The Product Mindset w/ Jessica Hall, VP of Product Strategy and Design of 3Pillar Global

Hey everybody, this is Mike Belsito, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're back for another industry interview. Uh, thank you very much for joining us. Um, I'm excited about today because this is a topic that has been on my mind because I actually recently got a book with the very same title, and we'll talk about this in a minute. So this— I figure this is a perfect opportunity to dig into this book. It's a brand new book and we are lucky enough to have one of the authors with us. But before I make the formal introductions here, I want to sort of introduce what these industry interviews are all about to folks that are maybe joining for the very first time. So these industry interviews, these are live video Q&A chats, kind of like virtual fireside chats that we do twice a month. We always do it on the first and third Wednesday of every month at 1 PM Eastern. With product leaders from really all around the world. And, and we discuss all different topics that are relevant to product people. So we'll go for 30 minutes today. So to 1:30 PM Eastern. And I have a whole set of questions for our guests. But the thing that makes these fun, in my opinion, is that I really love to take in as many of your questions as possible. So if you have a question for our guests at any time, in fact, the sooner the better, use the Ask a Question section. It's right at the bottom of your screen. And if you click on it, you can ask your question there. You could see other questions, vote if you want to vote. It's really, you don't need to worry about that too much. Just ask your question and, and I will try to get to as many of those as I can throughout the session. And then there is a chat feature as well. So if you look at the chat feature, I know I just shared a whole bunch of information in the chat feature, but we figured let's use that for introducing ourselves. You can share maybe where you're from, what kind of product you're working on. It's always fun to just see where people are coming from and tuning in from. And maybe you could put here now, like, hey, you know, I can see and hear you because I was worried about, can people see and hear me? So you can let me know in the chat there, but definitely use that chat or feel free to make comments throughout if you'd like. And then for those that aren't familiar, Industry Interviews are part of Product Collective and Product Collective, we're a community for product people. So We have all sorts of things. We have these, but we also have our newsletter that goes out every week to about 20,000 product people. We also have a Slack group and about 10,000 people in that Slack group. So if you're not in any of that, you could just sign up at productcollective.com and we will, we'll definitely get you in on that. And then we meet in person every year, actually twice a year at Industry, the product conference. We actually have a European edition of Industry that takes place in Dublin, Ireland in the springtime. And then we have our global edition, which is sort of the main conference next week in Cleveland, Ohio. So if I seem a little bit stressed out, it might be because we've got a lot to do for that. But it's going to be awesome. We have over 1,000 people that are registered to be with us. People are still registering. Almost every single workshop that we have is sold out. All sorts of people, Jason Fried of Basecamp, April Dunford, even Grammy and Academy Award-winning artist Common. I'll be interviewing him on stage. And I had actually a crazy dream about that last night, but we won't get get into it, but it's a lot of fun. So if you want to make it last minute, you can go to industryconference.com and check it out. But with all of that out of the way, I want to introduce our guest, Jessica Hall. And Jessica of Three Pillar Global is actually a return guest. So I'm excited to have Jessica back on. And Jessica, with David DeWolf, actually is the author of The Product Mindset, which is a new book that just came out. And we're going to talk all about it. But thanks a lot for joining us, Jessica.

Thank you so much for having me back.

Yeah, it's definitely awesome to have you back. And, you know, I figured maybe we could just start the conversation really, you know, about the book, about the product mindset. I know this is a strong point of view that you and David have that you've now put into print here. And I'm just curious, maybe we could start off by you just sharing, like, why— like, why did you write the book? Like, why have this point of view that's so strong that you feel like it's it's worth it to put out there in, in book format. And maybe we could start there.

