Episode 80: Dear Melissa- Answering Questions About Scaling Up Teams, Defining User Value, and Workplace Burnout
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about scaling up a whole junior product team at once, how a listener can align her team’s KPIs to user value, and why product managers are more susceptible to experience burnout.
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Q: What’s a successful approach to scaling up a team of junior PMs without leaving stragglers behind? [3:47]
A: The most successful approach I’ve seen is to bring a couple of experienced people who can show them what good looks like besides just you. What you’re going to want to do is assess your team members’ skills, and then also look at your strategy and see what you need to get done. Do you feel confident that you have enough coverage over all those areas? If not, you might want to hire somebody who's more of a senior product manager that can take over some of the high priority stuff… The most successful companies who make this transition hire a mix of senior people in with their junior people so that they can take some of that coaching and demonstrate what good looks like. [4:59]
Q: How can a team responsible for security set measurable goals that show whether we're delivering real value to users when we're so far removed from the user value? [9:08]
A: If you think about it, credit card security provides a lot of value - you’d probably have no purchases on your site if people don’t feel secure about it, and there definitely won’t be any repeat purchases. So you are basically saying that by having better credit card security, you can increase repeat purchases in a given time period. I think there’s a direct link here… I'm sure people have done studies about people being more likely to shop online when they feel safe about their credit cards, so maybe you should get some of those numbers. That will help steer you in the right direction and feel like you have that user value. [9:45]
Q: What makes product people seemingly have a higher potential to experience workplace burnout? What can we do to proactively prevent or combat this? [13:19]
A: I have seen product managers burn out left and right and it's because you have to deal with a lot of moving pieces and sometimes it all comes back down to you. Product managers deal with literally everybody else in the organization… so you have to put yourself in the shoes of marketing, sales, operations, customer support, developers, designers, and the executives. You have to constantly be thinking about how to communicate with them, how to get their buy-in to move forward, how to take all the feedback you receive and translate it into what the company should do… I see people burn out in organizations where they're constantly battling all those other functions to just do their jobs… All of these things can be solved hopefully with cross-functional collaboration… If you want to keep your good people, you want to make sure that you're not overwhelming them and that you are really setting them up for success [by] creating an environment in which they want to come to work every single day. [14:04]
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of dear Melissa and happy August. Where did the summer go? Where did the year go? I can't believe we are almost into the fall and you know what the fall means. It means strategy planning season. So if you are worried about getting into a room for a week and making up all the stuff that you're gonna put on your roadmap, I suggest you listening to a couple of our previous episodes about strategy planning. So you can avoid that. What a fun time of you're a September and October. Let's, let's just all get together in a room and make up what we're gonna build next year. That's usually what happens, right? I've been a part of those conversations. So I wanna make sure that you don't start off on that foot. And instead you start thinking about how can we do this correctly?How can we start scaling our strategy correctly? How can we set the right goals? And what that means is it starts right now with getting the data together and all the information that you need. So if you are trying to figure out how do I set this up correctly? First thing you do go get the data, take a look at all your products. Start to think about how they're performing. Um, you know, what cohorts of customers are working the best in them. Uh, what's not working where you have win loss, uh, analysis on products. Look at that, get some feedback from sales, go out and look at what kind of customer research you might need to do to validate problems, get all that done before you get into that room with everybody else.
That's gonna be absolutely key for you just setting off on a good foot when it comes to strategy.And if you have any questions about strategy planning, we have a lot of episodes on that, that you can go to our website, product thinking, podcast.com and look back on those and make sure that you are setting off in the straight foot, making sure that you are setting off on the right foot when you get into that mode, that crunch time. But besides that, I wanna make sure that you're having a good summer and you at least take this next month to relax a little bit charge up because we all know Q4 is that quarter where we all seem to just be going crazy. So please rest up over the summer before you get into crunch mode, you're gonna need it and your team's gonna need it. I hope you can get out to the beach, get out somewhere, see that sunlight, get out of your houses.If you're working from home. Like I do make sure that you see some people relax, take a breather. It's very important for your health. And with that, we're gonna jump into our questions for dear Melissa this time.So let's dive in.
Dear Melissa, a long time listener. And first time question submitter. We'd love to talk to you a bit about scaling up a product organization with some junior PMs. I've been on a rocket ship with product management over the past few years from not knowing what a product manager is just a few years ago to now the director of product and established FinTech PropTech company in the Silicon slopes. I find that most of our product team members, most junior product managers and a couple APMs that want to take the next step. Uh, but it can be tough as a single product leader to scale up a whole team simultaneously. What's been a successful approach to bring the team along for the career improvement without leaving stragglers.
