20 Years of Product Management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

[Music] oh hello oh man it's so back good to be back in the US I moved to the UK in 2010 but it's so good to be back in the Fertile Crescent of product management I started my product management career about 20 years ago pretty much basically back when the profession was getting started and as Martin said I started off as the product manager for Internet Explorer 4.0 so for context that was back when Apple was still a failing PC maker and Mark Zuckerberg was 13 years old now I don't think it asked Dave I'd like to get a job like yours I want to be a chief product officer what advice do you have for me I don't think that's a very interesting question I say you don't really want my job my job is really about approving expense reports and listening to product managers wine but we recently had a new starter at photo box and she said Dave knowing what you know now like if you could go back to that Dave 20 years ago and give him some advice what advice would you give him I thought that actually is an interesting question I never really thought about that so I thought about it and I thought about it and it became the seed that blossomed into this presentation I've worked on products all over the world I have had amazing experiences and I've had some great successes and I've worked with the best product managers in the world but I've also made some mistakes in fact I've made all the mistakes that you can make as a product manager some of them more than once I've been yelled at by customers I've created products that failed I've lost the companies I've worked for millions of dollars one time I even made a customer cry but I am a better product manager for it I've been forged in the white-hot heat of failure and I'm a much better product manager before they having to have those experiences so what I've done today is I've distilled all of that experience all those 20 years of successes and 20 years of failure down into its essence and when you walk out of here today you're gonna know everything that I know about product management 20 years in 20 five minutes are you ready all right let's go the first thing I would say to my younger self is listen to your customers now I know this sounds obvious but I'm constantly shocked by how little we're listening to our customers it's always surprising your job is a product managers to be maniacally focused on understanding your customers problems and you cannot do that if you're not listening to them I've interviewed over 300 product managers at four companies in the last five years and I'm constantly shocked by how few of them have a basic understanding of the customer problem that they're trying to solve you cannot solve the customers problem without understanding it and when you don't listen to your customers you end up building solutions for problems that nobody has ladies and gentlemen I give you the smalt now the smalt is the world's first smart centerpiece designed exclusively for your indoor / outdoor dining area now what exactly is the small you ask well the small tis three things the first thing the small tis is it is a speaker it's a Bluetooth speaker by the way this is a real product it's a Bluetooth speaker and I get that right if you're eating you want a little bit of music you know to go with your meal that's fine the second thing is it is it's a it's a color-changing mood light okay now okay you might want a little ambience it's not really my thing but I get that okay so you got a speaker you got some color changing mood lights alright I like where this is going and the third thing that the smalt is and this is the best part it is an Internet of Things voice connected salt dispenser somebody actually wrote that right like some copywriter actually wrote that okay now having fun while I'm putting salt on my food is not a problem that I have I now need a Wi-Fi code to put salt on my food I'm going to say it right now I am never going to ask Alexa to pass the salt so when you don't listen to your customers to understand their problems you end up building solutions for problems that they don't have so the first thing I would say a little baby Dave is spend more time listening to your customers but the next thing I would say only stop listening to your customers when it comes to solutions your so your customers are the least qualified people to come up with solutions we're not stenographers if we just wrote down everything the customer said and and we put it into our products anybody could do our jobs right I'll show you what happens when you listen to customers about solutions you get this this is the oral-b pro expert pulsar gum care toothbrush this is the world's most advanced toothbrush okay it has an entire website dedicated to this toothbrush where they expound at length about all of its virtues and benefits of which it has many it's got crisscross bristles it's got power tip bristles it's got end rounded bristles and soft gums stimulators but my favorite part of the whole site is that they figured out the perfect angle of the bristles to get the most amount apply some poor bastards spent his career testing okay is it 15 degrees no is it 17 degrees no it's six Eureka it's 16 degrees so that was somebody's job this is a picture of a toothbrush from 50 years ago this is the pro expert blabbity blah blah blah this is what you get from 50 years of listening to customers right so listen to your customers to understand their problem but don't listen to your customers when it comes to building solutions that's your job so I go back in time to little Dave the next thing I would say to him is watch the competition and no surfing on product hunt and reading TechCrunch does not count I would say watch the competition because there's rich source of information that can help us better understand our customers problems right I view every time the competition ships a new feature or the ship a new product I view that as a user test that I can learn from even though we didn't ship it because there's so many signals out there there's so much information that we can see where you see instantaneous feedback from customers about what they think about our products and other people's products so these are some Amazon reviews for the oral-b pulsar blabbity blah and you can see maybe not in the back you can see that people are starting to say hmm I really don't like that I can't replace the batteries in this toothbrush interesting then even got YouTube reviews right this guy actually did a