Sure. The product mindset, the idea of the product mindset dates back to the early days of 3Pillar, which is in about 2009. And we started working with clients and over the years what people said is there's something different about you guys. I can't entirely put my finger on it. You know, is it the people? Is it the process? Is it the technology? Is it some of your ways you interact with customers? They couldn't quite put their finger on it, but one thing we discovered over the years was that it was a kind of unique way of thinking, a kind of unique way of approaching developing product that our folks had that other people in the industry didn't have. And a lot of times when we were brought in, nobody calls us because things are awesome. They call us because they need help. They call us because they're behind. 'cause they're having trouble getting adoption or retention. They're having trouble getting to market fast enough. They don't have the right skills. So everyone calls us 'cause they need something and they found something different within us. And we said, well, we do the product. We have believed in something called the product mindset. We train all our folks on it, whether you're in finance or talent or sales when you first come in the building, and also product and UX and engineering. QA and DevOps and all those things, maybe there's something there. Maybe there's an opportunity to share something that we've learned in our 13 years of being in business and our hundreds of clients and, you know, north of 150 products that we've worked on for people. And so we started doing public workshops about 2 years ago, and that was the first time we exposed this to the world, and we weren't entirely— it was experiment. Like we didn't know if anybody would think it was good or would they think it was ridiculous. But what we learned in that is a couple of things. One is that people felt like this approach and this way of doing things was much more empowering for the practitioner and gave them a lot more opportunities to impact the work that they were doing. That it helped people from different backgrounds, from UX, from product, from engineering, from product marketing, be able to understand and communicate a little bit better. But the main thing people said very clear everywhere that Lindsay and I went to do this was, can you please tell their executive team, can you please tell them, because everything they're focusing on is how much, you know, what's your velocity? How much stuff are you shipping? Did you give me what you said you were going to give me when you said you were going to give me? How are you managing the cost? So they're always focused on the execution, how much stuff they were pumping out. And it wasn't always clear what the teams were supposed to do. And there wasn't a lot of heavy investment in understanding the customer and testing as we go. So what people said loud and clear is, we like this, but we can't do it. So you need to tell our executive team. And that's why we wrote the book. We wrote the book designed so that if you were flying from DC, where we're based, to San Francisco, by the time you landed, you would be able to get some exposure to this idea and hopefully start to buy into it and enable your teams in order to start thinking in a way that's different. And what we're hoping is that we can not only help practitioners, people who came up the way I did through UX and product, but also help leaders who are struggling with uneven output or inability to connect with their customers find ways to help their teams improve. So that's the hope, but the book was actually just released last night. And so It's a little bit early to see how it's going to play out, but I'm optimistic and terribly nervous.

I love it. And actually, so I, and I'm glad you mentioned that about, you know, not just for the people themselves, but it's like, this is, can you tell this to my executive? So hopefully people reading this, they can start to learn, hey, how can I maybe sell this up? And actually it kind of, kind of, you know, last industry interview, we had Eric Bodak on. Eric was one of the co-founders of Pendo, and, and they have done a lot of work on sort of product-led, like that's a term they've been using. Um, and we talked about like whether it needs to start from the top to be product-led, or can you kind of, kind of from the, from the, uh, or rather than top-down, can you also go bottom-up? Can me as a product person, can I do what I need to do to sort of sell the product mindset up through my organization? And I'm curious your take on that in particular.

