When I was a new PM and I was owning this area within LinkedIn, that was our job posting experience.
And so my first effort, and I was coming in for marketing, let's redesign the job posting flow on LinkedIn.
Let's test different experiences, really trying to solve a LinkedIn problem of conversion rate and revenue.
I remember we had a product review with a very senior leader at LinkedIn.
This first question, what customer problem are you solving?
And my heart sank, I was the most junior person in the room.
I could have been left out to suffer on my own.
And my leader at the time immediately without missing a beat stepped in.
The extent of support that I felt from that leader and accountability that he took in owning that in the moment, really stuck with me and helped me think about leadership.
AI has been at the heart of a bunch of things we do across LinkedIn for a long time.
And obviously certainly more recently with the evolution of LLMs and generative, it's helped us unlock a lot of new value for our customers for doing these repetitive tasks, looking up people, doing a bunch of research on an organization.
It's helped us bring all that in one place and make it really turnkey for sellers to be able to unlock those insights that they need.
I think a couple ingredients that successful teams have together is like getting your cross -functional partners onboard at the same time.
It's not like product says this and then designer engineering down the line go execute.
so having this like really healthy cross -functional team to drive that.
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions.
We'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, I'm excited to have Monica Lewis, the VP of product at LinkedIn joining us.
She leads the LinkedIn Sales Solutions, a billion dollar business that leverages AI driven insights to revolutionize sales teams effectiveness.
I'm thrilled to learn from her experiences and insights on how AI is reshaping the sales landscape and her approach to building product teams that can get ahead of innovation.
But before we talk to Monica, it's time for Dear Melissa.
This is the segment of the show where you can ask me all of your burning product management questions and I answer them here every single week.
Go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what's on your mind.
Hey, product people, I have some very exciting news.
Our new Mastering Product Strategy course is now live on Product Institute.
I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to productinstitute .com and use code LAUNCH for $200 off at checkout.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, I'm moving from an in -house B2B product manager to a product owner for a small boutique IT consultant, what are some key skills to develop to make sure I hit the ground running with new clients to ensure that I can move through discovery effectively and understand a range of different industries quickly.
Alright, so as somebody who's been consulting for quite a while, I have to get up to speed on different industries all the time, very quickly.
And to me, that's very exciting because I like learning about all of these different solutions and value that we deliver.
So my biggest piece of advice here is that first, always center on the customer and the value that the product provides.
So you're going to want to learn about who is that customer, really deeply understand what does the solution that they're trying to propose or that they already have, do for that customer.
How does it provide value?
And why is that important to them?
If you can anchor on that, then you can start to think about how does that customer use it?
Where does it fit in their life?
And then you expand from there.
So even if I was getting caught up into healthcare, like I've had to learn so many different things about healthcare and I don't have a healthcare background.
When I was looking at that, I was always saying, who are we solving this problem for?
So in one company that I came into it was an electronic health record system.
And that one, I knew that doctors were using it, nurses were using it, but then I also had to learn how insurance companies were using it and how we processed payments and how we did billing.
And for me, I mapped out all those different roles that were contributing to it, and then I try to understand why we were valuable, right?
What did our solution do that provided value?
How did they use the workflows?
Where did it fit in their daily lives?
What were the points of contacts with it?
So I'm a very user experience driven person as well.
So I want to see the flows.
I want to see how people are using it.
So we would go into the product and I'd start to look through it.
one way that I found that you can really get up to speed quickly as well is to work with the sales team.
So in a lot of organizations that I'd come into, especially this one, when I said, Wanted to learn what kind of value we provided and why it was different, I went to the sales team and I said, can you do your presentation for me as if I was a customer, Walk me through it, walk me through how it works, why you're better, why the solution's the right one, and they usually have packaged up in those sales calls, why you're important, right?
Why it actually matters.
So it's a great way to get up to speed really quickly on what the product is, why it's important, why it's helping to provide value and unique ways to the customers.
And from there, then I'd go back and I dig into it.
With customer support.
I dig into it with product managers that were working there.
User researchers I'd listened to customer calls.
If I was not doing the product management work myself, just to get up to speed with what was going on.
So that is where you can wrap your head around what the industry and what's happening there pretty quickly.
And I'd also go out and do my research. So if I knew what their competitors were, I would read reviews about how they were perceived in the market.
So I'd go to G2 software is a good one where you can read reviews about what people think of the products, what's failing, what's working, and then that helps get you up to speed about what's good and what's bad pretty quickly as well.
