Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
Sunday Rewind this week is a 2019 talk from #mtpcon Singapore, in which John Maeda argues that the increasing complexity and speed of technology can only be handled by bringing balance to our work – and that product people are best placed to lead the way. Read more »
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Whilst discussing the growing AsiaPac tech scene during a panel at #mtpcon Singapore in 2019, how to nurture local talent formed a large part of the conversation. One year on we look back at the advice shared by this group of product leaders.
The conversation about local talent began with a question – rather than fly talent into the region, can we do a better job of nurturing local talent?
Silvia Thom, Senior Director of Product at Zalora kicked things off by sharing her experience of growing a team in Singapore. A few years previously, when she was trying to grow her own team there, she actively went out to meetups to explore the product community.
To her surprise, the community was fairly small, so she started attending local meetups, and later began helping the organisers at her local ProductTank. “I was starting to give back and to see how we could grow this community.” Next, she turned her attention to her company. “I thought, ok, I cannot go out there and just hire ready-made product managers, we really have to start developing a career track.”
This meant Silvia had to think about how to bring in someone new, such as a fresh graduate, and to guide and mentor them internally, as well as offer external help like attending conferences and workshops.
“People say ‘I can’t get product managers, what should I do?’ I get this question a couple of times a week. The solution, she said, is not always to bring in people from overseas. Instead, it’s about training local people up and mentoring them internally.
If you do need to bring talent in from elsewhere, Colin Pal, then VP Product at Photobook suggested that it’s not always a negative. “I think one of the things that really helps is to not see this phenomenon, or this situation, as a problem… some people see this as foreigners coming in and stealing jobs.” He explained that hires from other countries can help to boost product practice at your organisation.
“Speaking as a local, it has really enriched things for us to see how things are done elsewhere. It’s not something tangible, it’s not something someone wrote in a book maybe in London that’s far away,” he said, “it’s literally people who are here, in the here and now.” It’s the responsibility of local product managers to make the most of these people, of their knowledge and experience, he said. “If you’ve got great people who come from more established markets or more developed practices, pick their brains!”
Renato Silva, Director of Product at Tencent, commented that the responsibility for nurturing talent doesn’t have to solely fall to you.
He explained that we tend to think that it’s our internal job, our internal responsibility only, but in reality there are lots of opportunities to learn and share ideas thanks to the efforts of the product community. As a product manager, new or experienced, you simply have to get out there, take advantage of it and give back what you can.
“The ProductTank example is a great one,” he said. “We’re now in more than 200 cities, so if you’re not yet involved in one of those communities where you live, try to do that. Try to bring knowledge from a conference like this, or from wherever, into your local community and try to nurture your own local community so that over time they will get more interested, improve their craft and even maybe become the next hires for your next super project.”
If, as you read this, you realise that you’re the talent to be nurtured in the scenarios described above, we’d love to know your thoughts. Share your experience, questions and concerns in the comments below so we can continue the conversation, and take a look at these additional pieces of advice from our 20i9 panellists.
For Renato, a key piece of advice is to be a rebel. “Ask why for everything,” he said. “Don’t just take everything for granted or execute whatever people are asking you for, ask them back – why? Why should I do this? Why is this important? Where is this going to take us? Absolutely ask everyone. Be the person asking the questions.”
As well as asking why Kaia Lai, Head of Product Marketing at Grab, recommended asking another, specific question, that being – how will this product help who you are trying to serve?
“From a customer’s perspective, you should always be asking why this is right for them.” This is important, she explained, because product leaders who have been flown in from outside the local area might not have the local nuance needed to ask that question. “It’s really really important that we think super super customer first and really understand the kind of vision we’re trying to tackle so that we can create the right solutions.”
Based in Kuala Lumpur, Colin has seen that product managers in Asia don’t always give themselves enough credit.
“As product managers in Asia, we need to find our identity,” he said. “We are not the same as product managers in Europe, we are not the same as product managers in the US. Trying to imitate is not the sincerest form of flattery in this case. We need to know what we want to take and what we want to learn, but also know the areas where we think we can lead.”
With this in mind, think about what you’re good at and where you might need help so that you can hone your craft and take it forward.
Anyone who works in product management will know that becoming a product manager isn’t as straightforward as taking a course, or getting a certificate or degree. In most cases, the people who really want the role seek out the opportunities and learn by doing. To that end, Silvia recommended that you follow your passion, even if it’s currently only a hobby.
“Find a topic that you’re passionate about or a problem that you want to solve. I think that’s very important and where it can start,” she said. “Try to do some mock-ups or some user research and just see how you feel about it. See if it really excites you.”