Yeah, I really enjoyed that conversation and I had been hearing this product-led language a little bit more common in the marketplace. I've run into a couple of organizations who are really focused on doing that. Largely this has come from the CEO or CPO is where I've seen it, at least my limited exposure to it. I think it's a really interesting idea that we are going to really focus on the product and use the product to enable all the other departments and invest the effort there and make that the center of what we do. I hate to say that I went to a place of the cynical consultant, which is, mm-hmm, so what does this mean? What, what does it mean to be product-led in this organization? And how would I know that that's actually happening? Because what I'm going to do when I get there is say, so how do you guys make decisions? What kind of behavior is being elevated? What kind of behavior is being downplayed? How are you involving people in what's happening? So when you say we're this kind of culture, we're product-led or sales-led or engineering-led, which is what most things are, how does that manifest itself? And if you only say it once, if you only have some all-hands meeting where your CEO stands up and says, we are product-led, led, you are not going to be product-led. You're going to have a nice bit of marketing copy that may appeal to people like you and me who are nerds about this stuff, but it may not translate into the organization and the decisions that your teams are making every day. So if you're thinking about, we want to be product-led, that's a great place to start. What does that mean here? How will we know we're product-led? How will every person who interacts with this experience it, how will they know what good looks like? How will they know what not so good looks like? And how is that going to play out in organizations? Because I see a lot of times that they will say one thing, but in reality, it's quite a different thing. I went to a financial services company and said, we are all about this one metric. It's what all our performance reviews are about. It's our, it's our one goal, our North Star metric is we want to get more self-service. We want more people working through our digital tools and not calling into our call centers, because that will allow us to save money and get things resolved quicker. But when you really poked into why did you decide that, why did you do it this way, how did that enable this, in a totally conversational kind of light way, what they really got to was Actually, reality was it's just what this one person wants. So they said this is their culture is based on this, but in reality, it was, this is what this person wants and what that person wants is what I've done. And so that's a great thing. And I think he talked about some wonderful ideas. I would definitely encourage anyone who didn't catch it to go check it out and then be kind of cynical. And how, how does that actually work? How am I going to play it out? And how am I going to know that it was more than just theater? It was more than just, you know, a nice tagline that sounds good when you're in a room with a bunch of other product people.

Well, and by the way, you had mentioned that people should check that out. If anybody did want to check out that industry interview video chat with Eric Bodak, you could go, you just search for Product Collective on YouTube and you'll find our channel. There's, actually already dozens of other industry interviews, plus conference talks and more. You know, so I'll give you— give a plug for the Product Collective YouTube there. But yeah, thanks for mentioning that. And actually, so maybe I should— well, I tell you what, I want to take an audience question here because one did pop in and this is a good one. And by the way, this is a reminder to everybody else, keep those audience questions coming because I have my questions, but you all probably have better questions. Than I do. So let's, let's use your questions. This one was, how does the product mindset differ from sort of organization to organization? And is having it like— some— sure, that different— well, I guess it's a question like, is there one product mindset or should there be different flavors just sort of depending on the organization? And this person sounds like they're coming from a large organization and they had asked, is having a product mindset in the product organization Enough, you know, or does it have to be sort of embodied within the whole company? So maybe you could give us your thoughts on that.

