#ProductCon: The Skills to Become a Director, VP, or CPO by Facebook VP of Product

hi everyone thanks for taking a time to attend my session I wanted to thank the wonderful folks at Prada Khan I know this is a little bit of a challenging way of interacting I would have loved to meet all of you in person but gives me a great chance to talk about a passionate subject of mine which is broad Career Development for product managers feel free to use the comments I'd love to to know a little bit about where everyone's from and we'll we'll get started the the topic I chose today is really related to when most common things I hear from the from the product managers I've encountered which is you know how do you get to the next level and and the way I describe it is you know how do you advance from you know many of you are managers today and they're there they're not even clear on what does it mean to be a director or to get to that next level and what is what is even vice president or chief product officer even means and so what would I I wanted to use today's presentation to kind of talk through kind of what I've learned from these different levels and and doesn't even make sense for people is this in your desk is this your destiny is this the next step in your career and maybe you can take a moment if you're watching and just think through kind of what is your your career path over the next five and 10 years we get oftentimes so focused on what's next what's promotion look like what's the right level am I at the right company but I think if you kind of think through that maybe five years or ten years from now and then think about well is the steps and changes that I'm making in the next few years leading me to that destination that's really a career plan and you want your next step to fit into that sort of long-term plan and oftentimes that does mean oh well I aspire to be an executive and and and I hope is that you know there are different executives at different companies but I do think that there's some common pattern I've seen between directors vice president and chief product officer and you know hopefully we'll be able to explain kind of what your boss is doing and what their boss is doing and what those skills look like now I know there's a lot of information here and I try to distill it down but I did publish an article on medium on my medium that you can go to just as my first name Nickell and on medium and and you can kind of read a little bit of the notes that are going to be presented here today so you know I wanted to reduce myself my name is Nick Helsing Hall I have been in kind of the tech industry for about 20 years I lived in the Bay Area and I'm coming to you from my basement and so I wish I could get a chance to see each and every one of you but perhaps we'll be able to chat throughout the session and perhaps afterwards as well my kind of career is sort of shaped into two kind of chapters my first chapter leaving school is really focused on startup so I was the mid 90s and the internet was just getting born and so I really wanted to enjoy you know sort of founding type adventure and so I I joined a company I founded an early calm and that eventually became a co-founder of two companies one that I was a CEO of which was cast iron systems which was in the enterprise side of the world and and that was eventually acquired by IBM and then I went on do the same thing in a company called say now very different kind of a voice Twitter if you will and and that company was acquired by Google and that really started the second chapter of my career that chapter was really three executive roles in product management one where I led two new initiatives on the product side hangouts and photos and then I was after four years at Google I made a four year change to Credit Karma which was a hyper growth company it had about 200 people when I joined I was the product leader for the organization and and kind of built out the product management team and expanded the product lines from kind of one free credit score to a number of different products you know our goal was to kind of become the sort of money button on the phone if you will and that that led to a team around seventy five people in both product and design and you know the company was about 1200 when I left so we went through a nice kind of Grossberg and then in december of this past year so about six months ago i ended up joining facebook to lead the the facebook apps newsfeed and so part of the reason why i thought this would be a good topic for me to choose is that you know we do see you know and i get a chance to really interact with lots and lots of product managers like yourselves and you know because i've worked with them managed them learn from them and then i end up coaching a lot of them as one of my kind of hobbies i hear this constant like well how did i do how do you get to direct or how do you get to this or a vp or chief product officer and because I held the roles at different scales I thought it would be worth kind of sharing kind of what I've learned well so before we get started I think these titles can be kind of confusing and so I do want to you normalize as much as possible and I'll start by saying that product management means lots of things lots of different people and it's changes a lot depending on the company you're in but the primary thing that I would note is that product management gets more complex the more products that are the company has and the more people that are involved in it and in fact this picture that I'm really fond of you know kind of illustrates the point if you look at this the the sort of the generations of companies that go by companies start out kind of find product fit that's that drunken walk stage then they find something that works and they kind of make sure it doesn't go out you know it's like everyone's standing around the fire hoping that the smoke starts to stay as a small burn and then when they get to hyper growth you know it's like gasoline is getting thrown on a company's really really building value and then when you have to scale you're kind of the market leader and so I like this because it has a lot to do with the different types of product management that exists at these different phases and I've written about this in the past but what I would say is that you know if you were to sort of say you know come to me and say that oh you know I got this