Product Management Misconceptions w/ Chad McAllister, Host of The Everyday Innovator

that end up being the best one. So, um, with all of that, you know, I want to get right into the topic for, for today, um, which really it's a, it's an interesting one. It's kind of twofold. It's one, um, product misconceptions. So what are some misconceptions about product management? Um, and then two, how might those misconceptions actually be holding us back in our career? So we're gonna learn a little bit of history maybe, and we're gonna, we're gonna have some actionable advice. I'm sure that we're going to hear from as well from our guest, who is Chad McAllister. And Chad is the host of The Everyday Innovator. Chad has had The Everyday Innovator, which is an awesome podcast for product people. It might be one of the first product podcasts. I think there's hundreds of episodes. And Chad, thanks a lot for joining us.

Very glad to be here, Mike. Thanks.

And refresh my memory on that, like, how far back is that? I feel like even when I was first getting into product Everyday Innovator is like one of the only product podcasts that are out there. So maybe you could give a little info.

Sure. So this started as a blog in 2013. And one of the interesting things I did was hopped in a motorhome with my wife and two kids, and we drove around the US for a year and two weeks. And I was interviewing people along the way about product work, innovation work. And I got back home and missed those discussions and created the podcast then in January 2014. We've been running this quite a while. Um, I don't think it's the first podcast, but it is the longest running, uh, weekly podcast for sure. Uh, so quite a few episodes now. Check it out, The Everyday Innovator.

I love it. I love it. And yeah, I love podcasting too. As you know, Chad, I, I'm one of the co-hosts of Rocketship.fm, um, which I have a lot of fun with. Awesome sort of creative outlet. So I'm a big fan of product podcasts too. So yeah. And I think everybody should check out The Everyday Innovator for sure. But I want to get started with, you know, kind of digging into the topic here. And, you know, I think part of it is sometimes people make the assumption or just sort of have the belief that product management, especially software product management, it's a relatively new career field. And that's true in a way. Like, I guess if you're comparing it to other professions like the legal profession or, you know, accounting. But it's not completely new. You know, it's not like it's 5 years old or 10 years old. Like it's been around. Like, I'm wondering if you could kind of just give us the background on that and, uh, yeah, maybe like a bit of a history of the role itself.

Yeah. It's not uncommon to go to a conference, virtual conferences, you know, lately where maybe someone on a panel will say, you know, I've been doing product management for 10 years longer than it's even been a thing. Right. And I appreciate that, and it certainly has grown in popularity recently. And maybe it was like 4 years ago, there was a headline in Wall Street, I think it was the Wall Street Journal that said, product manager, the hot new title from the Ivy League MBA type schools. So it certainly has grown in visibility. But I think what is useful to know is that the discipline's been around a long time. And so there's things that we can pull from that we might not even be aware that exist out there. And obviously people have been building products for a very, very long time, but it seems like most of the history when you look into this traces the origins of this thing that we call the product manager back to around the 1930s in the US. And it seems like this is better established across the world in the US than some other places too. So it kind of makes sense to start here. And that was at P&G and they called them brand manager first, the person responsible for for developing a product and growing a brand and getting customers to adopt this new product. And then I think one of the useful things that happened was, what was it? Was this 1976 maybe? We had the first and now the longest running professional organization pop up for product managers, right? So this is older than a lot of listeners are, you've been alive to hear this. But there is a professional organization that has been around since, I think, I'm pretty sure it was '76, called the PDMA, the Product Development Management Association. And that's how I got in touch with even knowing that there was a discipline called product work. My career was software project manager, and I went up kind of learning more about project management to help me with software projects. And I was running into some problems that I couldn't find information out there, like from the Project Management Institute. And I, one day I thought, well, if there's a PMI for project managers, I wonder if there's a professional association for product people. And that's how I stumbled across PDMA and found just knowing about them and their resources, they kind of curate the body of knowledge for product people. That was really helpful. And so even though it's relatively new in the scheme of things and certainly very popular in the last few years, there's a solid foundation of knowledge that we have access to.