So that's one of my biggest pieces of advice.
Focus on the customer here in new industries, focus on what the value is for them.
I try to wrap my head around, is this a workflow for them?
Is it something that replaces part of their job?
Is it a way to streamline getting them to an answer quickly?
What's the value, what's the piece of the pie here that's really going to make a difference for them compared to what they could be doing.
And then if you center on that helps you really understand the landscape of things and then you can dig into the problems faster.
I'd also say my other piece of advice is if you're moving from in -house to consultancy, really set the right expectations with your customers upfront.
So in a lot of consultancies people will hire you to build software, and I already have an idea in their head.
They're like, oh, we don't need discovery.
You don't have to go out and do these things.
Just build me the right thing.
So make sure that you have set expectations upfront about how you work, how you want this to work, why it's important to actually get in touch with your customers, their customers and understand them better so that you can do this properly.
So make sure that you set that off on the right foot so that you can do the best work possible.
I wish you the best of luck.
And I hope you enjoy getting up to speed on all these different industries just like I did.
Now it's time to talk to Monica.
Welcome to the podcast Monica, it's great to have you here.
Thanks so much, it's great to be here.
So you have an interesting background going from engineering to product management.
What made you want to take the lead?
I always noticed this part of myself that was loving building, but that also felt the need for this creative outlet.
And was also really driven by understanding the customer, understanding the business sides of things.
I found my way into product management actually from engineering to marketing and then working closely with PMs realized oh you know what that role is that the overlap of those three technology, business, and like creativity.
So I was able to moonlight a little bit before making the leap over formally at LinkedIn.
Very cool. And you now lead the sales solutions at LinkedIn all across product management there.
Can you tell us a little bit about what are the sale solutions?
Because most of the folks listening here are probably product managers.
So what is the other side of LinkedIn that usually hits us up in our DMs?
Absolutely, tons of folks across all different professions use LinkedIn for different purposes.
One really valuable use case for LinkedIn is if you're in sales or an outbound role it's a great way to research organizations that you want to do business with, find people that you don't know that you need to know to do business and ultimately it's really about matchmaking between someone who has a solution or product number and someone that has a problem that can address.
So this is all about creating simple -to -use highly -valuable tools that help enterprise sales teams all the way down through single -person sellers at smaller organizations, find the right people, do everything they need to successfully engage and build those relationships.
Awesome, and with the sales solutions, what are the types of products that you oversee there?
Yeah, it's primarily a subscription business.
So there's a consumer subscription you can buy directly on LinkedIn that lets you unlock powerful search filters and really hone in on those right potential buyers on the other side, and then there's more advanced versions of the subscription that lets organizations sync it with their CRM to really help it power their entire sales organization.
And you guys have been incorporating AI into some of these technologies lately, too, right?
Yeah, AI has been at the heart of a bunch things we do across LinkedIn for a long time.
And obviously, certainly more recently with the evolution of LLMs and generative, it's helped us unlock a lot of new value for our customers who are doing these repetitive tasks, looking up people doing a bunch of research on an organization.
It's helped us bring all that in one place and make it really turnkey for sellers to be able to unlock those insights that they need.
When you're considering putting AI into your product strategy or figuring out how it gets incorporated, what are some of the decisions that you're thinking about or making before you that leap?
Yeah, I think at the core for us and for myself, it's about making sure we're really grounded in the customer.
What's the problem?
What is the need? AI is a really powerful solution.
I think we're all still learning what it can do for us.
But at the end of the day, you start with really deeply understand your audience and your customer.
And then I comes in terms of, hey, how can I solve this?
How can I solve this most effectively in a trustful efficient way?
And I think specifically where we've really found resonance, many of us are using these open -ended chat models.
But what we found is really helpful is how do we hide some of that complexity, take that on ourselves, and enable our users to just assume the outputs of that.
And at a click of a button, be able to get those summaries and so forth versus maybe bringing a heavy textual UI to them, which certainly has its place.
But we've just been really excited at the ease of use and adoption we've been able to get.
When we start with the customer problems, figure out applying AI and other solutions, but just make it really easy for the end user who's busy, time -strapped, competing attention for attempt at other things to unlock that value at the click of a button.
When you were considering this, how did the solutions come up?
like was it through customer research and observing the problems and somebody saying, hey, like I think we can use this to help solve it there.
Like what really led you to wanting to incorporate some of these new features and building them?
Great question. I think we started with some core belief based on here's where we see sellers are spending their most time and where LinkedIn can add unique value.