director role at this series a company and then I'm kind of choose between that and a director role at a company like a Facebook or Google I mean those are just very different there are apples oranges comparison so in this article or in this discussion what I really wanted to do is to kind of narrow it down and sort of say well you know the titles don't really mean anything when you're comparing across different phases in fact a VP at a late stage company like a Google is probably very different than a VP at a hyper-growth so you know to make things simple VP at a hyper growth company you know these are the companies like the slacks and the Pinterest and the Hoover's of the past you know those companies look a lot like directors at scale because they are end up doing some of the same types of things and they're even compensation tends to be pretty consistent so for the titling purposes in today's discussion and when I refer to director VP CPM I'm really kind of heading towards the sort of later stage companies and that way we can kind of compare and you can do the your own translation as we go through this now there are four areas that I want to kind of touch on when I think about the distinctions between these roles one is probably the easiest which is scope then there's like how do you build this sort of trust in collaboration skills what does it take to build a team and lastly what does it mean to kind of focus on strategy you know all product managers end up having a thing through these areas but I pulled these four out because they're just so different and they beg different skills to come from from the candidates okay so I'll start with product scope this one's probably as I said the easiest to understand product scope for me is you know starts out as director you know I'm assuming that most of you are kind of at that senior IC or management level you know your director is probably your boss and or perhaps your boss's boss depending on where you are in career and that director usually owns a pretty well-defined area of the product and so they're almost like they're quote-unquote CEO of a well-defined product that exists in the marketplace you know for me personally that was owning kind of this new product called hangouts and and then the product that we now call photos those were well-defined areas and directors are typically in charge of those arenas unless they're very very large so that this sort of starting point for for scope if you will when you become a VP you're essentially collecting a series of these together so you own this suite of products or a complete product line so the newsfeed if you think about the your Facebook app it's got a bunch of products that are embedded and stories as an example of that the commenting is an example of that how postings are created they're all big product areas that sit inside of this sort of product line that a vice-president went on and then a chief product officer usually does not have another peer in product so usually they're in charge of the entire set of company products and that is my experience when I was running the product line at Credit Karma now the main thing that I want everyone to take away from this is that you know in order to get this additional breadth it's a little bit like climbing up the mountain so I like this analogy because it illustrates things that pretty nicely like when you're at the bottom of a mountain you know at that valley if you will you can see it in this sort of picture you know you're really clear on what's on the ground you can see exactly every detail and then what happens when you get promoted or you move to say a VP or director you start going up and scaling that landscape to the point that eventually you're at this top now what you end up realizing is that as a VP or is a CPO you just see a lot more of what's going on with a lot less detail and so the skill to master is how do you achieve this breadth with my sacrificing depth where people struggle is that they don't necessarily have the skill to let go and sort of make decisions with less information and when you're in that stage you end up finding yourself working harder and harder and harder and so where you end up burning out is at that director of VP where you just literally cannot continue to go forward because you don't know how to give up and you say 20% of the information to make a hundred percent of the decision and so that's the thing that either scope is sort of the most obvious as you see people have more and more that the skill that you have to master is the ability to sacrifice your depth and what's hard is that what's gotten you here is your ability to master the details you know every detail you know exactly the things that are coming in the next release exactly why the design is the way it is why that technical challenges are the way they are what the constraints are what's coming and when you have more you just can't have that unless you just work all the time and never gonna sleep and that'll eventually burn you out so this is the skill that I find and it's the one of the more telling skills to determine how refined is the skill how much ability to make decisions with low information really dictates how far someone can go up the ladder okay crust and collaboration is related to this and so I use this because I like the notion that that that you know product management one of the things I love about it is it's a collaborative it's a team sport if you will it's a collaborative field right and yet the focus of who you have to build trust with changes dramatically depending on your level so when you're a director your goal is to focus inward on your own product team as much as possible you're really measured on this ability to trust that team so you make those decisions with less information and again that delegation and it's around your inward team which is the skill but which we which we noted before but as a VP for the first time you're actually spending as much time talking to other leaders and other products as you are with your own team so it's a pretty distinct shall we call it point of focal focus is that when now you're essentially saying is that I not only need to make sure that the product below me is working but I have to make sure that the other teams are actually understanding what we're doing and and oftentimes I'm working with those other teams as much as as much as my own team and I'm measured