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.
It is Friday and that means it's time for Dear Melissa.
So we started separating out the Dear Melissa segments where you can ask me any of your product management questions into their own episodes on Fridays.
So make sure that you like and subscribe to this podcast so that you never miss one.
And you can ask me anything. of your burning product management questions if you go to dearmelissa.com and I'll answer them on an upcoming episode as well.
So this week's question is coming from a new VP of product.
This is all about how do we learn product management when we come from industry experience?
Let's dive in. and see what the question is.
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Dear Melissa, I am a former chief people officer turned VP of platform and product marketing.
What is one piece of advice for a person with a ton of industry experience but limited product experience?
So this is a very common thing that I see in a lot of companies where somebody with very deep industry expertise and is pretty strategic will come into the product management role for the first time.
And there are a few things that you need to look out for here.
So I wanna tell you how to get up to speed in product management.
I also wanna tell you how to be successful here.
And I wanna tell you how to win over your team.
So your unique background as a chief people officer, it's going to give you a rare perspective on the industry and it builds empathy with your customers, which is fantastic. because to be a great product manager, you need to deeply understand your customers.
So here you're getting a leg up where you really understand this industry, You understand your customers well, and you're probably very well voiced in the problems that they are dealing with.
But the transition from CPO to VP of platform and product marketing, Something where you can't take for granted that product management here is a craft.
And this is the biggest issue that I see with people who transition in from very deep industry experience.
If you're doing product management for the first time, you have to recognize that product management in and of itself is a craft.
It is part art, part science, part psychology.
It's figuring out the intersection of business, technology, customers, problems, and creatively coming up with solutions.
So it has its own methodologies. It has its own frameworks.
It has its own ways of thinking. And those things exist and are codified very well out there in the industry.
There's been a lot of different ways that many companies do product management, but they do come back down to certain ways of working.
And you have to understand what those are.
I see a lot of leaders who do come in at this top spot, this VP spot, and they have a lot of product managers who are working with them underneath. and they are unfamiliar with their ways of working.
And that is a really fast way to lose credibility with your team.
So what you're going to want to do first is look into this craft and start to get up to speed on how product management works.
It's different than what you've experienced before.
It is not just about, hey, let me hand down somebody's you know, some of these solutions to the team and they're just going to go and do exactly what I spec out.
That's not how this works. You as a VP are in charge of setting strategy.
But you also have to understand what's the right level of strategy to set.
It's going to be focusing on what are those big industry problems and pushes that you can go after to succeed.
And that's where your industry experience is gonna come in and really help you, right?
How do I craft that? But you're gonna have to scope it in a way where you can, then give that space to the product managers to go out and figure out what are the solutions we should actually build. right, investigate those problems a little further, come back to you with aha moments or things that you may not have seen before.
So in order to work well with the product managers, you're going to need to learn the language. learn about understanding concepts like product market fit, user journeys, feature prioritization methods.
You're going to have to learn about experimentation, how we work with technology. what the tech stacks are, how that actually has implications on what we build at the end of the day.
You wanna get really well invested into how these teams all work together.
What are the appropriate cadences? How long it takes for things to build? so that you can go back and forth and start to work with the product managers, negotiate with tech, and then be that linchpin in between everybody to set this strategy.
So I would really recommend that you invest time in learning product fundamentals.
Do I need you to be fantastic at writing a user story?
No, you don't have to do that, right? Like that's not your job, but you do have to understand how the teams work.
You have to understand those fundamentals, those concepts that I just put out there.
And your job as a leader here too is not to just tell people what to build.
It's to concentrate them on the right problems to solve.
So how do you explain those problems to them?
How do you understand their processes for doing good customer research and not just shoot it down saying, I know... how to build all of these things, right?
I am the industry expert here. You just listen to me and you go out and you just figure out, you know, just build it, just do all these things, right?
That's not your job. And that's where I see a lot of industry experts get stuck.
So now you're getting up to speed on the craft of product management.
I would also recommend here to reach out to other VPs of product and see how they are scoping strategy.
How do they set strategy? What kind of framework do you want to actually implement here?
There's a lot of different strategic frameworks.
There's OKRs. I teach about strategic intents and product initiatives.
They're very similar to OKRs. What are you going to use?
As a VP of product, you're in charge now of bringing in the frameworks that you want to use, right?
You have to actually build that scaffolding and that infrastructure for the rest of the product management teams to operate.
So that's why I keep stressing here. It is so fundamental that you actually understand how product management teams should operate. so that you can do that.
You're going to have to mentor people in this as well.
So I would look around on your team too. and say, who here is senior and is really good at product management, just like the craft of product management?
And you're going to want to lean on that person and help bring them into this kind of like partnership role here where you can go back and forth designing how product management should work with them.
This will really help. And if you don't have that senior person who's really, really good at product management, you might want to hire them, right? maybe as a level right underneath you to do a little bit more people management, to do more of the craft of product management and to work with you deeply.
