of a team effort of what does success look like. So if success is we want 400 users in this early stage beta, it might vary who does what in a given moment. So when you talk about experimentation, is experimentation going out and running guides and running different guides experiments to try to get interest and raise awareness of the beta? Is experimentation, two different UIs and trying to figure out what the feature, how it should actually work. There's going to be heavy design involved in the latter type of experimentation. Product operations might run the former around some guide experiments to drive interest. And they may be partnering with product marketing around what's the messaging to get across the value we're trying to deliver to get people excited about the beta. So it's a little bit more of a team sport than it is exactly clear delineations.
Melissa - 00:22:10: Product marketing, which you've been mentioning as well in this, it's just like a hot button issue, I think, for people out there. I believe it's because there's a lot of companies out there with really bad product marketing. And the product management teams are picking it up or it's falling on them. And they're more concerned, like, let's say, with just launch and creating materials for launch. But they're not doing a whole full gamut of what product marketing typically would do. Can you tell me a little bit about, like, how do you see the product marketing team at Pendo? And what are their responsibilities? And how does that compare, I guess, to both product management and then product operations?
Trisha - 00:22:43: At Pendo, product marketing reports in to me and they're a part of our product team. I think if you ask most of them, they equally feel a part of our marketing team as well. Like, it's a very shared team between both. I think that often people think about product marketing as a bridge from product over to go to market. And I always joke and say, we don't need a bridge. Like, we need a tsunami. We don't need someone to take the ticket, for lack of a better word, and bring it over to the other desk to connect the two and change the words and the messaging from, like, the product speak to the market speak. I mean, of course, that's a part of the role, but it's so much more strategic than that. When you think about how are people going to buy, how are you going to improve your win rate against your competition? How's the industry changing in terms of ROI and value? And what is their business case? And then you bring that back, to pricing and packaging. That might change what features you prioritize or build when you have a good understanding of the competitive landscape.
When you think about how people are buying, when you think about packaging, right? You might need to build, let's say you're doing a good, better, best model. If you build this feature, this feature, this feature, and you haven't already thought about what's in pro versus base or good and better and best or where your lines are between your modules that you're selling, you know, you might come out with sort of a Frankenstein set of features that solve problems and jobs to be done, but aren't actually aligned with how you're going to sell and the value story. You need to think about that up front. So I think about product marketing as such a strategic and important voice at the product table. And I also think if you're a highly innovative company who's launching new products often, who has an AI story, who's doing a rolling thunder of features coming out regularly, having product marketing in those product conversations all the time is really important rather than trying to look at things at the end and be that bridge.
Melissa - 00:24:47: 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. So when you're looking at your strategy and you're trying to set your product strategy for the next couple quarters, year, whatever you're looking at, what's your process for including product management, product marketing's voice, pricing and packaging? Like, how do you look at those to help you set strategy and who's involved in that?
Trisha - 00:25:35: I mean, strategy starts at the C-suite in terms of company strategy. So I think it depends if you're talking about the macro level, like what new product do we want to invest in or, you know, sort of investment allocations across your sort of R&D teams. That starts at the C-suite level versus if you're talking about within a particular product prioritizing features. At the macro level, the way we do it and just always been so impressed with Todd and the way he runs Pendo is we have a very clear set of cadences. We have quarterly planning that we do as a C-suite. And then right after that, we have executive planning. And we set our OKRs during that. Now, as you can imagine, as a product leader, you can't flip around your product strategy every quarter. And we don't. At least one of our quarterly planning is a long-range big bet planning, where we start to think about who do we want to be three years from now, five years from now. And then we back that into two years from now. So, we very much think about the go-to-market and the product strategy together. For example, if we want to have more success in Europe, we should be thinking about product marketing in Europe. We should be thinking about what are the product nuances in those regions. We need to think about, you know, localization. And so those are together. We think about how are we hiring and sales. Where's the marketing spend? Where are we spending our time? Are we going to go do conferences in that region? All the way to what features matter. And I think it's really important that you think about company strategy, not just product strategy.