YouTube review of this toothbrush but here's the thing it's had 11,000 views so you also have then you've got comments on the YouTube reviews right so we can go down this rathole all the way down right so again you've got more comments about the fact that you can't replace the battery so if you were designing a semi disposable battery powered toothbrush what might you surmise from all of this information it's pretty easy to find you might say that people think it's important is that they're able to replace the battery right in this thing but oral-b doesn't want them to be able to place the battery right why because they want to sell them more toothbrushes because oral-b is solving oral B's problems they're not solving their customer problems now interestingly enough [Applause] interestingly enough when you're doing all this customer research you can also come across some amazing information about how your customers are using your products in ways that you never intended but that's the subject for another talk so first I would say watch the competition because it's an amazing source of information to help you better understand the customer problem but the next thing I would say is don't watch the competition ok stop worrying so much about what the competition is doing in our tech bubble our echo-chamber we get we frost ourselves up in a lather every time some kind of new technology comes out we all race to implement it and you really have to ask yourself does implementing that new thing really help solve the customers problem or is it just a novelty you really have to ask yourself is connecting my service to a chatbot really going to help our customers with what they're trying to do do you really have to ask yourself just taking something that works perfectly fine like a salt shaker and connecting it to the internet going to help anybody do anything sorry that one makes me angry is anyone here from smarts malt no I hope not you better not raise your hand but you have to remember that the competition is made up of people just like you and me and they've got all the challenges that we have in making good decisions for our customers my last MTP talk in London was all about how the structure of the human brain and cognitive biases basically make it impossible to make good decisions we're not going to cover that today you can go watch it I mean don't don't watch it now watch this talk now but you can go watch it later but if the competition does come up with something that really works and something that resonates with customers then I would tell little baby Dave to be a thief right I mean I would don't actually steal anything right but don't actually be a thief but I would say don't be a afraid to take that idea when I was a young product manager I used to think I had to come up with all of the ideas and I wish I knew this sooner in my career your job as a product manager is not to come up with all the ideas you job as the product managers to solve your customers problem and if someone else comes up with a better idea than you had then take it and steal it with abandon so tell a little baby Dave to be a thief you're not actually watching my other talk are you so anyways the next thing I would tell them is remember to get paid so most of us as product managers are working on something that's a commercial endeavor and we spend all of this time and effort building features and taking them to market but we forget to ask one fundamental question will anybody pay for this right and if you ask we all go out we say do you like this feature and the customer says yes I do and they say would you like us to put it in the product and the customer says yes I would and you're asking the wrong question right because when you say do you want us to put that in the product the customer can say yes for free right they don't have to trade anything off well you have to ask and understand is are they willing to pay for it what is their willingness to pay that is the fundamental question that we all need to understand let's talk about the elephant in the room last summer Evernote decided in search of profitability decided to fundamentally change the way that it was pricing its products and the internet lost its mind now how many companies can have hundreds of millions of users and not come up with a way of being profitable but the internet lost its minds and the internet lost its minds not because they didn't see any value in Evernote people loved Evernote I loved Evernote they lost its mine because they didn't understand why Evernote was charging for the things that it was charging for right it didn't make any sense so let's take a look at why people were so angry right so here's their feature pricing tier so the first thing you notice is that the transfer for the free tier per month is 60 megabytes okay is that a lot is that a little so then I'm left to think okay so a notes probably a couple of kilobytes and a web clipping maybe 50k 56k like and by the way like 60 megabytes is a weird number it's not 50 megabytes it's not a hundred megabytes like what and so now I'm left thinking I'm having to do math now like they're they're making this my problem to figure out which of these things I need they're being giving me no help at all the next thing I did was they took something that was free and they started charging for it all right so you could prior to this change sync your Evernote stuff across all of your devices and in an effort to again make some money they decided to restrict it to do to two devices and this is Evernote solving ever notes problems their problem of profitability not solving their customers problems so you can imagine how much customers really loved when they did this the next thing you notice if you look at the first page here first of all you get a gigabyte of transfer I still have no idea if that's enough for me or not but then you say they offer the feature access notebooks offline and I thought hey I might actually see value in that might actually be willing to pay for that and then I started to think okay what are the scenarios where I'm going to need Evernote but I'm not gonna have access to Wi-Fi right I can get Wi-Fi on the plane I can get Wi-Fi on a train I can get Wi-Fi on the top of Mount Everest and I'm really struggling to figure out a solution a scenario where I'm actually gonna need this but I'm not gonna have access to Wi-Fi so that's not very helpful to me but then this is the one that gets me so for the biggest tier right your best customers the people that pay you the most you're going