I think it's helpful when all of us are building how do we find a really important valuable problem But like our context, our point of view, our team, our company can add unique value because that's where you have the sustainable differentiation.
So we started with that and we spend a lot of time with our users.
We have a lot of sellers within LinkedIn and then obviously our customers and prospects that are not even yet our customers.
And had a sense of here are some of the things that are more time intensive, more repetitive that I could play a role in.
I think personally for me my approach also has been like, I try to be very open to ideas coming from anywhere.
So actually, funny story that initially we set off on two areas that we were interested in and my energy to the team was we need to pick one, we need to focus, let's pick this one, it's a bigger problem around searching and it was actually the determination of the team and their sense of safety, and you know what, Madhika said maybe not that but we're gonna still test and build a prototype and show what's possible and prove it's not based on a business case or a strategy doc.
It's based on look, let's show us what we can do.
And it's been really fun being in a team where everyone feels empowered to test and learn and be part of driving what the right solutions are versus expecting it all comes from a single leader or a single source of truth.
I think a lot of leaders struggle with creating the environment that you're describing right now.
and where i see them get tripped up is like we're locking people into super hard road maps or like locked down road maps we're like asked we're not giving people time for discovery how did you cultivate this environment what are the factors that you think lead your team to say hey i'm comfortable enough just like testing this out and then i'll bring it back to modica and we'll see what happens to be very self -aware i still have a lot of learning to do but i think some of the things that I try to do and my partners also, it's, it's about close collaboration with my Eng partner, my design partner
so forth is own mistakes, own when we're wrong, cut it from the rooftop.
So I've been in front of the company all hands and told that story that like, hey, I was wrong and it was a great thing that the team drove out so I think they've seen me personally, embrace those failure stories.
I also try, although again, still on the journey, I try to share thinking early and really open it up to the team for feedback.
And we're constantly iterating our processes.
So even right now, for example, as we're thinking about planning what's next, my previous mindset was like, I need to create clarity.
I can't share these early scratch notes with the team until I have a little bit more clarity.
I need to circulate it with a few other senior people.
And we're trying something new that's like, here's the skeleton doc, what do you all think?
How does this change things?
That also gives them not just time to react and say, hey why does that make sense and share their unique perspective it also gives them more time to do some of that discovery research versus the just in time here's the guidance on the road map now you have two weeks to come back with this plan and then lock it down so those are some of the things that I do that I hope helps influence the culture and the team and gives everyone a sense of hey my voice matters I know how I can make an input and interact when you're encouraging them to go brainstorm what are the problems we could solve where is that were you
And also doing it with a mandate of like, how could we use AI or was it just more part of a broader strategy discussion?
I think AI is what's new.
So there is this question, things that before we've looked at and said, it's out of our wheelhouse, that's too hard to tackle.
I can't imagine. So I think that's what's causing us to reevaluate things that previously we may have not prioritized or not gone after.
And I think certainly all of us are trying to explore in our own jobs.
How do I use AI? I personally embrace it.
So there definitely is this like context change that's driving that, really trying to stay grounded in, Hey, what does the customer tell us?
How can we lightweight validate our, your ideas early through conversations, through paper prototypes, through barely functional prototypes and user research to make sure we're on the right track.
So I think that's why we're seeing like AI plays a big role because it's what's new.
But certainly if we can solve something through, let's just clean up this copy, let's fix this workflow.
Let's make this clear.
Like, I think it's really important that we celebrate those wins too so that folks understand, like, it's about solving the problem, not about taking the AI hammer and everything, although it is a very powerful hammer, and it's actually the Swiss Army knife hammer, so there is some reasoning there.
Some people are definitely hammering too, whatever direction they get when it comes to AI.
When you're looking at the whole scope of this and trying to steer the direction of the sales solutions from a top level, what kinds of things are you looking at in the how have you seen AI shaping the way that sales is being done and what have you seen as trends that are happening?
Yeah, I'd say we see it's really great spending time with sales people because they are so innovative, resourceful, they push the boundaries on the org way of doing things to figure out how can they be more effective.
So there's a big part that is just like understanding what's happening and can we extrapolate from there?
How can we make that easier?
How can we build that into the core flow?
The big opportunity that we're excited about is folks spend so much time in non -customer facing work.
70 plus percent of their time is in updating trackers and researching, prepping for meetings.
We were reminding themselves et cetera.
And the biggest challenge that many salespeople encounter is how do we get a meeting with the right person at the right time to be able to share how we can work together and partner together?
so that's been a job -to -be -done area that we're really excited about given that LinkedIn is so uniquely placed in having a pulse of the professional global network.