on my ability to peer with another person who's my level and so that's a different type of work and often the people that are in those other arenas though they're product people they perhaps have totally different ways of working they have different cultures they have different ways of building I mean certainly when we see you know at Facebook as a family you know we have lots of partnership at my level at the VP level with Instagram or with whatsapp and we're trying to understand how do we work together and partner together as much as possible and in that process of working across you have to understand that these teams have been built from different people they have different cultures they have different sizes they have different processes and so the skill is last trying to make sure that you're pulling back and giving the right amount of space to your team it's really about understanding how to were kind of in partnership with other product areas which runs similarly but differently and lastly when you become a CP o the most interesting part of about being a CP o is that your peers in this sense are actually not even product folks and they're actually other c-level executives like person that leads sales or marketing or HR or finance or legal and and that partnership means that they are not at all brought up into your same value system and perhaps the same expertise and background they may not even be from tech they may be completely different types of leaders and mindsets and their teams are going to be run very differently and yet you're measured not only on how well you build your own product but how well you can work with those ex executives who are quite different than you and most people would say well that's normal when you get to a senior level your peers are no longer in your own function but the difference is that in product everybody has an opinion on product I think you've probably noticed that as a product manager but boy everyone not only has an opinion but they have a tightly held opinion on how the product works because it has a huge impact on how they do their job which is not the case in Reverse you may not have a tightly held opinion on how finance works or how the sales team works or what marketing does but believe me they probably don't reciprocate they do have a point of view and so your challenge is that you have to set expectations that are realistic and do that and do that teaching what when knowing that the person doesn't come from your background and is not an expert in product and so that process that collaboration is necessary but boy is it a totally different sometimes even exhausting skill compared to working with peers who do come from product but may run different styles of groups and organizations versus your own team who report to you who actually are just essentially trying to build product in the same direction as you're guiding them okay so hopefully that makes sense feel free to leave comments if it doesn't but I think that the the distinction here is so significant because of the level and who you have to partner with and build that trust with okay the next theory is around team and again we've touched a little bit about this but you'll you'll start to understand how distinctness skills are as you climb the ladder or so to speak so you know as a director your goal is of course to influence the people that are in your team the ICS and managers most directors have managers which then have small teams underneath them and you know most of Directors honestly also have a few ICS that are senior that report to them right that's it that's a traditional model certainly at scale and this is one of the way why it's closer to how VP's work in slightly smaller companies because the size of team in this case is you know usually half a dozen a dozen maybe even as many as 20 people which is usually the product size you know you split across two or three groups that in a hyper scale so the the goal and and this is something that I talk pretty openly about with my own team is that you know when you're a manager your goal is to teach product management to the people underneath you and the IC in particular when you're a Gregor you have to have a mindset swift shift of not just teaching product management to your ICS but you have to learn how to teach management to your managers and often the skill is radically different and again it has a little bit to do with letting go and encrypting the steering wheel at just the right level of strength so that the the manager can kind of continue to keep it in motion under some guidance but the challenge here is that it's not just an it's not teaching product management it's actually teaching management and that means you're telling people how to career grow the people underneath them how to run meetings how to understand career and teach that how to work on things like comp and calibration and promotions this process of kind of teaching a totally new skill is a big change between manager and director now as you move to VP you of course have now directors that are underneath you and many directors have that sort of CEO mindset so they're quite capable of even running small or maybe even medium sized companies so again you're in a complete change where it's not teaching management it's really recruiting and building up executives and you now think about your team as a whole you're looking at the identity of the team and you're thinking well it's mine I have two directors who are strong in this area but I need to go off and build something new you know I'll give you an example I was in a product team once where I joined and the team was really good at execution but they weren't in a position to go build new things because they were so good at executing and incrementing and growing what's working they just didn't have the skill to go out and create something new now it doesn't mean anything has gone bad it's just it as a VP in this example my interest is now adding new skills to the team so that both things exist the ability to continue to increment and grow and scale and the ability to have this new type of skill that was missing now in addition I would say that you also have to diversify the team in terms of makeup sometimes it's not just you know the same style of people have been maybe being recruited and now your goal is to go in and say well maybe I need folks that are more creative that have maybe