I love that. And yeah, it's like even, even these last few years, I think I know exactly that article you were talking about, the Harvard Business Review or whatever. But yeah, it's like the role has been popularized, but, but we've been at it for a while as product people and maybe some of us came into the role sort of relatively new. Certainly the internet, you know, in the 1990s sort of popularized, um, you know, product as software, and, you know, kind of gives a whole new meaning to software product people now. But, but here we are now, and I think, you know, sometimes when things are relatively new, uh, because even if it was '70s, sort of still relatively new for, for an organization to pop up like that, um, there are misconceptions that can, that can happen. Um, there are misconceptions that could sort of, um, you know, reverberate within the product world. And I'm curious, you know, for you, as you've dug in What are some of these common misconceptions that you hear about when it comes to product management?

Sure. And some of this, you know, as I was thinking about having this time with you, you know, what might be a good path to go down with some of the conversations that have just come up in response to the podcast and people that will email or call. And I kind of want to frame this in the space of joy that, you know, what is it about product work that people are drawn to? And where do they really find joy in that? And there is this large, big spectrum for product work. And sometimes people think about it in a certain perspective and it might not be actually well aligned with what they're doing. And maybe just the change needs to be made to change their perspective on product work and help maybe introduce a company even to that difference of perspective. So since I mentioned PDMA, you know, the organization is the Product Development and Management Association. So we got management and development there in the title. And I remember going to these meetings, you know, we would have once a month with other product people, which was great because you can kind of commiserate with other product people. And having these interesting and I kind of felt over time strangely odd discussions about, well, no, that thing you're talking about is product management. The thing I do is product development. Or that thing you're talking about is product innovation. The thing I do, you know, and these different terms and perspectives, when you throw the product marketer in there.

Or project management even sometimes.

Yeah, right.

I see those two getting confused, right?

Yeah. And a lot of people, and hopefully I suspect probably some of the listeners too, they might be in a role that they're doing product work, but their title doesn't directly reflect that, right? So that's certainly not uncommon either. So to kind of just get my hands around this, what I think of as the full spectrum of product work, I created this model and I need simple things to help me remember what they are. So I use IDEA, I-D-E-A, to help me remember this model. And the I part is ideate. This is where we come up with ideas and we put together a concept that we might pursue. The D is develop, where we're actually making this concept real, right? If it's software, we're writing code, building user interfaces. If it's something that we manufacture, we're getting ready to do the manufacturing of that and the actual manufacturing part. E stands for evolve, which is what happens after we launch the product. So now we're getting into the marketplace. And if we did a good job, competitors probably take notice and they're making some changes to what they're doing. And we need to evolve our position in that marketplace and continue to make the product better and maintain our position. And then because IDE doesn't really sound like anything I can pronounce well, idea, the A on the end there is for accelerate. And that's a collection of practices that just helps us do everything better, right? We might look at portfolio management in there if we have more than one product we're responsible for. We might look at lean practices and agile practices, other things that help us get better. So I use that framework then, the idea to, to convey this full spectrum of what product work can be about. And you'll find that certain organizations might have a product manager that is all about the I part, right? Product management does our ideation and product concept work. Or some organizations, the product manager is all about the D work. And we're developing, we're making a product real. And some organizations is all about the E work. And they might actually call it more of a product marketer. It's like, I'm responsible for getting the product launched to the marketplace and then seeing it grow, right? Taking care of growing. And at the same time I say that, any given organization will use different terms for any one of those things, right? But I think we could talk about all kinds of misconceptions and myths, but I think just recognizing that there is this full breadth of product work available helps to open our eyes a little bit about what one might want to do as well, right? And personally, I like the I part. I gravitate towards the ideation part. I love doing new work. And I sure hope there's people around me that can pick up the, the E part and get this thing launched to the marketplace because I start getting really bored at that point. So, so that's one perspective, and I think where some of the misconceptions come from is just thinking about product work more narrowly when it really is this really broad, broad stretch of work that can be done.