How can we help advance that and help take some of the rote work out of that to make it easier for me to just get those conversations going and start to build relationships?
So it's very much like taking the work away and anticipating the needs of what's coming out here.
Yeah, I think there's like a huge role for AI to do a bunch of the tasks, and then to help me level up in the remaining tasks that are more truly human, and where I add value, how do we make it easier for that to be more, well?
Yeah, and I think that's like the part that maybe scares everybody about AI, is that because it becomes so easy to draft emails, or put these things into a computer, and then have it spit out, that we all get the same type of messages from people.
They all use the same strategies, they all sound very similar, in what ways do you see the sales team succeeding as well in those like initial outreaches to then be able to earn the right to have the face to face conversation or have your personality shine through.
Yeah, I think the most effective sellers, they have certain habits that they're deploying and whatever the tool set around those if you look at salespeople who are more likely to hit their quota and outperforming, they are really understanding the accounts or the companies that they're doing business with and that people at those companies, they're spending a lot of time getting the lay of the land, researching, understanding what problems are they facing.
So they're talking to folks, they're running a ground game, meeting with different folks in the organization and building that model of what are the problems, how can I help?
And how do I get my foot in the door?
What's the right in to that organization?
And they're the most effective sellers.
They're certainly using AI to help simplify some of those tasks, but And so they're spending still the time on, hey, now that we're in the conversation, I can learn things from you and I can offer ways to support you that I'm not going to get through searching the web or what have you.
So they're the ones who are really using these tools to help them more effectively piece together that mental model.
And they're getting themselves out of the drudgery so that they can be more effective in those conversations.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot like consultative sales or bringing the personality back into it in the advice and the tailoring and really understanding a lot of customer research, it sounds like too.
Yeah. I think, to your point, messaging automation, it's just a higher bar.
How do I stand out from the noise?
And that's where I really appreciate like the human ingenuity.
AI can create a great starting point, but how do you add that special touch, or how do you realize, you know what?
I have a shared connection.
Let me start there, and that's my path into the organization versus the cold email, but who knows if it's going to get seen or received and so forth.
So it's that human ingenuity on top of AI starting point that can really help both.
That's nice. It also makes me see very much how, like, LinkedIn is positioned as well compared to some other sales tools out there.
AI powered ones, but they don't have the connection piece that you do.
And do you see, like, people leveraging those different factors of LinkedIn have a lot more success?
Oh absolutely. If you reach out to someone through a warm introduction versus a cold outreach you're four times as likely to get that response.
So we're working on how do we help surface more of those.
You can already find those warm leads and ask for that intro through Sales Navigator.
But how do we just make it easier for you to access that and for organizations to access that.
We also let you see not just your connections but anyone at your organization because you can ask a colleague even if you don't have a close relationship you may not if you connect to it on LinkedIn.
You can ask a colleague for an introduction and that's a typical approach, but really excited to see folks making use of that functionality in Self Navigator.
And we're finding ways with AI to make it that much more accessible and valuable.
That's really neat.
For everyone in the process.
That's cool. What kind of metrics and data are you using when you're deploying these new features and these new products to like measure success?
How do you keep your team like rooted on outcomes?
that you started with my, or you ended with my starting point as well, is I wanna have what is the customer problem.
In a perfect world, a perfect measurement, how would I know that the customer problem is solved?
Oftentimes we may not have full visibility into that outcome that happens offline, but really wanna make sure that we have metrics that are as close to that as possible.
It's best if those are simple.
Like for example, hey, if I wanna start a conversation, if I send a message to them, did they respond?
The next thing happen that we can look at and say, hey, we know we've started that relationship.
In other instances, it's a bit more complex and we work with our data science team to try to get as close at causal length on what that metric is as possible.
Then upstream of that, maybe those outcomes, they take longer to measure.
It's harder to run an AB test. So, we have some scaffolding around, hey, what does our weekly retention rate look like?
So for the new users in particular, they set up for success in the first session in the first seven days.
They can also be helpful proxies if that outcome that we're after is a little bit further down the line or harder to measure.
So it tends to be a basket, and I think that's a really high value thing that we can think of.
What exactly is the goal?
What's the problem, and do we have the right measure?
Because as soon as you set a measure, high -performing teams are gonna drive for that measure.
So it's really important that it's understandable and that it's the right one is possible for the team and the effort.
You mentioned using the data science team to help you dig into the metrics and understand what's happening there.