Great question. And first of all, though, where are the Silicon slopes? Because I would love to know, I would love to visit <laugh> let's let's send me, send me that answer.I really wanna know where this is. Um, also like we're Silicon beach. If we've got Silicon slopes, I wanna know where Silicon beach is too. <laugh> fill me in, let me know. I'm curious over here, but to get back to your question, how do we scale up a team like this? Now this is something that I've been doing, uh, a lot. Now, if you have a lot of junior product managers, sounds like you do mostly junior PMs, couple APM season. Uh, this can be hard. So your job definitely is to train them, but it depends how many people you've got here. Like, are we talking 10? Are we talking three? Are we talking four? The most successful approach I've seen to bring a team along is to help hire in a couple of experienced people who can show them what good looks like besides just you.So what you're gonna wanna do is look at your team, uh, figure out where the coverage is, where do people excel in different skills? Uh, who's a little bit further along than other people.
And then also look at your strategy and what you need to get done. Uh, do you feel confident that you have enough coverage over all those areas? If not, you might wanna hire in somebody who's more of a senior product manager, uh, that can take over some of the high priority stuff that needs to get done, but can also help demonstrate what good looks like and train a couple of your junior people along the way. It's really hard to bring up a team and scale a team, especially quickly. And especially if you're a high growth company, that's all junior, it's incredibly hard to do this. I've done it. I've worked at companies where we've taken like 350 people who were super junior, never did product management before I've been in companies where we've had more than that. Uh, and we've tried to train them all and what's really hard. And what I've learned from this is that you can do training. Training is always good. Get 'em a class, get 'em, something like that. Uh, but they need to see how it works and they need somebody there to answer questions and guide them.
So part of that is definitely your job, but you don't have that as your sole responsibility, right? Like you are not just a trainer of product managers. You're a director of product management, which means that you're gonna have to be doing some strategy stuff, a lot of road mapping in your own work. So you wanna look at what is my capacity for training? How many people can I take on how many people can I train? And then you're gonna wanna look at your team and say, is that reasonable for how many people that we have? And if not, you're probably going to want to mix in some more senior folks there. That's gonna be key. The most successful companies who make this transition do hire a mix of senior people in with their junior people so that they can take some of that coaching demonstrate what good looks like. And a lot of people come along for the journey.That's what I've seen be the most effective.
So if you do have enough people where you're feeling more comfortable about training them, you need to think about too. Like how can I demonstrate some of this stuff without getting sucked into the weeds? And that's what I worry about for you when you have a lot of junior people and they can't take on all the work themselves, even though you're delegating, um, sometimes they see directors of product management just get like in the weeds with everybody and they're doing all the tactical work and they're not doing the things that they're supposed to be doing, which is strategic. Same goes for VP. Same goes for CPOs when you have a junior team. So you need to think about this as a leader, who do I have as my right hand person, who I feel really confident with like giving some direction to, and then they can just go.And if you have nobody on your team like that, you need that because otherwise you're just getting, get dragged down. You're gonna get dragged into the tactical. So honestly, like hire people, bring in people or look across the organization. Even if you don't, can't like have capacity or budget to hire someone.
Is there anybody else in your organization who you can bring along into your team, maybe move some junior PMs into other areas where there is more, you know, more, uh, senior people, anything like that? It sounds like you're an establishment tech prop tech company. So I'm hoping that you are not the only director of product. Uh, I'm getting some context clues from in here, but if you are, this is gonna be harder and you really do need that senior person. You can't be the only person doing all this. If you have other directors of product, maybe talk to them and figure out like, how do we make sure that we have enough senior people and enough junior people to grow this entire team across the company?And I do believe junior PMs, a couple APS. They can definitely learn, uh, they can ramp up pretty quickly, but they need to be able to watch people. They need the coaching. They need, um, tightly defined bounds of what they're working on, where you can loosen them up later. They're gonna need a lot more direction than a senior person. So you really need to think about how are they gonna get all of that exposure and their coaching and, uh, being able to see what other people are doing so that they can internalize that and take it along. So I would think about all of those things and, uh, to me, the most successful thing I've seen other companies do when they're making a big transition is hiring a couple and it doesn't have to be a, a lot, just a couple senior folks.
All right, next question, dear Melissa. I love this series. Well, thank you. I have just started a new gig at a multinational retailer, working on a team responsible for credit card security. The product organization is currently going through an exercise of redefining the visions and core KPIs for each team. And my team have come up with KPIs around things like speed, error rates and security footprint. I appreciate the value in tracking these metrics, but it feels like there's a link missing between these in our overall company measures of user value, repeat purchases in a given time period. How can a team responsible for security set, measurable goals that show whether we're delivering real value to users when we're so far removed from the user value?