And I think Todd and Pendo does a great job of that. And so then it's about rolling that down. Okay, this is what we're trying to achieve over the next year or two years. What does that mean for us? When it comes to a particular product, I really trust my leaders on that. And I am grateful to have three great SVPs of product on my team. One that runs session replay and listen. One that runs sort of more how you think about Pendo core, like guide and analytics, as well as some of the AI pieces. And so we kind of break it out that way. And so they really, knowing that we're aligned on the strategy, they're all a part of the executive team and they come to that quarterly cadence that follows the C-suite cadence, are able to work with their partners in support, engineering, success, and sort of prioritize from there. But what we do is we align on product OKRs and goals. And so what are we going to measure? So while they're out there figuring out what are the different features that they want to build, what we are aligned on is the outcome we're expecting. For example, we want to increase. Usage of a particular part of our product, or we want to upsell a particular part of our product, or there's a new competitive pressure and we want to improve win rate against that competitor that we align on as a leadership team of product. And then people go from there to prioritize.
Melissa - 00:28:41: When you're thinking about strategy and you mentioned you've got this cadence, how are you balancing the short-term needs of the market with the long-term needs of the company or the vision of where you want to go? And how do you make sure you still leave space for innovation? When the LLMs come out, you go, oh, let's do something with that.
Trisha - 00:28:58: It's always a dance. There's never a perfect math equation or easy answer. At Pendo, we have a core value that's called maniacal focus on the customer. And if we have a bug or an issue that's making our customers' experience less than optimal, we need to prioritize and fix that. And we have maniacal focus on the customer. And you'll see that we'll rally around issues, we'll rally around our customers, and that's incredibly important to us. So that does come first. I think that there's sort of a false dichotomy between solving customer current pain and innovation. Like, I actually think they can be one in the same. And what I mean by that is when the LLMs came out and everyone was starting to figure out their roadmap on them, one of the first things we did is some of my product leaders, Eric, our CTO founder, and Todd, we whiteboarded and we said, one of the things that even with Pendo, people are annoyed by or have to spend the most time on and which of these are candidates for the LLMs to help with.
And so the LLM, of course, might be able to solve a problem that you couldn't have solved before. But typically, you still want to make sure that you're solving customer pain. And you probably hear us at Pendo often talk about, is the product you're creating a vitamin or a painkiller? Is it something that's nice to have that makes your day better? Or is it actually solving real pain? And I think a lot of times with AI and the LLMs, people have just built something because they can versus solving customer pain. So, you know, earlier we talked about NPS, nobody who uses Pendo or any NPS system wants to read every verbatim and manually summarize them for people to read. That is a real customer pain that we had today. And then there's the LLM to solve it. Now, there's some out-of-the-box innovation to your point we do as well. We have hackathon twice a year where we give our entire team's product design and engineering the freedom to go work on anything they want for a few days. And they come up with amazing things that end up in our product. So there is just sort of this room and culture that we create for people to just come up with anything outside the box as well.
Melissa - 00:31:10: I think with that culture, right, a lot of innovation comes from that. What do you do to make sure that culture stays strong? Are there any practices or any tricks you feel like that you found really work to maintain an innovative focus and to help people keep focused on the customer rather than just like, hey, this is our value, right? How do you practice that value?
Trisha - 00:31:30: So there's two pieces. One is the innovation pieces, the hackathons and giving people time. I mean, if that's two weeks a year, whatever you can give, making sure that you take time out of picking up JIRA tickets and backlogs and just letting people have the freedom to try something that's their own idea. I think that's really, really important. Now, as a part of that, culturally, what makes that exciting for people? We have awards. Our head of engineering and Todd and I and I go through each and every single one of those hackathon videos. We watch every one of them and help pick the winners. So people know that that's important and special and they have a lot of fun with it. And so I think that's part of the culture. They also know, everyone here knows if they come bring any of us in leadership, any product leader, any engineering leader, Todd, an idea, we're going to listen. We're going to riff on it. Now we're going to ask what customer value does it drive? And I think to me, that's also a part of creating a culture of process and making sure that your process understands the goals as well as the customer value, you're going to deliver. And that's, you know, sort of the other side of the coin from the innovation.