Are you basically looking for relationships between if people do X, Y, and Z, this is more likely to happen?
Are you pulling out data from the uses are already and finding patterns in there and then that's where you go to set the metrics?
Yeah, for example, for customers who are CRM syncing, hey, can we predict what set of actions leads to good outcomes that are tracked through the CRM, like opportunities being opened or deals being closed.
And that's where our data science team can help us unpack that.
And it's obviously a fine balance.
You don't wanna model as a metric.
You don't want opaque multi -factorial thing that then you can't performance manage, it goes up, why it's so complex to unpack.
But it is helpful in confirming this thing that we're doing, how is that driving the ultimate outcome for the customer when possible?
I wouldn't say it's like the first place that we start is like draw on our data science team necessarily for that, but it can be really helpful in more complex contexts where there's a bunch of different actions that need to or often happen and result in an outcome.
It also makes me think that with all this data you have this expert view of what works, right?
What causes more relationships, what will allow people to be more successful, how do you translate that as well into the user experience and to help the sales people achieve their jobs?
Yeah, we have a framework that sort of helps.
You don't just wanna shove something to a user and do these things because LinkedIn said so.
So we're always trying to make it explainable to them and connected to what task you're trying to complete right now, what is in your mind, and nudge them along the way to the next action they might wanna take.
Hey, you just found this person that you think is a good fit, you've saved the lead, you saved this account, nudge, nudge, why don't you reach out?
We've started a first draft message for you, edit that message and reach out.
So it's through a set of like nudges.
And us having as clear a perspective as possible.
And what's the happy path that's useful, but also know that we shouldn't be forcing everyone down, giving them the control and the flexibility.
If they have a different objective in mind, great.
How do we make it easy for them to achieve that as well?
But those are some of the ways that we try to help set the customers up for success when they're in the tool.
What do you think about designing the user experience for that and making sure that it's not overwhelming because I have seen places where it's like you must be in this path and I will never let you out of it because we are the experts versus the nudging like you're talking about, the careful balance.
What types of factors do you think go into that and how do you know where the line is?
That is a really good question and it's hard to always tell did I get it right?
You're talking to users.
You're looking at the data.
I think we try to make it really easy.
Here's the what and the why.
And if they need to know, here's the how that you're doing.
And just making it simple for them to dismiss if they wanna get out of here, they can always dismiss.
You don't have a forced workflow.
You have to get through these six actions or else.
And then there's also a part where in working in enterprise software, you have the end user as your user.
You also have often like an admin or someone else who's thinking, okay, here's how this tool fits in for my organization.
So we also empower the admins to set up and configure and so forth so that it can, it's not truly customized but it can be configured in a way that it's gonna resonate more with the sales process that they run or how their team runs.
So I think you can also think about what different user groups can I empower.
Even the end user, they're so busy, they're going from meeting to meeting.
They're not gonna dive in and like configure all their settings but the admin really wants to, they can create leverage for hundreds or thousands of users at once.
So those are some ways that we can help try to stripe that balance so not too much noise, but also flexibility when needed.
I like giving people the configurations to be able to do a lot of that too.
And it sounds a lot like automated onboarding or self -managed onboarding there too, which doesn't put a lot of pressure on your team or LinkedIn to actually go customize those things.
Yeah, we're excited trying out like also how can Gen AI pre -fill some of that onboarding We'll tell you about you from other folks on your contract, what products you sell et cetera.
So there are opportunities also to like pre -fill things and then it becomes always easier to edit something than start from scratch. So yeah, just mentioning that's another way that we found helps create speeds user to value.
That's like a question we're often asking.
How do we accelerate the time for the user to unlock that value?
Very cool. With what you're talking about as well, you mentioned the admins, you mentioned the end user sales, people who are actually using it.
A lot of organizations I see struggle when they're in a situation, they've got a different customer, let's say, somebody's buying it, and then there's a lot of different people who are using it.
How do you navigate building for the person who is actually buying and going to market for that versus the end user and making sure that some people are just not getting lost in that?
Yeah, I think the most important thing is having alignment between them.
The organization will realize value, and it's the connected value of the end users, adopting the product, valuing the product and so forth.
So making sure that those value stories are aligned.
So you're not telling your buyer one thing and then delivering something else on the ground because those gaps can't be sustained for long before the music stops.
So I think that's the first part and just making as many as possible like connection points so that you're not needing to do this translation of here's how the end user is getting value, measuring value, what makes them happy and excited.
Like how as much as possible do you translate that at an organizational level.