I like this question. Um, so if you think about it and you break it down, right, how does credit card security provide user value provides a lot of user value, right?Like there's probably gonna be no purchases on your site if people don't feel secure about it. And, uh, there's definitely not gonna be repeat purchases if they don't feel secure. So you are basically saying, we believe that by having better credit card security, we can increase repeat purchases in a given time period. I think there is a direct link here. I think you could probably measure that or get a study. I'm sure people have done studies about when people feel more secure about their credit cards. They're more willing to shop on site. So maybe get some of those numbers that will help you, you know, steer you in that direction and feel like you have that user value.
Now there's a lot of things though, about credit card security that you can break down, cuz it's not just about, are we secure? Like, you know, there's all of this stuff on the back end and security stuff from a technical perspective about being secure, but the users actually have to perceive you also as being secure, right?They have to feel confident that when they put their credit card in your system, they're not gonna get scammed. They're not gonna get it ripped off by somebody and then have like, you know, a, uh, Turkish rug guy calling them every five seconds to see if they wanna buy a rug. Like we're using their credit cards to, you know, buy lotto tickets or anything like that. So you wanna make sure that they feel secure.
So there's two parts to this. I think one, how do we make sure that we are actually secure and then two, how do we know make sure that the users know we're secure? And I think you can build KPIs around that speed error rate, security footprint. Um, those aren't bad KPIs. What you wanna do is start to think about like, if we do increase our speed, um, of, you know, securing credit cards, if we increase our security, uh, footprint, if we increase decrease the error rates, what behavior do we think will change in users?That's, what's gonna get you to the user value that you're kind of looking for. So let's say if we increase our security footprint and make it incredibly secure to shop on our site, do we believe that users will purchase more? Um, do we believe that they'll feel more secure from purchasing? Which means that they will purchase more in the long run, like it all is connected here. And I think you have to give yourselves a little bit of a break saying that, you know, we're removed from the user value. I don't think you are, like there's, this is a huge part about making people feel confident in, uh, in these things, right? Like this is, this is really key to making sure that people can purchase things, have a good experience on your site and feel confident that they're not gonna lose, uh, the right to their credit card or have to cancel it or have a million different charges on it.
So just keep going through a line of behavior, right? Like just keep tracing that line of, uh, we make our stuff more secure. What do we think will happen? What do we think will happen then? What do we think will happen then? And keep going all the way back up to repeat purchases. That's what I would look at. Uh, you might also wanna like pull, like I mentioned before, pull some studies, I'm sure there's a study out there on perceived security of e-commerce sites and what that means for purchases. I'm sure there's a study out there on that. Use that data. You don't have to make up all this data yourself. Like you can use that data. You can use that research, pull that in so that it makes you feel more confident about what you're doing. And you've got some data to go off of. Maybe they even have percentages of how much is supposed to increase and they have got, you know, here's what worked on other sites. Take it, borrow it, see if it works for you. All of that stuff, I think contributes to an overall good user experience. And I don't think security or anything technical like that cannot be traced eventually back to the user value. Just takes a little bit more work.
All right, next question, dear Melissa, what makes product people seemingly have a higher potential to experience workplace burnout? What can we do to proactively prevent or combat this Ooh, burnout? It's the topic of hot conversation. Uh, if you listen to any of my videos, uh, with Gib Biddle and Barry O'Riley, we do this personal board of directors where we kind of check in on each other in our work and we post them. Um, I think they're on YouTube in LinkedIn. We post them and we invite people and we just kind of, you know, check in on each other and give advice and see where we were. And I have talked to them about burning out myself. So this one hits close to home. Um, and at the end of 2020, I burnt out pretty hard and still recovering from it, but feeling a lot better these days. And I see a lot of other product managers burn out too. Why for me different, I'm a consultant. We're my own business. That's a, that's very different than being a product manager in companies. But I have seen product managers burn out left and right.
And it's because you have to deal with a lot of moving pieces. And sometimes it all comes back down to you. Product managers deal with literally everybody else in the organization. There's very few other roles that cut across like that. So you have to put yourself in the shoes of marketing, you have to put yourself in the shoes of sales. You have to put yourself in the shoes of operations and customer support and developers and designers and the executives. And you have to constantly be thinking about how do I communicate to them? How do I get their buy-in to go forward?How do I take all of that feedback? And there's a lot of feedback with me, uh, and translate that into what we should do.