to give them a feature customer support right so what you're saying is for your highest value customers your best paying customers you're gonna give them the feature that they're paying you for that they'll only derive value from if your product breaks and this drives me crazy I hate when companies do this they makes customer enterprise customers fine like that makes sense for enterprise support but not for consumers this is not something that you should be charging for it makes no sense but Evernote justified the price increase by saying it reflects the significant investment of energy time and money they're basically saying that they want us to give them our money because they're trying really hard not because they're helping us or solving our problems so they're solving their problems right and as product managers our job is to solve our customers problems and that is why people got so angry so as you're developing products you have to remember to make sure that people see enough value and what you're building to pay you money for it so don't forget to get paid but the next thing I would say a little bit maybe Dave it stops worrying so much about getting paid we are business casing the sole out of our products we're so time constrained and resource constrained that we're often put in this position of having to justify every little thing we do with these elaborate business cases and these arduous processes and not only does that slow us down but it creates a culture of systemic risk aversion right it creates a culture of small incremental thinking driving small incremental gains when I was starting off as a product manager product management was really about defining the functional requirements of products and those functional requirements were often defined in megabytes megahertz or horsepower or dollars basically cost speed and power but it's no longer enough to just meet the functional needs of our customers we also have to appeal to their emotional and social needs as well customers want to feel connected to us they want to feel entertained they want to feel heard and understood they want to cheer for us and they want to trust us and Trust isn't built on megabytes Trust is built on an understanding that we know who they are and that they believe that we have their best interest at heart and that they believe that they're a part of our tribe and this is so crucial it's so powerful now these don't have to be big massive things right there can be little gestures this is mondo because there's a small fin tech startup in London and they have an app with a prepaid spending card and they offer a feature in the app that you might expect from something like that the ability to freeze the card right and after you freeze the card if you want to stop that what do you do you defrost the card right this didn't take anything it's a little bit of micro copy and a graphic right but it made me chuckle it tells me that they don't take themselves too seriously right and it tells me that we have a shared sense of humor true jerky is a SAN francisco-based company I actually had some of this the last time I was here it's really really good jerky but as I was eating it I noticed this they actually put dental floss in the bag jerky so that when you're done you can you you know where that was going um so but did they have to put that in there of course they did in does that increase their costs yes it does do you think that they can justify the ROI or even measure the ROI in terms of increased sales or increased customer loyalty for doing that no they can't right but it made me smile if you can make somebody smile give the foundation for a lifetime of loyalty but for my money nobody does this better than a company called pager Duty pedra duty is an automated incident management system basically when your site goes down it wakes all the right people there on-call up with a nap right and if you're one of those people on call you dread hearing that thing go off in the middle of the night right because it means something's really bad and you're tired and you need to get up and it's on you to fix it and the guys at page your duty really understood this they made these so they've got this barbershop quartet at page of duty it's called barber duty and they recorded these hilarious ringtones right it can go off you can choose that go off instead of some normal bead that can go off when happens it's hard to describe should I play you a few okay no boy that's that's a bit embarrassing jeez so is there anybody from page of duty in the audience you guys are from pager duty yeah so do you do you guys know these ringtones that I'm talking about do you do you think you can sing them for you guys want to you guys want to hear them sing one of the ringtones ladies and gentleman Barbara duty [Applause] [Music] I want we need to hear at least one more you guys wanted one more one more alright come on give us one more guys [Music] [Music] ladies and gentlemen Barbara Doody thank you guys thank you very much now how do you put an ROI on that well maybe you can so Jeff Atwood tweeted about this and Jeff Atwood has two hundred twenty four thousand followers so maybe you can but that's not why they did it so you have to remember that you also need to appeal to the emotional and social needs of your customers it's just as important if not more important than their functional needs the next thing I would say the little baby Dave is speed up I shudder to think at the amount of value that I have destroyed in my career through inaction through not taking action as product managers we often understand the cost of things in terms of how many story points it takes or how much how many dollars how many days it's gonna take to get done but there's something much more fundamental that we need to internally grasp right and that is the cost of inaction the cost of not doing something the cost of delay this is one of the most important concepts that I wish I had known earlier in my career we put off making decisions for all kinds of reasons every time you put off making a decision you are destroying value the features and products that we ship have a limited shelf life and the longer it takes them to get to market the less value that they have so every time you're putting off making that decision you're destroying value every time you're leaving a question that somebody has go unanswered and so they're blocked on it you're destroying value and there's all kinds of reasons why we put off making decisions right we don't have enough information right