Not to say it's always going to be perfectly lined up because an end user maybe isn't asking us, what is the high of this investment question, right?
They're more at their personal level.
Hey, does using this tool help me be successful and how do I drive that forward, but we try to put most of our investment therefore on the end user.
Because that is the driver of value, and then make sure that it connects with the problems for the organization, the buyer, the decision -maker is thinking about.
How do you incorporate that feedback as well from the buyer, from the organization into your roadmaps?
Especially when you're going out to market, you're going to do the sale, and you're hearing about all these things.
I know some people are tempted to just grab that, throw it on a roadmap.
How do you balance all of that?
Yeah, there's no shortage of ideas from our customers, also from our own team.
It is fun building for sales people because all my customers are my own sales team.
I think it's a balance, we have some ways of just saying, hey, these are no brainer quick fixes to reduce friction, et cetera.
And we have a process for making sure that we're constantly trying to eat those down.
For bigger investments, I think the question is making sure you're building things that will help your customer win in a way that you at some point have line of sight to how does that help grow your business?
So we partner really closely with product marketing and other partners on the go -to -market team, particularly if we're looking at a bigger swing, how do we run some customer validations upfront to just confirm, hey, is this a single or is this a home run for you?
And if we had this, would you see yourself investing in it?
You said, yes, where's that budget coming from for you to invest in, to just make sure we really understand that it is a true unlock for the customer.
And then we can feel more confident.
You still have this iterative process that you're building and testing, but it helps us try to stay focused on that customer value.
I like that question too.
Where is the budget coming from?
If you're going to invest in this, I don't think a lot of people are asking that one.
I think like many things, it comes down to you made a mistake in the past and you're like, let me not make that mistake again.
So it was interesting.
It was like an initiative I was working on like many years ago that everyone said, yes, great, we'll spend on it.
And actually not as many customers end up doing that.
It was like, okay, you know what?
Let's just dig in further to get specificity to feel more confident in that feedback.
That's really cool.
When you look back on your career, are there any like moments that stand out to you that have really shaped your philosophy to product strategy and how you think about building visions and incorporating new technologies?
Yeah, I can think of two or three come to mind.
The first one it was when I was a new PM and I was owning this area within LinkedIn that was our job posting experience, I'd grow the business, got it XYZ, and so my first effort and I was coming in for marketing, so I was really oriented around like funnels and so forth, so we just let's redesign the job posting flow on LinkedIn.
Let's remove friction, let's test different experiences, really trying to solve a LinkedIn problem of conversion rate and revenue.
And the pivotal moment, I remember we had a product review with a very senior leader at LinkedIn.
Sat down at the table.
His first question, what customer problem are you solving?
And my heart sank and it was a, oh shoot, of course.
You know that, that really clear problem.
But the other part of this that made it pivotal for me.
I was the most junior person in the room.
I could have been left out to suffer on my own and my leader at the time immediately without missing a beat stepped in.
This is on me. I asked the team to focus on X, Y, Z and revenue targets and the feedback is for me.
And obviously I knew the feedback was for myself but the extent of support that I felt from that leader and accountability that he took and owning that in the moment really stuck with me and helped me think about leadership.
It's about taking that accountability for the team and I really appreciated that.
So that is one that comes to mind.
Another pivotal moment was it was about, like, how can I tell my judgment versus the data?
There is a big product change we were looking at making and how customers purchased.
And it was this classic you ask customers, they're like, don't change.
I'm going to churn if you change this.
I like it just how it is.
And you would have to believe insane things in terms of how it changed our acquisition rates or retention rates couple that with it's a lot of work to go through all the effort to solve this.
I just kept getting kicked down the line, kicked up down the lines.
And finally, my leader at the time was like, that's it.
We need to learn to take intelligent risks more quickly.
And he screwed down the gauntlet.
He's like, you have five weeks to prove or disprove how this is going to work out.
Just figure it out.
And at a larger organization, that is a very fast timeline to turn around.
And we figured out it was a painted door test that then had support on the back end.
So we weren't leaving customers hanging.
And in five weeks we learned, holy moly, we had a 70 % increase in customer acquisition.
It blew away all of our expectations.
So that just taught me about, it was challenging because all of this evidence said, no, except for this, like the voice inside and we can't always just follow the voice inside, we need to be customer grounded, but the unlock was what can we do in a short amount of time to actually answer this question.
It's got me in the frame of, OK, we have some big vision.