Once you find that, she explained, it can be just the spark you need to find your direction, a new job, or perhaps even a job within your current company.
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#mtpcon Singapore speaker Barry O’Reilly has made it his business to get business leaders to unlearn what they know, and he’ll be taking to the stage in Singapore next month to explain more about how and why leaders need to unlearn past success to succeed in the future.
Barry describes unlearning as “the process of letting go of, moving away from, and reframing once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviours that were effective in the past, but now limit our success” so that you can embrace new behaviours that are effective in a world ripe with emerging technologies and accelerated change.
He thinks it’s a topic that will resonate with an Asian audience because of the prevailing top-down business culture in the region. “I think Asian businesses are starting to realise that their high-performance individuals don’t want to work in company cultures where they’re restricted and told what to do. These individuals want the ability to develop new ideas and pursue them,” he says. “Take Singapore for example, there’s an issue at the moment as innovators and entrepreneurs are moving to other markets, like the US, where they’re encouraged to innovate. The Singapore government is trying to bring talent back to the local market and coach organisations on how to adopt a more merited-based approach.”
Although he’s now based in San Francisco, Barry has worked in Asia and has current clients in Japan and China. He says the idea of unlearning is beginning to take hold in the region and Asian business leaders are starting to understand that they may have to adapt their leadership: “There’s strong interest in how they can start to do that.”
Most of Barry’s consulting work comes from Fortune 500 companies or from heavily funded scaling startups in San Francisco and around the globe. Typically these coaching engagements run from three to 12 months. He’s coached executive teams at Capital One, International Airlines Group, HSBC, Google, and Amazon, to name a few.
What he does, he says, is to get these senior people to understand that they need to develop a system to adapt to changing circumstances. Just as a product has features which need to be continuously developed in order to stay relevant, humans need to continuously innovate or adapt their behaviour or face being disrupted. “When senior leaders face issues they can’t resolve, or they’re not living up to the outcomes they expected, or they’ve tried everything they can think of and are still not getting the breakthroughs they need that’s generally a signal that they need to change their behaviour or shift their mindset. I’ve developed a system to help them do that.”
Barry’s unlearning system is grounded in experimentation, a skill learned from his years working in product, as he’s been a product builder for much of his career. Originally from Ireland, Barry’s first job, in 1999, was as a software developer for Citysearch in San Francisco – this was a Yellow Pages-type of online directory for business trying to get on to the internet, and a competitor to Zip2, the business that formed the start of Elon Musk’s career. After that Barry moved back to Europe and worked for a mobile games developer, Games Kitchen. “This was just after Nokia’s Snake, at a time when phones started to have small microprocessors on them so you could build arcade-type games on them,” he says. “We launched a game called Wireless Pets which went on to be the biggest WAP game in Europe. It got us seed funding and gave me an opportunity to learn how to build products with emerging technologies.” It was also a key transition point for Barry and the start of his shift to product management: he learned about agile and experimentation and that he wanted to focus more on “what to build, not on how to build it”.
After two and a half years at Games Kitchen, he went backpacking. He ended up in Australia and started to work on a $800m initiative to build next-generation e-learning content for schools across Asia-Pacific, teaching children to learn through game play. The content has now been distributed through the region, and incorporated into different learning resources- in Australia for example, it’s become the National Digital Learning Resource. “It was very interesting,” says Barry, “it gave me a chance to understand how to work with a federated group of people.”
After this, he moved to London to join Thoughtworks, because he “wanted to work with really great engineering people”. He adds: “Thoughtworks had a real pedigree, they were pioneering continuous delivery, there were people like Martin Fowler who helped to write the Agile Manifesto based there.” It was an interesting time for Thoughtworks, people were just starting to bring design and product thinking into their businesses, Thoughtworks staffers Lindsay Ratcliffe and Mark McNeill had just written a book, Agile Experience Design. Says Barry: “I was curious and wanted to do a tour of duty with the company.”
Barry ran Thoughtworks’ business transformation practice and ended up spending five years at the company. While he was there he wrote Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale in conjunction with Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky: “We formed a cross-functional team – I was responsible for product and business innovation, Jez for engineering and Joanne for compliance. The book was a bestseller.”
The success of Lean Enterprise gave him the impetus to set up on his own. He was keen to live in the US again so he moved back to San Francisco and started from scratch. “Americans aren’t that interested in what you’ve done elsewhere, so going from zero to one was difficult.”