I love that, and actually when I just think back of my own personal experiences, it's like, yet sometimes we might hear a specific role. I actually— the very first product role that I got recruited for, I had a startup company that was acquired, and, and, but it was the kind of acquisition I had to go find a job afterwards. It wasn't, wasn't one where I was retiring to a beach. Um, and, and the position I got recruited for was Director of Product Strategy. And I could tell you that, that first of all, I had to Google what that meant. But I could tell you right now, if I asked 10 people with that title, I'm getting 10 different answers as far as what they do. There's not necessarily the all-inclusive. If this is your title, this is exactly what you'll be doing. So to your point, I like how you kind of broke that down in the specific areas. It's like, as we're looking for whatever sort of focus we want to have as product people, it's not just about the title. It's really digging in deeper to see, does that match with what our interests actually are? So yeah, I'm glad you brought up that, that framework that you create. I think that's helpful.

And every organization uses different titles. You do have to go that next step, right? Well, what does that mean? What do you do? And I'll give you an example if you don't mind here. So, so one of the listeners to the podcast had reached out and he was a product marketer. And as he described the role, he was responsible for what happens when the product is made real and we're launching it to the marketplace and we're trying to grow its position in the marketplace, right? So that, that lifecycle management work when you have a product out, out in the marketplace. But in listening to the podcast, he got really interested about what a product management role would be. And in his, from what I recall of this conversation, in his eyes, that meant more about doing that front-end work of coming up with the new ideas and what, how do we create a new product or maybe make our current products better and doing more of the innovation sort of work. And so he reached out and said, basically, I really want to get into product management and this is where I am now. And the more we talked about it, he came to see that the work he's doing, he could easily reframe and call it product management if he wants to, right? He was kind of just stuck in this box like, well, this is product marketing work. Like, yeah, but what you're doing is you're just taking existing products, trying to position them better with customers over time, learning what those customers want, helping to refine and improve those products. And you're doing product management work. And he ended up finding another job. So he got started because he was in transition. And he found a product marketing job that he just loved. And all he had to do was really think about the work he was doing a little bit differently, and it became a good fit for him, right? And likewise, I think the opposite happens too. Like if you stick me, like I said, if you stick me in that product marketer sort of role, we've launched a product and we want to see it grow and what do we do? That's less fulfilling to me than working on kind of this front end of innovation side of things.

Yeah.

And that gets back to my joy point, right? The, you know, it's been interesting. I've been having too many conversations lately with people that love the work they're doing and they really despise the environment they're in to do it. And even to the point that they're changing careers because they don't like the environment. Whereas I think if they maybe reframe what they're doing a little bit and look for the aspects that they really enjoy, and try to find work that aligns with that, they'd be happier and maybe, maybe able to stay in their organization where they already are.

And yeah, actually, I'm so glad you brought that up because, yeah, going back to sort of the misconceptions, I'm curious, like, is that, is that one of them? That, you know, is one misconception that, you know, maybe it's, it's what's more important about what we're doing versus kind of where we're doing it? Or what are some, I guess, common misconceptions? I also want to kind of think about those specifically that relate to our careers. You know, you mentioned some of these things might actually be holding us back too. So yeah, what's your, what's your take on that?