We have some big problems. What are the what you need to believe that you can prove or disprove in a shorter cycle to de -risk this and fail fast or find the unlocked cluster?
So those were two moments that were really pivotal for me in terms of how I think about my job as a PM, how I lead, and just like the approach to getting to product market fit faster.
I think the second one too is such a great story.
I was just talking about it with somebody else on a different podcast earlier.
About how people are so used to the way it always is that they can't even imagine what it would be without it.
And I think we get into this trap as product managers sometimes of asking people what they want instead of observing their behaviors and figuring out where there's pain that they might not even realize yet.
And if they saw it go away, they'd be like, oh, okay, that's a lot better.
Absolutely. And I think the challenges when you're doing something that's more radical, you've changed so many different variables that it is gonna be harder to, if it fails, why?
But certainly, how do we balance, yeah, trying to understand what our customers are telling us.
But also, what questions are hard to answer on a theoretical basis, and therefore, do you need some other means of testing and learning what's true and what's - When you're testing something that big too, like you said, it's hard to figure out what exactly is causing the success.
What's your approach for doing that?
Like you did the painted door test in this acquisition study, right?
You saw that it was really increasing there.
What's enough to say, we understand this and how do you make that decision of, okay, now this is what it should be.
Like this is how we build that whole thing.
Yeah, I think for me, it comes down to having clarity of thought.
It needs to be less than five things that you're like uncertain about and either are play out one way or the other.
that defines the outcome, and I think, as quickly as possible, establishing, okay, here's what I think those three things are.
Let me check with my marketing partner.
Check with my end partner.
Let me check with my design or my strategy team and really refine that and then say, okay, which of these are the gnarliest thing?
Let's solve that first because we want bad news early.
And you can find that it comes down to really being able to understand what you know about the customers, what you know about the market, what you know about your organizational context or context, here's the most likely make or break and just finding a way to then construct a test that gets you a good signal.
I think the other challenge that sometimes happens is we did a test, it failed.
Is it because we did such a scrappy MVP test that it was an execution failure or was it an actual proof that the strategy is wrong?
And I find like it's hard to have a bright line test of that but it's just knowing you need a good enough execution and maybe decide let's do the 80 -20 execution and if it fails we're willing to invest so much more.
But just having that sense of what's my horizon for like playing this one out can help get that clarity sooner.
And when you're leading your team and looking across your portfolio and figuring out where do I place like my big bets and how much should I invest and like where do we test what's your methodology for kind of thinking about that and how much effort let's say for how much you want to put into these different tests or these different concepts and giving people room to go explore them.
Yeah, I've seen it may depend on the context of the organization.
Right? If you're on a zero to one, then that's it.
Let's swing for the fences and really lean into taking risks.
If you're running a team that's like reasonably mature, the company is counting on us to deliver some engagement, to deliver some revenue, et cetera.
We try to think about the different buckets that these investments fall into.
Here's the sure bet.
We know they're going to pay off.
Let's fund them. Let's figure out the most expedient way to get these wins in.
And then there's a next set of things that are either like strategic, we're pretty sure about.
There's a couple of unknowns and then there's the swing for the fences venture bets.
And I try to keep in mind, OK, roughly we want whatever, 60 -30 -10 or 70 -20 -10 across those categories.
Maybe it's a more disruptive time.
And I feel like there's more risk to our business and I want to swing a lot more for the venture bets.
I have that resource allocation in mind.
but really the resourcing comes down to here's our goals and objectives across these buckets and maybe actually maybe the sure bets, I can get these with less resourcing and I don't need to see exactly 70 % of all the people in the team working on this thing.
It's just a sense check that can be helpful, but just understanding do I need to deliver to the customers or to the company that can then help you think across those like shorter time horizon and then the like bigger swing that's in your portfolio.
When you're looking at setting the teams up so that they can go experiment successfully too, what do you think besides, you talked about safety, the ability to actually go do it and the time to go do it.
What are things do you put in place or do you practice at LinkedIn, whether it's the way you run tasks or the tools that you use so that people can actually orchestrate these really well and get feedback?
Yeah, I think a couple of ingredients that successful teams have together is like getting your cost -functional partners on board at the same time, so it's not like product says this and then designer engineering down the line go execute, so having this like really healthy cross -functional team to drive that.
Second, just making sure we really understand like what do we think the outcome of this is going to be, and then if it's an A -B test make sure that's implemented in the platform so we can get that read self -serve.
Hopefully we don't need some intensive ad hoc analysis.