Barry says he overcame this by thinking of himself as a product: “To launch myself in a new market I thought about how I could identify key customers that I wanted to work with and show them that I could pair with them to provide what they need and want. In some respects, it was a big bet but I felt I had the systems in place that I would be able to figure out if it was going to work.” He says he and his wife set some KPIs to hit in the first three months to validate the business was working before both fully committing to move the US as the base to build out the venture. “For the first few months, I commuted between the US and Europe. When I quit Thoughtworks there were people in Europe who wanted me to work with them, so I had clients in Europe to give me a base to build from.”
Going from one client to three was easier than going from five to 10, observes Barry, because as you grow you have to rely on people you may not know hiring you based on the evidence and outcomes of work with others – a key reason always to seek to agree and evaluate outcomes with clients.
After four years Barry’s consultancy business is well established and he still relies on KPIs to measure his success. “A key metric for me is the viral coefficient of my peers sharing my content with others,” he says. “By that I mean if I’m creating a great product then my peers are referencing my work. It’s my leading indicator.” He takes a portfolio management approach to the business, and invests 35% of his time in new product creation and development – building new approaches and experimenting with new ways of delivery.
Barry is now looking for ways to scale his impact by leveraging technology, as one of his aspirations for the business is to get a million people to learn how to “unlearn” in the next 12 months. To this end, he’s just run his first Unlearn workshop in virtual reality. “I learned a lot. The platform is still very new and naïve. I’m experimenting with partnerships with other businesses, and doing these virtual reality workshops. I’m challenging myself to find out where I can get to with it,” he says.
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Not many product people can claim to have coached staff at the White House. “It’s my most proud achievement,” says Silicon Valley veteran Janice Fraser, “It was such an honour to be invited to support our public service… it was a peak life experience for me. For four years, every six months during Obama’s second term, I brought a team to the White House to teach startup-type thinking to Obama’s administration.”
An expert in emerging management practices to support innovation at scale, Janice is currently a partner at Seneca.VC, a one-year-old firm where she works alongside other entrepreneurs like Melissa Moore, Shirley Schoenfeld, and their founding advisor Eric Ries.
Seneca is focused on building a community and supporting early-stage startups and entrepreneurs, helping them gain access to investors, giving them operational support, and teaching them to build long-term value using the Lean Startup methodology. As part of this community-building, Seneca has thus far successfully run two conferences called Founders and Funders, each attended by about 200 people.
Janice is also a consultant to large corporations. She works with a handful of large businesses, helping their efforts to transform the way they bring new businesses to market, and acting as a strategic meeting facilitator. Her consulting can turn into heavyweight projects, she says. “I will engage very deeply with select clients on an important piece of their story. For example, I’ve been working with a Fortune 50 company – and a long-standing client – on the development of a measurement tool, helping them to measure the success of startups in the corporate portfolio. It’s a big meaty project.”
In addition, she’s in the midst of writing a book with her husband Jason Fraser, which should be published in 2020. It’s looking at key leadership skills “for life, family, work, and business”. While the details are still under wraps, Janice describes it as “a framework that helps leaders deliver outcomes rather than outputs, and helps everything move more quickly with less drama”.
With such variety, Janice cannot characterise her typical working day, “there’s no such thing!” she says. When she’s not working she isn’t averse to either facilitating or leading a bit of silliness – the other week she went to see a troupe of drag queens performing a musical adaptation of Harry Potter…
Like many product people, Janice hasn’t taken a straight path to her current position. She started out as a molecular biology student, but after taking up an internship she found she disliked the work environment and ended up graduating with an English degree. She then spent five years in editorial at tech media publisher IDG before joining Netscape in the mid 90s, effectively as a product manager. “I was the lead for a 35,000-line Javascript application that was one of the first personalised interfaces to the web (strikingly similar to igoogle.com). We didn’t have UX, product management, none of those things existed. Our mission was ‘there’s this internet thing, what are we going to do with it?’.”
A quarter of a century on, Janice has started six companies in Silicon Valley, worked in senior product roles at Pivotal Labs, Bionic, and elsewhere, and terms herself a “poly enthusiast”. “At heart, I’m a product person and entrepreneur, and they’ve played out in different ways in different parts of my career,” she says. “What underlies all that I’ve done and continue to do is that it matters to me that the humans involved in whatever system have an easy time of it. I once had to write a six-word biography – and I came up with ‘knitting at the edge of newness’. Whether it’s been desktop publishing, the internet, user experience, entrepreneurship, corporate transformation, whatever the new thing is, I’m the person at the edge of it trying to make it boring. I’m trying to make it simple for regular people to do the new thing reliably well.”