Yeah, I think the things that are holding us back is just not having good alignment, you know, between your role in product and where you really find joy. And maybe this is, you know, the way I just kind of framed that was you might not have a broad enough picture of what product work entails and you're not looking at the right place. Someone might come to product management thinking that it's, as I correctly would say, as they're thinking about it, that it's all about customers. You need to understand the customers and spend time with them and know what the problems are. And you get into product management work, and in your organization, maybe it's all about the data. And they might even say to you, no, you don't need to be talking to customers. That's what our sales team does. That's what our marketing team does. They'll bring those insights. Your job is to analyze how people are using the product, and explore the data and tell us how to make it better. And if that's surprising to you, then maybe you want to reframe what you could be doing with product and either at some point you can't make it work in the organization you're in, but maybe help the organization think about things a little bit differently because they are limiting themselves. If they're expecting salespeople to bring them the deep insights about problems, it's not going to help. Just doesn't work, right? Salespeople can be our friends and they can introduce us and open doors to customers, but they're in different roles. They have a different responsibility. And the customer, this is the key thing, the customer thinks of the salesperson differently than they're going to think of a product manager. So I think that alignment is one thing to examine about the work you're doing and what else might be possible. And the misconception there is simply what does product management mean? And I was alluding to another conversation with a listener that I felt really heartbroken about because he had been listening to the podcast for a while, wanted to get into product management work. Even though my podcast is really targeted towards people that are well into their careers in product work, all kinds of people listen to it. And a lot of people have listened to it that want to break into product management. It helps you kind of think the way that a product manager should work, should think. And he was so excited, he went for his first interview to to be a product manager and emailed me afterwards and said, that was really disappointing. They don't talk about product management at all like you do on the podcast. And there are different perspectives for sure. And that's why I do like to enter this full breadth so we can at least be on a page together and recognize that we might be focused in different areas, but that there's different work that needs to get done.

Yeah, yeah, I want to dig in more on that. And by the way, to everybody else, just a reminder, if you have questions for Chad, load them up in the Q&A section. I'd love to, to get to some of your questions as well. But on that note, I mean, if we find ourselves in a place within our organization, you know, many of us maybe we're in that spot, maybe we're again enjoying the work, but we're in this place that is saying, oh, you don't need to talk to customers. By the way, I feel like if anybody's telling you you don't need to talk to customers, like, that's a giant red flag. But if we are in that spot, what, what can we do? I mean, aside from, you know, start looking for employers that, that do value when we go to talk to customers, is there anything that we could do to, to try to help sort of change that culture?

Yeah, first I think you need to examine yourself, right? Just take a clear assessment and maybe I've always been a big fan of feedback and it's painful for a lot of people and I get that, right? But asking people for honest feedback is how you help recognize blinders that you might have. And if you're in an organization and I'm one of these that's coming to my mind that says, you know, our product managers don't talk to people. And yet I know they have non-sales and non-marketing people engaging with customers, right? To get different kinds of insights. And what's going on there is really a level of trust, right? And so something happened at some point likely, and some salesperson with influence said, we're never having that product person with us again because they really jeopardized the relationship with the customer. And maybe that became now part of the culture, right? Or whatever the reason is. Well, to help that, you as an individual, if you want to help that, you need to build some trust to be able to get some customer relationships going. If you go around the back of the salesperson or maybe a marketing team and reach out to customers directly, not going to serve your interests very well. You could go to non-customers and maybe build some relationships which would actually serve your interests really well. If it's a product, I'm a big fan of doing things scrappy. If this is a physical good sort of product, like I was working with a company that was developing the exhaust fans in houses, right? Like your kitchen exhaust fan and ceiling bathroom exhaust fan. We could go hang out in Home Depot on the aisle where the exhaust fans are sold. And as people come looking at the aisle, you know, and looking through things and they finally pick one and start walking out, you can just simply ask them, so hey, why did you make that choice? What were you thinking about? What do you need? And just get some insights that would be helpful to you. And you're not threatening the sales team at all. But then you might have some more information that you could go maybe start, you know, take the salesperson to lunch. Might be a virtual lunch these days, but take them to lunch and talk a little bit about some things that you found out and try to build that relationship to the point where you might get invited to go out. Because if you're, especially in a B2B setting, but if you're in a setting where the salespeople value long-term relationships with their customers, They actually do want to bring resources with them to show that the organization behind them has more value to offer to the customer. So they're looking for people like product managers to do that. So back to the original question, what do you do? Take assessment of kind of your own self, right? And maybe what your strengths and weaknesses are, where you need to grow. But try to find a way to build relationships with customers that aren't going to threaten others in the organization. And if you build up that trust with the salespeople, then you're much more likely to be able to keep meeting with customers even on your own.