And if it's not an AB test, if we're not able to do that for some reason, okay, who are the right customers that we can put into this beta and know that we can have conversations and feedback from to be able to elicit that.
We also use an OKR process at LinkedIn.
So at various times teams have set, okay, here's my deliver high confidence stuff.
And we're actually gonna make sure we set these exploratory OKRs, that are more about planting the seeds for next quarter or next half.
so that we're not always in like, reap, reap, reap mode.
We need to be sewing bets as well.
So there's other mechanisms that you can use depending on your, like, accountability or target setting structure at your organization that can help create that space and tell the teams, no, it's not just that I want you to do this.
Like, we're all expecting you to do this cause that's what's going to drive the future growth of the future.
Sounds like a great way to to bake in some innovative thinking and get people to start pushing boundaries that way too.
It's been helpful. Obviously you get into the throw of the push and the pulls.
So I think the other part is knowing like if we're not green across the board on everything and we need to make tradeoffs, knowing at the front where things move can also help too.
Yeah. Monica, when you're thinking about the landscape of sales and how things are changing with AI, and you're looking to the future of where all this technology is going, what do you think we're going to be seeing in the future?
What are you looking forward to?
I'm really excited about how AI is going to help.
I know we're not we talked earlier about, oh, it may increase noise.
I think at the end of the day, we'll see much more empowerment for buyers in this journey.
How do we help them learn more and more effectively?
Buyers are already doing a lot of their research before they engage with a seller.
How do we make this two -way connection more, more efficient and more transparent?
And I think it really is going to help elevate sellers into a more strategic role, so I'm not having to manage all these tasks as much, and ultimately like, in success that will help organizations have their problems more effectively solved, to have them be more effective, more revenue driving and so forth.
But I think AI is going to help shape a lot of that through, you know, the sales, the sales process is still the same.
It's, there's a question of, do I understand the problems, do I understand my value, my product's value, my services value, and then connect the dots across the board and get to close.
The other thing that we're seeing in organizations is, there's a proliferation of, like, who makes a decision to make a purchase?
And to date, we're seeing the typical enterprise has over 11 stakeholders in a buying decision.
And you can have lots of people say yes and you just need, one, like, the wrong person to say no, that can stall or derail a deal.
So I think we're also going to see this helping sellers better understand who do I actually need to know who are my hidden allies, my champions, that I can empower and connect with to help drive that through.
And that's something that we're also excited about working on delivering in sales later.
But I think just at the end of the day, it's about solving problems between buyers and sellers and it can play a huge role helping both sides of that equation.
Oh, I had no idea there was 11 stakeholders involved.
That's a lot. It is a lot.
Yeah. And yeah, the most effective sellers, we call it multithreading.
You're like, great.
I've got this really excited champion, but are there any past customers?
Are, is there any past employees or X, Y, Z that can help you really get the lay of the land?
Enterprise sales, it is a highly strategic, all hands on deck team sport between the seller.
There's often customer success, maybe they have some technical support as well.
So it really is a complex motion that excited about how I AI can help that more effective been more efficient across all of them.
That's really cool.
I'm excited to see what it does too.
Monica, my last question for you is if you had to go back and give some advice to your younger self, what would it be?
My younger self was very interested in what's next, what's the next thing.
And I think I had a misperception that, oh, more things.
More things on the list of stuff that I own is the way that I'm going to grow.
I remember at one point one of my peers left LinkedIn and I Who's going to own that product area?
Oh, I'm going to make a pitch to my manager that I should own that product area because surely two things is better than one.
And he just, he's very direct.
He's a straight shooter.
He's a Monika. Empire building is not your way to grow.
You have a huge scope for impact.
Learn and grow where you are and make that impact.
And I'm so glad he gave me that advice.
So I think my advice to my past self is it's not to settle for the hand that you've dealt but just like being curious, being hungry to learn and to make impact within what you have is going to be such a rich experience and set you up for future growth versus trying to play some more tactical game of like, how do I be seen as more senior?
So that's what learning that sooner might've been helpful for me.
So that's my advice to my past self.
That is great advice for all of our listeners out there.
Thank you so much, Monica, for being on the podcast. If people want to connect with you, where can they go?
You know what, you can find me on LinkedIn, Monica Lewis.
Let's get a surprise surprise.
That's great and we will put Monica's LinkedIn link in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast .com and you can find out more about LinkedIn Sales Navigator and their solutions there as well.
Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next week with another Amazing guest. In the meantime if you have any product management questions for me, go to DearMeylissa .com and let me know what they are.
We'll see you next time.