Janice even has a sticker on her computer that says “regular people”, and she completely rejects the received wisdom and mythology that it’s only extraordinary people who do extraordinary things. “Extraordinary things are done by regular people,” she says. “I always find myself saying ‘I bet I can make this easier for everyone.’”
She’s always enjoyed what she does, and says there have been at least four or five times in her career when she felt she was working at the peak of her capability, doing the most good that she could: “I’m incredibly privileged because I’ve had many times in my career when I’ve felt ‘this is a good thing I’m doing.’” Chief among these times was the period she spent working with the Obama administration: “I even had a trip to Camp David where I led a workshop for the National Security Council.”
She’s worked in Silicon Valley since her Netscape days and has a pretty clear-eyed view of the place, warts and all. It’s still generally not female-friendly, she says, although the Me Too movement has exposed many of the bad actors. “Most of the women my age, who’ve been around for a while, have stories,” she says. “But it’s still an extraordinarily creative, driven, and curious place.”
What has changed over the years, she says, is that today there are “two Silicon Valleys”. On one hand, there are huge tech companies in Silicon Valley – like Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Google and Twitter – who hire people looking for very secure corporate jobs, and on the other, there’s the entrepreneurial startup space.
“The big tech companies are full of people who have a massive salary and tremendous security at a very young age,” Janice says. “They’re looking for something different from their lives than the startup part of Silicon Valley that I inhabit. This is the part that’s trying to invent the future. If you look back to the mid 90s, the people who were working in Silicon Valley then had some pretty utopian ideals about internet technology.” She says it became very commercial very quickly in the late 90s and post the 2008 recession has been very aggressively commercial. The bro culture that many people find distasteful has developed since the recession, she says. “The Me Too movement is having an impact on this culture,” she says, “if nothing else the millennial women just won’t have it any more.”
Janice tends to work with what she terms “founders who are not in fashion” – and she includes women and people of colour in this description. “I want to help them to have a better time. I hussle in the Silicon Valley sense – but I do it because I’m curious and passionate, not because I feel I have to win at all costs. I’m not about winning and losing, but living my life as myself and finding prosperity, meaning, community and joy that way. That sets me apart from a lot of the community that I’ve been making a career in.”
What qualities does she think a good startup founder needs to possess? Janice finds that the best entrepreneurs have a drive and a particular mindset: “There’s an ability to believe in a future state and to maintain that belief despite headwinds, and at the same time there’s a willingness to accept the truth when you see it or hear it.” The best entrepreneurs also possess both hubris and humility, and can make adjustments to both, she says. “They have an ability to go and learn, and then seek and receive or bring in whatever resources are needed. Courage is effortful and confidence is effortless – and you need a lot of both. You can’t always have courage or be confident, it’s about balance.”
Where does her own drive and mindset come from? “I learned from a very young age that I had to create my own future and I had to take care of myself,” Janice says. “If you want to have anything you have to go make it yourself. As I say, I’m a poly enthusiast, and I have an insatiable desire to know about ‘stuff’. That doesn’t mean reading everything or watching all the videos, for me it takes the form of engaging with the people.”
Women of Janice’s generation who have enjoyed long careers in Silicon Valley are few and far between, so she hasn’t had many role models to follow. But someone who has been an inspiration to her is tech investor Esther Dyson. “For years I kept a picture of Esther on my desk, and she invested in one of my companies. I’ve always admired her individuality and curiosity. She’s clear-minded, she knows who she is, and she crafted a life for herself in a field that didn’t care much about including women. She dominated in her own way without trying to be anybody else,” she says.
You could happily apply those same sentiments to Janice herself. And if you’ve attended a Mind the Product conference in the last few years, then the chances are you will have already seen and heard this clear-mindedness in action. Not only has Janice delivered inspiring keynotes on innovation at #mtpcons in London and San Francisco in the recent past, but she will also be taking to the stage at #mtpcon Singapore in March.
She says she’s looking forward to understanding more about how the AsiaPac region operates, although she’s already had some secondhand exposure to this. “Product management is very much a family business in my house,” she says. “My daughter spent 18 months in Japan setting up the Pivotal office there, and my husband spent three months establishing the product management practice at Pivotal in Singapore.”
Although she’s still officially undecided on the subject of her #mtpcon Singapore keynote, she thinks that a talk she’s developed on the psychology of confidence could be an appropriate one for an Asian audience. Intrigued? Find out more, or buy your #mtpcon Singapore ticket today.
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