Yeah, I love that. I love that because also that's something that you can do on your own, but then also showing maybe the value that you've been able to get out of it. And once— because that's the thing is like, right, leadership loves data. They love looking at different things to understand like, okay, did this actually— does it positively make a difference or not? And if you can now show data from those conversations you had with customers, like, look, I actually went out and talked to 10 different people, and, you know, 9 of them, you know, keep talking about this specific thing that, that maybe we can focus on, maybe it's a problem they're experiencing, we can help solve it now. Data helps in those conversations with leadership. So, but I love that that's something that you could kind of take action on pretty quickly. Obviously, you know, it sort of depends on the market, but I I think that's great.

I love that.

What about, are there other, you know, just as you've come across product people, particularly when it comes to, you know, one's career, and, you know, if you've talked to certain people that feel like they're getting maybe stalled in their career, are there common sort of things that pop up, almost common, like missteps that people are taking that you think they ought to, you know, maybe rethink or, you know, kind of things that they could do to sort of revive that piece of their career?

Yeah, I'll go back to the feedback item, and this works for anyone in any career, right? But setting a cadence, predictability of getting feedback with those around you is really helpful because we all have blind spots, right? And if I'm on a customer visit trying to do an interview and I might say something that I didn't even notice might have been offending to the person I'm interviewing, but someone else picked up on it, if no one tells me, I'm never going to know, right? I don't want to make that same mistake in the future. So having people that you can trust to give you honest feedback, even if it might be kind of like a gut punch, you know, and you're the person that gets to evaluate what to do with this feedback, but to kind of build that cadence to say, hey, you know, how did that work? Do you have any advice for me on what I did well and maybe what I could do better next time? That helps us just not to have the blinders on at times. So that's good for any of us. There's all these models out there for what product management is about, right? And like we sit at the middle, Martin Erickson, who I greatly respect, we sit at the middle of UX, which really is that customer piece in the middle of technology, in the middle of business. Okay, but does that mean you have to be a technologist to do a good job? Not necessarily. The mini CEO, which has been talked about a lot, that we're product managers or the mini CEO. Well, we do have a great deal of responsibility and we have no authority, right? So we have to recognize that aspect of it. Help me with this question. I know we're getting close on time too, but listeners, if you would type into chat for us why you got into product management, if you're in product management now, that would be most helpful. As you're doing that, I'll just go ahead and share the two common responses that I most frequently hear, which is People get into product management because they want more influence in the organization. And there's kind of two sides to that. One side that I really respect is maybe they had a product experience and they knew it could have been better. And they want to have influence and make things better in the organization. Some people just want the power and authority. And the reality is there's no real authority. And you have to wield influence. And then the other thing is to kind of be more of a big picture. I want to contribute more strategically, more big picture. To the organization. Both are great. And by the way, product managers should be becoming senior leaders in organizations. They should have a role at the C-suite over their careers because we're in this really unique role where we interface with more of the organization than almost any C-suite role does. And so we bring a lot of wealth. And that's why people are— we are seeing a lot more product managers become executives than we maybe have in the past. I love that. So I think if your career, you're finding your career getting stalled a little bit, maybe reflect on why you got into the first place and maybe your motivations have changed some and think about if there's some misalignment there. I appreciate people who are typing in some responses here too to the question.

Yeah, some, and they're people-oriented, which I think is great. And it kind of goes back to not just people-oriented, but customer-oriented. You know, you said before, like how important it is for us to be close to that customer. You have some people that are giving their response that, hey, I want, I wanted to stop writing code and kind of represent the customer. I love learning about people and how they behave and think, especially customers. So I love seeing the customer-oriented answers. I will say, maybe this would be kind of a final question, and I know we don't have a ton of time, but somebody asked the question about, hey, if we are supposed to be, say, interviewing customers as product people and we want to be in front of customers and learn from them, What if we weren't necessarily trained as, you know, behavioral scientists? You know, that we have a research team at the company. You know, how do we sort of mitigate us as product people doing the interviews when maybe there is a, you know, depending on how big the organization, maybe they have a dedicated research team. What's your, what's your take on that?