or we don't know who the decision-maker is right or so-and-so is on vacation and so we need to wait for him to get back the one though that really gets me so I had a team and I was talking to them and I said why haven't we made this decision yet and the product manager looked me in the eye this is a true story and he said we haven't made the decision yet because we haven't been able to get a meeting room to hold the meeting to make the decision and when I heard that it made me want to go up on the roof set myself on fire and jump off the roof it drives me absolutely insane I just can't believe when people do that they don't make a decision because you can't get a meeting room the next thing was a little baby Dave is say no as product managers we don't say no enough and again what this is one of those things it's so powerful but our jobs are hard right we've got lots of stakeholders we've got lots of competing priorities we've got lots of people to make happy but let me be very clear this is not about making people happy this is about making our customers happy and there's all kinds of reasons why we might say no if marketing comes to you and asked you for a marketing feature the answer should be no if a sales guy comes to you and he says I just need this one feature for this one customer the answer should be no it's really hard to do this if the CEO says hey I got this great email from my cousin and it's this great idea but it's not a great idea the answer really really needs to be no my favorite though this one that sticks in my memory why something made it into a backlog I was doing some backlog grooming with the team and I saw this thing in the backlog and I said why is that in the backlog that doesn't help anything and the person said to me said well we gave it to Steve to put something in the backlog because Steve hadn't had a turn to put anything in the backlog in a while but if you are saying no you're probably saying no for all of the wrong reasons and I'm guilty of every single one of these right you say no because you think you're protecting the team you hear that all the time your job isn't to protect the team your job is to protect the customer right you say no because this is my favorite this is the one I'm guilty of all the time you say no because you don't like the person who suggested it right your job is to say no but make sure that you're saying no for the right reasons the next thing is don't be a visionary right when I was young I thought I had to have all of the answers I had to be able to see into the future and know everything and meant I would be this Oracle that people would come to and I would dispense with my wisdom and then they would go off and build things and it would be amazing Elon Musk is a visionary he builds self-driving cars and spaceships okay if your strategy to be a really good product manager is to be Elon Musk then fine go with that but for the rest of us this is about grinding it out right this is about doing the hard work products don't need visionaries they need product managers who are obsessed with understanding the customers problem and solving it right so don't be a visionary be a product manager this is what we do when I was 25 I worked on a product called host integration server and it's a product that connects these things hey IBM mainframes to the Internet and I was so excited because I was going to my first customer pitch and I put together all the features that were gonna be in this product and it's ready to go there's gonna be amazing and I walked in the meeting and there's a 60-year old man there with a suit on and a pocket protector and then there was 25-year old me with shorts and sandals on and we sat down and I said okay let me tell you what we're gonna do okay so first of all you're gonna be able to access natively everything on there but we're gonna put web service design that you can be able to wrap xml wrappers around it you'll be able to do all this stuff and then you're gonna be able to take it to the web and he said let me stop you right there you have no idea what I want do not come back until you have a clue about what I want that was the first time I got yelled at by a customer as a funny joke my mom always says this funny thing she says the product manager that really thinks he knows his customers like a male gynecologist and I always get a chuckle for me I love it um man I really I got no Nate was thanking his family earlier I really should remember to thank my mom for that um you know I'm just gonna show you a picture of my mom okay she's really cute just having a lot of luck with this today wait a second is my mom in the audience she is in the audience mom stand up stand up stand up round of applause for my mom thank you mom the last thing I would say if I could go back and talk to Dave 20 years ago I would say Dave be dumb you've got a precious gift when you're starting off and that you don't know anything you're not encumbered by knowledge and you're not encumbered by inertia and the best product managers that I've ever worked with have had this capacity to be dumb to always look at a situation through the eyes of the customer companies drift right they lose sight of what they're there to do and they start solving their problems and not customers problems and as that product managers it's our job to always correct that and always advocate for the customer and bring the customers perspective to the situation so I wish I'd spent a lot more time being dumb and if you can spend a lifetime being dumb you're gonna have a great career as a product manager and that my friends is what I would tell Dave if I could go back in time and tell them everything I knew but don't listen to me product management is a mindset and it's a craft and you have to make your own path you have to make your own mistakes and you're so lucky you're so lucky that you have this amazing community here I didn't have this when I was starting off you have this amazing tribe of people that you can learn with and learn from so don't listen to me however if in listening to this talk I've saved at least one of you from climbing up off the roof setting yourself on fire and jumping off then it was all worth it ladies and gentlemen one more round of applause for Barbara Doody one more round of applause for my mom thank you enjoy the rest of the conference [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Spread Ideas

Views: 922,933

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Id: i69U0lvi89c

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2017