Melissa - 00:32:41: Yeah, a lot of people don't love to talk about process. I think they got stuck on scrum. And you say that word and people think it's a bad word. But to me, I've found that in a lot of companies that look like very successful companies as well, sometimes it is just a process problem, right? Like culture is good, this is good, but there is no process to do X, Y, and Z. And you put that in and it solves it. How do you think about operationalizing your process? And what do you and your product leaders do to make sure that all of this works together to keep delivering value?
Trisha - 00:33:15: So to me, process is not fill out this report. If that's what you're doing, then I can understand why it is frustrating and it feels like a waste of time. And I'm not saying you never have to write a document. We write tons of documents. But it's not about a report. It's not about a template. To me, it's about the cadence and the questions that you ask in the preparation. So you should have a set of quarterly cadences, a set of monthly cadences, and a set of weekly cadences for different levels, for different teams, for different efforts. And so what do you do in those cadences, right? You either write down on a doc or you're looking at a dashboard, sometimes a combination of both. What are your goals? What did you achieve since the last one? And what are your goals for next time? And sometimes that could be we're going to run experiments. You talked about experimentation. Hey, we're trying to solve free-to-pay conversion. We don't exactly know what is going to improve free-to-paid conversion. We're going to run these seven experiments in the next quarter and come back and figure it out. Well, but we know this is our goal is to improve this. And that's what we're holding ourselves accountable to. And so when you come to that cadence, you know you're going to review what worked, what didn't work. And then once we double down on it, we're watching the metric. And now we're talking less about the experiments and what we're going to do when we're just watching the metric.
And then if it stalls or changes or starts turning in the wrong direction, we rethink the strategy. We might try a different experiment. That is one useful process, but it depends what you're trying to solve. That works very well for second week retention or free to paid conversion. That doesn't work as well typically when you're trying to launch a brand new product and get product market fit. And so there, you know, you're thinking about your alphas and your betas and your design partners. And you're thinking about what is the value metric that you know they're getting value out of your product. And so you're very focused on that. And so to me or for a very mature product, we want to improve usage in this particular part of our product. So when they come to those cadences, it's about what am I trying to achieve? I'm trying to improve usage of this particular feature. So here's what I'm going to build to do it. And then here's all the other things around building the software, like using in-app guides, like doing customer-based emails to get people aware of the new feature. And thinking about that holistic program or campaign around what you're doing. And so for me, I enjoy process, but I think process is more about the cadence and the questions you're asking and the way of thinking than a particular report.
Melissa - 00:35:47: When you think about product teams, what are some must-have things that you do or meetings or processes on that weekly, monthly, quarterly basis that you're like, this is how you should be thinking about these timelines?
Trisha - 00:35:59: So some of the scrum ceremonies are still quite helpful. Probably not for the CPO level unless you're a really small company, but for your individual teams, I still think end-of-sprint demos are very valuable in making sure that you have working software. I think that still matters a lot. But when you think about from a product management standpoint, to me, it's in the monthly. Every month, I meet with each of my squads to understand what were their goals last month, how did they achieve them, what did they build, what did they say they were going to ship, what did they ship, and then what do they plan to ship next month and why? And what are their goals for it? So I do that every month with each of my squads. Not each scrum team, but each squad, sort of each functional area. Maybe you could call it product, but sometimes it's not quite that simple. Like, for example, integrations. Is that a product? But that would be a group I would meet with. So I do that. And then I'm sure that flows down to how often they meet in terms of cadence as well. Quarterly, we do a product business review with executives across the company. And there we do the same thing, but just taking up a level. Instead of each squad, it's the whole product team. And they're talking about what did we ship last quarter, how is it performing against our goals, and what are our goals for next quarter. And then we do the same thing in a separate meeting for product marketing, where they talk about what are the launches that they're focused on, what is the research they're doing. And in a separate meeting, also led by product marketing, we look at win-loss and sort of competitive landscape each quarter as well. And that drives product strategy. It also drives sales enablement strategy.
Melissa - 00:37:38: When you're looking at that competitive landscape and the stuff from the product marketing, what types of things come up in that area? Because I feel like sometimes people think that's on product management. People are not sure if that's on product marketing. So what are they bringing to the table or reporting on so that product management can look at it and say, oh, we need to reprioritize or we should change this path?