Yeah, so I saw that post too, right, or question, and the person mentions confirmation bias and There are product managers who approach interactions with the customer to confirm what they already want to do. It's like, of all the things that we could do about this product, its next version, where it's going, or maybe this new product idea we have, I already got my path figured out. I'm going to go talk to customers and collect some sort of data to confirm what I want to do. This is not helping anyone at all, and it's a total waste of time. Instead, you know, we've heard this, hopefully you've heard this, you want to fall in love with the problem and not your solution. And you want to really deeply care about that problem the customer has. And if you don't know how to do that interview yet, first just relax about it. Because all you have to do is just be curious, right? And just be curious about the customer and their problem and get them talking about when they have this problem, what else they have tried to do to solve this problem. You know, is this a really big problem What's important to you? Try to get it related to some other things and just be curious. And there's some really simple, useful guides out there. You can go Google Ash Maurya, who wrote the— we had Lean Startup. He wrote the second book in the series. Running Lean. Running Lean, thank you. And then Scaling. So Running Lean, and there's a nice— if you pick up Running Lean, super useful book, you can find his little interview guide. And his blog site too has tons of good resources. But you can find these interview guides, but it's really simple. Just be curious. And your job is to understand the problem more deeply and not talk so much about your solution. If you're at the early stages of this, you're not trying to validate your solution yet. You're just trying to understand the customer's problem. Later, we do care about validating the path we have to solving that solution, but now we just wanna be curious and understand the problem. Oh, hey Steve, thank you so much for sharing that. With us. Yes, in the chat.

Yes, and Ash is one of my favorite product people. We've actually had him a couple times at Industry running workshops. It's great. What I'll do is I'll email everybody some of the resources from Ash, because I think that's, it's great advice, in my follow-up email later today. So keep an eye out for that, everybody. And, and really, we're at the end of our time already, so things went quick. If there— what I'd love to do to end it though, Chad, is just if there's sort of one very quick takeaway that you'd hope people could get from this session. What is that? And then, and how can they kind of keep tabs on, on your work? Maybe you could just remind us about the podcast, everything like that too.

Sure. Thank you. And I'll put those two together, which is the learning to think like a product manager is just having this appreciation for the customer problem, getting fascinated by that and kind of understanding the interfaces that you have inside an organization to be able to deliver on that problem. And having this bigger breadth maybe of what product management is about is helpful. And the podcast, The Everyday Innovator, which, oh, by the way, when you look for it in your podcast player, will soon be called Product Masters Now. We're changing the name here after 6 years. It goes through, we just have interesting people on. Mike, you've been a guest before. We have great guests that describe tools to use, describe some mindset aspects about how we think about how we can think about product management, maybe get out of our own way at times too, how we interface, how we work with those other aspects of the organization. So all kinds of good conversations that are obviously free in this podcast to simply say, you know, this is an easy tool for me to learn more about product management. So, and also, of course, Rocketship FM is a great place to learn about founder stories initially, right? And also how we think about product.

That's awesome. Well, I, I appreciate the shout out for Rocketship there too, Chad. Thank you very much for that. And, and thank you for the, for the time for joining us. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate it. And, and to everybody that joined, whether it's your first time or whether this is the 10th time, you know, come to these industry interviews, thank you so much for being here. We have plenty more already scheduled, so you could go to industryconference.com and you'll, you'll see a little bit at the bottom, the industry interviews that are coming up. Feel free to register. Always free to take part in that. And, uh, yeah, keep an eye out for an email from me later today with, uh, this recording and then some of the resources that we talked about. So thanks again, Chad, and thanks everybody. Have a great one.

Thanks all.