And the truth is that I don't see as many people burn out in workplaces that have great cultures and that understand product management really well and just let people do their jobs. I see people burn out in organizations where they're constantly battling all those other functions to just do their jobs. And that's where people usually experience the burnout. Um, it comes from a diff a couple different factors, like one just not being able to do good work and feel like you're doing good work that contributes to burnout like crazy. And I see so many product managers just fighting an uphill battle to get their executives, to buy to their way of working or, um, to understand what they're actually talking about to not come and just swoop and poop, all of these different feature ideas on them to actually like approach things a little bit more experimental.
Uh, I see them working as well with like in very, I see them also working in areas of friction, like sales yelling, that they don't have their products on time, right. Not having a roadmap, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of these things can be solved, hopefully. Um, with good communication and cross collaboration, like cross functional collaboration. I've seen it work, but you have to have the energy to be able to do it. If you go in, you know, bright eye and bushy-tailed to a company and be like, we're gonna work on these things and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make sure that I'm communicating well with everybody and we're gonna solve some of these problems up front. You have the energy to do that, but it does kind of like, you know, but does kind of beat people down over time. If that they constantly do that. And they don't feel like they're moving forward or making progress. And I think that's a big piece of the burnout.
Do you feel like you're making progress? Do you feel like you're learning? Do you feel like you're moving forward or do you feel like you come to work and just fight battles all day? And if you feel like you come and just, you know, ready to go to combat, that's gonna burn people out. So that's what I think we have to look at. We need to really make sure that we are creating an environment where people feel like they can do their jobs. We're creating an environment where they get to learn. We're creating an environment where they get to come to work and feel safe.
Um, safety's a really big piece of this and we're actually gonna have a whole episode on this podcast on what workplace safety actually means. It's not a fuzzy, you know, nebulous thing. It's something that you can actually measure. Um, and, uh, Tara Scott is gonna come on and talk about what that actually means. This's what she does with companies all day long, make sure that they have a safe working environment. Uh, you can measure it. You can actually, uh, tweak it. You can fix it. And it all starts with leadership. So we wanna make sure that we are setting a good place for people to come to. We wanna make sure that everybody who comes to work feels like they're in a safe place. They can, uh, get their jobs done. They can make progress, they can see results and they feel like they're doing something. They feel like they're making good progress. And it's not just an uphill slog every day. On the other side, too, people can get burnt out when they just feel like they're bored and they just come to work and work really long hours.So you wanna make sure that things are interesting. People are pushing themselves in the right direction. They're growing and they're learning. And I think that's, what's going to help us with burnout.
Um, also as these companies keep laying people off, if you're out there with a company that's laying a lot of people off really think about, am I making everybody else here work longer hours because they're just laid a bunch of people off and I don't wanna hire anybody else that will also contribute to burnout. So if you wanna keep your good people, you wanna make sure that you're not overwhelming them. You are really setting them up for success. You're creating an environment in which they wanna come to work at every single day. And, uh, we wanna make sure that product people can get in there and do their jobs. And they're not just fighting people left and right across the organization.So this is where, you know, creating really good cross functional processes comes in. You are product operations coordinator. I can see from, um, your thing. This is where you come in.
How do you make sure that sales and product are communicating well together? How are you taking all that information and getting it to product? How are you? Make sure they get the data? All of those things I think will contribute to people having a better experience at work. So I would not neglect, like making sure that we have the right processes and data and systems set up for people success so that they don't have to go reinvent the wheel. Every time they walk into a new company or every day that they come into the current company.
So definitely think about those things as well. And to get back to my little message too, at the beginning of this, um, if you are feeling a little burnt out, you know, take a break. August, August is a little, uh, a little slow in most companies. And I wanna remind you that if you do have vacation days, you should take vacation days. Don't be afraid, worry about yourself. You don't wanna suffer from burnout. Like I did. It is not fun. It is extremely physical. It is extremely mental. Um, it's fun to be excited about work again. So you wanna make sure that you can go in and actually be excited too. So make sure that you rest, cuz I know that we all wanna do everything. We wanna push ourselves to the limit. We wanna be the best. Um, I think product people in particular, you know, they gotta, they gotta make sure that they're on top of things and they feel like they can't let it go. You can let it go. You can let your work go for a week, week or two, go on vacation, chill out, have a good summer and then go back to work refreshed. So definitely make sure that you're doing that.
So that's it for the dear, Melissa this week. If you have questions for me, please submit them to dear melissa.com and we'll be going through these, uh, every other week and answering all of your questions. Uh, and in the meantime, please subscribe to the product thinking podcast. That is how people find us. That's how you won't miss an episode. And like I said, we've got some really great guests coming up, particularly Tara Scott is coming up, uh, to talk about safety. So if you wanna dive more into that, she'll be on, uh, the podcast soon. So make sure you subscribe. So you do not miss any of our episodes and otherwise we'll see you next week.