That could be a really good pair. So once we understand how product management should work, we've got those fundamentals, we've got the processes, all of those things, now we're gonna go back into what you're really good at, right? and your superpower, which is deep empathy and user understanding.
So this industry experience that you have is your secret weapon.
You understand the pain points, you understand the frustrations, you understand the real-world challenges users face.
Those product managers have to learn that through research and data, but you've actually lived it.
So how do you bring that to your team? You can come back and show them what it's like to actually work there. but you're going to have to fight a really big bias.
And that bias is that this is the way that we've always done it.
So if you've been in that industry for a very long time and you know it cold, you're probably used to the solutions that you've seen out there.
You don't wanna just copy the solutions you've seen out there, you wanna make them better.
You wanna think outside the box. I run into this problem a lot with new chief product officers or people who are very high up in companies who've been in it for a very long time.
Financial services is a great example. There are a lot of people who became chief product officers in financial services, but they didn't really have a technology background.
They had a business background. And to them, we have to say, hey, even if you're in this very highly regulated area of financial services, You still want to understand products and understand solutions and why they work from industries outside of you because you might be able to borrow some of those patterns and some of those ways of working. to make your solutions better.
So here I would say, while... bring in that empathy to the team.
Also look out at other products and decide why you like them.
What makes it good? Is it the user experience?
Do they do it in a unique way that actually solves this problem much better?
Could we borrow that? Could we borrow lessons from things that are not just within our industry, but are outside our industry and bring those solutions in?
It doesn't have to be a one for one solution, but it could be patterns, user experience patterns, the ways that people are interacting with things.
That's what makes it unique. So you're going to want to make sure that you encourage your team to come up with unique creative solutions and you're going to want to challenge your biases from having that deep industry experience.
So remember, we're gonna empathize, but we don't wanna dictate, right?
We wanna empathize with our customers. We wanna point the direction and we wanna be solid in our direction. of what problems we wanna solve, but we wanna be open to creativity in what those solutions are.
So that's what we wanna do there. And you can bring that into the team and make sure that they are deeply experienced now through your knowledge on what the customers want.
You're also going to be able to spot teams that are building features that sound good in theory, but maybe not work in practice because they might have a misunderstanding of who those customers are.
So again, lean on those expertise for those types of things to kind of gut check.
Are we going in the right direction? Do people really understand these customers?
Do they understand these users? That's going to help you there too.
Now, I've brought this up a couple more times, but let's really get into it.
Strategy versus execution, right? You need to know your lane.
So you're going to focus intently on the why.
Why are we solving these problems? And the what when it comes to problems.
What problems need to be solved? You need to be crystal clear about the outcomes you want to achieve.
You want to be crystal clear about what you expect to change for the users and the customers and the businesses once that happens. but you're going to not tell the team how to do that.
You may have inputs, you may have feedback, that's fine, but you're not dictating the how, right?
That's what the teams are there for. So since you don't have a ton of technical expertise, that's where you have to go back to your teams and rely on them, your CTO counterparts, and your developers, your product managers, your designers. to come in here and help you understand how you might do that.
So you can provide input. You can provide feedback.
That's great. But make sure that you're getting really crystal clear on what the problems are. and why we're actually solving them, right?
What those outcomes are. Then let the teams go out and come up with the solutions. create a psychologically safe place for your teams to come back, challenge your ideas, propose better solutions, and work with you.
And if you do that, you're going to be really successful here too.
So practically, what can you do to set yourself up for success in this new role?
Spend a lot of times with the actual users, shadow them, interview them, observe their workflows.
You've probably been doing this a lot in your other roles.
But also make sure you get out and see what people are doing in other companies because they might be using it differently than you.
You suspect it. Partner closely with engineering and design and your product management team.
Admit what you don't know. Ask lots of questions.
Use your people skills to become the connector between these different stakeholders and teams.
Make sure you establish regular feedback loops so that you can learn and adapt quickly as well.
So I think you're in a really good spot to strategically lead this.
What we need to do is layer on some really good product management fundamentals.
So just because we talk about team level processes in product management doesn't mean that you should ignore it.
I would get up to speed on that. I would talk to your teams about what they're using, what's not working, what is working.
I would make sure that you do have solid product managers underneath you who know that craft And then I would open up that space for them to propose solutions while providing very firm direction on those problems.
And with that and a little bit of patience, you're going to be able to really excel at this learning curve.
I find that the best product leaders are those who deeply understand both the business context and the product discipline.
So what we're trying to do here is up-level you on the product discipline.
But if you're curious and willing to learn, you can definitely get there.
So I wish you the best of luck and I hope this advice helps.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dear Melissa.
Again, if you have a question for me, Make sure you go to dearmelissa.com and submit it there.
We will answer it next Friday. And make sure that you like and subscribe so that you do not miss any episodes.
Next Wednesday, we'll be back with another amazing guest.
I'll see you next time.