Trisha - 00:37:57: And they're presenting both to sales as well as product at the same time. So what our team does is the product marketing team works very closely with RevOps to look at each deal and understand the win-loss, each deal, why we lost, why we won, in which segment, and against who. And their job is not just to give us a clear picture of that data, but to show us trends and also to give suggestions, right? It's not just an analysis meeting. It's, hey, by the way, if we thought about feature X, Y, and Z, we think we could have changed the win rate by a certain percentage. Or what they really think is we need to relook at our pricing against this particular competitor. Or they're really thinking about AI in this one space. Are we? And they're just an input. At the end of the day, product management owns the prioritization. But this is an incredibly strategic and important input because we're leaving a lot of revenue on the table if we're losing a competitive deal. And then sometimes they're just working with sales enablement on updating a battle card and thinking about re-enabling our sales team on different messaging.
Melissa - 00:39:05: Do you have a way to, besides the cadences for product management, to dig more into those numbers or see what's coming in from sales that way?
Trisha - 00:39:12: Yeah. So when it comes to sales numbers and overall company numbers, including product usage that comes from Pendo, we do aggregate everything into a series of dashboards for the whole company that everyone has visibility into. We believe in transparency here. And so everyone can see from an ARR perspective what we're doing and how we're doing. And they can see that data. And we want people to look at it. I'll ask a particular product manager, do you wake up in the morning every day and just freak out if you lost a deal to a particular competitor? I want them to have that kind of spirit and focus the same way you would if you were the salesperson who's commissioned check dependent on it.
Melissa - 00:39:53: When you're looking at the future of this area of product management and what it's getting into with AI, what are you excited about most?
Trisha - 00:40:01: I'm really excited that AI and the LLMs can solve problems in a way that would have taken us a really long time a while back. It's sort of magical, your ability to ask the LLM a question and have it process an enormous amount of data with context if you do it the right way and give us an answer. For example, almost all of our customers have a knowledge base somewhere, and they've all created documentation on how to use their product. But then they come in to use Pendo, and they go to create a guide, and they have to go create that guide. Well, couldn't AI have just looked at the knowledge base and the documentation and at least given me a starting point from it? I think that's so exciting, and I also think it's exciting for all of us as product managers and engineers to learn something new. I just sat in a session, and it was probably the most fun I've had in a long time a couple weeks ago with our engineering teams. And tech leads were walking me through RAG and how it was working and what it was all looking like and what are the challenges. And it was so fun to learn a whole new technology and open my mind to thinking about problems we can solve. So I think that's really exciting because I think most of us come into the profession of product because we do have a curiosity, and we love to learn and solve customer value. And I think that AI is just opening the world of that to another level.
Melissa - 00:41:23: If you were to give yourself advice, if you were starting as a product manager today, how would it be different than when you started as a product manager, right? What should you be concentrating on or paying more attention to these days?
Trisha - 00:41:35: I'm going to first start with what I think is the same, and then I'm going to say what's different. And I think the things that I would say the same is being curious, getting your hands on technology, making sure you understand it and can play with it. I'm not saying you have to be a developer and you have to come from an engineering background. You don't, but you have to be technically curious and understand how these tools work and what the world of possibility is and getting your hands on data. The other piece I would say is the same is spend time with customers. There's just no replacement for that. The things I think that are different is making sure you're using your time wisely. And maybe we did that before, but the tools we have at our disposal now, I mean, when I started off as a product person, there were no product analytics tools like Pendo. There certainly wasn't AI to go summarize all of this stuff for me. And so making sure you're using that so you can have highest and best use of your time, which comes back to that customer issue. And I mean, when it comes to AI, play with it, take courses on it. Just be as curious as possible.
Melissa - 00:42:35: Well, thank you so much, Trisha, for being on the podcast. It's been really great talking to you and learning so much more about you. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
Trisha - 00:42:43: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place. You can find me there.
Melissa - 00:42:47: Great. And we will put those links to you. Trisha's LinkedIn profile and a link to Pendo so that you can check it out on our show notes, productthinkingpodcast.com. So go there and definitely check it out. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest on the Product Thinking podcast. Stay tuned and make sure you hit that subscribe button. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are.