less tenure because we want new ideas perhaps the team has been very data and analytical and so we've only gotten one style of mindset in the team perhaps you end up like looking at the gender of your team and saying well we've mostly male we're mostly female or we learn't realize that we haven't really matched the customer base where our customers are much more broad in nature but we tend to have only one type of product manager and so you need to diversify the identity of the team but you also need to do that through recruiting and retaining the executives that agree that exist and understand the process here you are actually setting how reviews are done you're setting what is the currency of value is it a metric is it a is it entrepreneurship is it what is the quality of things like communication so VP's have a lot of distinction because they're setting how product management is done in their area as well as shaping the team now when you get to CP oh it's more of the same but you're now looking at the entire company's culture and you might be saddled with being measured on well did you end up introducing and innovating and new products so your VPS need to bring this innovation notion your process needs to scale across the entire company and the skills then which you need to bring in may need to be totally new to the company as a whole and so what I feel like is that you start out teaching management and then you end up thinking through how to recruit a diversified set of executives and then you do a diagnosis on the holes that are missing in the organization and really thoughtfully end up working through those okay the last area that that I'll touch on is around strategies strategy comes up a lot everyone says today once you become a director your goal is to avoid just execution you have to now point where we're going right as a manager you're oftentimes chartered on building something that that is a well understood direction but it's which features now what resources do you put in it and then what's the sequence I push on this a lot which is lots of times people are clear as a director here's what good looks like in a year but they don't have the next quarter and the plan of where they go and how they scale that mountain so I really like the notion of sequencing as well as direction for directors I think that for VPS on the other hand it's a little bit trickier with VPS you really are trying to now represent the thick consistency and cohesiveness of the whole product line and so just as I said you're now working cross with other VPS and other organizations but often if you just nail your product area then when people your customers look at your product they see like one VP's product is in one tab one VP's products and another tab one VP's brought us another tab and they're like well I don't understand how this meets my needs so your your vice-presidents need to work through and say hey we need to partner up to make sure that complicated projects that may need to be delivered across many many many different groups actually make progress it could be things like technical platforms it could be one common customer view it could be a complex integration on the front page of your product but generally these silos actually really get in the way of making the product work but if you just have your directors nail their individual areas you'll get this sort of patchwork of products now as a CP o your job is actually much more on vision so the strategy is less around cohesiveness of the product line more around what's happening to morrow and a lot of times it's the storytelling in the narrative that needs to be a plus here you're oftentimes you're bored your founders your CEO have had a strong point of view on where the company will go in 3-5 years but that won't just be a product vision that'll be a company vision and then you're gonna have your directors who are really clear on their roadmaps why they're achieving what they want your VPS connecting all of the dots and your CPA is left with well I know where the products gonna go and say the next six to twelve months and I see what the vision in the company is and my strategy is to story tell how these two things connect how will the product get there and then how will the changes I'm making in the product team ultimately land and end up as a as the team to get to that strategy and vision so it's that product team story as well as the product story which lends itself to that vision okay well this has been a quick 30 minute chat around how I think about career I do think that the skills are super different between directors we appease the CPAs and maybe the most important lesson is that not everyone will be capable of getting to these levels but more importantly not everyone loves the actual practice of explaining to the head of marketing exactly how product works or teaching management versus just getting it and building it themselves or working through strategy and vision and trying to connect between these two relatively fixed targets or career shaping other individuals I think that this is one of the areas that I would ask you to think about is as you look at the skills that I've laid out here think through how much of that is connected to your current skills how much of that is connected to your definition of joy how much of that is essentially available in one or three or five years and that should help you understand what's the job like for that boss what's the job like for the boss's boss and ultimately how do you build a long-term career plan so it's been a real pleasure to virtually connect with all of you here at Prada Khan I wish you the best of luck in your careers check out the article on medium because it has some in them a little bit more detail and I look forward to to seeing more of you thank you so much bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Product School

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Keywords: Product, Product Manager, Product Management, Product School, Coding for Managers, How to get a job, product manager salary, product manager resume, what is product management, what is a product manager, product management training, how to become a pm, product manager interview, machine learning, ai, Technology, Career, PM tools, software, metrics, product management basics, growth product management

Id: Hp1CDLTFOWY

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020