Yeah, there's a couple of questions there. I think I'm going to try and break it into pieces to make sure I get all of them. Let's start with a little bit of why mindset, because I think that helps frame this particular conversation. If you look at the work of Carol Dweck and others, The— your mindset is how you think, how you make value judgments, how you see yourself as part of the group, how you see yourself contributing to part of the group, how you make little decisions that are made in an instant, how you think through big decisions as a group and try to make big bets. Your mindset influences the large things and the little things that you do every day. And that's why we think mindset is so powerful. That strategy might be something you only see, think about, you know, once a year, once a quarter, maybe we talk about it, maybe there's a deck, but every day, if you're an engineer or product manager or UX designer, you're going to have to make a decision that has an impact on your customers and your business. And we want you thinking about how you are going to create value for those things in every decision that you do. And the research on mindsets looked at parole officers, corrections officers, police officers, social workers. They've looked through a lot of different professions and then found that when people had the mindset that they were really solving problems, creating value, being part of a larger goal, that it really created a much greater output than people who saw themselves as, well, I gotta check boxes, I gotta follow the rules, I got to get things done. And that's why we think mindset is such a powerful thing. And, and it can be effective in small organizations and large organizations. So to give you an example for both, a large organization that we work with is a major fashion retailer. And they own a lot of brands, a lot of brands that you are definitely familiar with, a lot of brands that you may or may not be wearing. At this moment. And, uh, but they're behind, you know. A lot of other companies have gotten much further ahead of them in their digital tools because they had an old-school kind of IT mindset. Very, um, here's the requirements, here's the scope, I need your CapEx and your OpEx and your PRD, BRD— oh, those are the worst— and, um, all of these things. And so we had to go into that organization get the leadership support, roll out more formally. This is how things are going to do. Teach people the mindset, change their practices, have a coach with them along the way when we work with them, because we help them release their first mobile app in less than 9 months. And then that was in one store, and then we pushed it nationally, and then we did some work for them in Japan as well. And so in that particular— in the large organizations, you've got to go top-down, bottom-up, meaning you have to have executive sponsorship that is going to bring you in and make the investment, but there always has to be a champion. In this case, I have this particular guy who was a QA manager, and he so embraced the idea and so spent time with us and so advocated for it and organized. He found an entirely new career really leading this transformation within his organization that was not available to him beforehand. So I think in the larger organizations, it definitely has to— you need some champions, you need some people who are going to push it along, and you also need some people who are who are going to advocate for it and are willing to do the heavy work of changing minds of people who only care about what they're going to get and how much it's going to cost. Like, that's where that fight has to be waged. And so a lot of times what happens when David and I go into organizations, he works with CEOs and I work out with the people. And we moved closer and closer together in order to help organizations. I've also seen it taken on in small organizations. In small startups where we did some sessions with the product team and the engineering team and just giving them some language and giving them some tools and some ways to get after things. They largely did it themselves and then they educated their leadership on how to do it. So I've seen it in different ways, but the larger the organization, the more it's important to have that heavy top-down sponsorship. But if nobody's going to fight for it, If nobody is going to go out of their way to move it forward in the organization, I don't think you're going to get anywhere, even if you have the CEO or the CPO or the VP of product pushing it. And to answer the last piece of the question, it absolutely can't— this ain't going to work if it's just in the product organization. If it's just with the product managers, then they are left to fight this fight all alone. And that's exhausting. If it can pervade, if everyone who's touching the product, the engineers are thinking about how they're creating value, that's going to make the difference between they say, okay, well, I see what you're saying in the story, but there's two ways we can do it. We could do it this way. Here's the trade-offs. We could do it this way. I think the benefits and trade-offs are this. And now we can have a conversation and make a much better decision because that engineer is using their product mindset or a designer thinking through, Well, I have these bits of feedback. Here's how I think we could probably solve for this and break it into pieces, navigate trade-offs, talk about benefits and risks. We kind of need everyone to engage in that conversation. So ultimately when the product manager's gotta make a call and they're gonna have to, they're getting the best information and the best way to measure risk and trade-off from their team. If everybody's focused on the same thing, And ironically, we designed this so it worked in all three of the countries that we do business in, in India, Romania, and the United States. But we found it worked pretty darn well down that hallway and that you all of a sudden you could have engineers and product folks who are now looking at each other and say, oh, engineers like, oh, I get it. That's why you're asking me about this. This is why you're trying to do that. And we can get everybody moving in that direction towards these common goals. And You know, you're just, you're not a ticket taker. So like, what do you think? Now for some product managers that may be uncomfortable, cuz that's going to invite a level of speculation and questioning that they may or may not be ready for, but it's going to change the way the team operates and how that team works as a unit and a unit towards a greater goal that they're trying to achieve.

Yeah, that's great. Well, and, and I imagine there are people on this video chat where again, maybe within their product org, like everybody gets it, but beyond it, they're not there yet. And you mentioned how important it was to have that champion. And I, I'm betting that, you know, sometimes maybe senior leadership recognizes this and, and calls a company like yours to come in and action happens. But I imagine a lot of times it, it does. It's that champion or the people that sort of step up to be champions. They're the ones that sort of can— convince leadership, but it sort of spreads. I'm just curious if you have advice for people that want to be that champion within their organization, like how can they be? Like what steps can they take?

That's a good question. The first thing is you need to understand how your organization works. I worked with an engineering team and they were creating a brand new product, and this brand new product was going to open up a lot of the market that was closed off to this business. They said, you can't do it this way, we can't entertain that risk, we are not— we can never do business with you until you can do it the different way. They were building the way— the product that allowed them to engage with their customers a different way that was going to open up a whole new market opportunity. And I remember talking to them, I'm like, so guys, what's the revenue chart? Like, what? What's the revenue target? Like, what are you— what are— what are— what kind of revenue are you expecting to bring into the organization? What kind of How many sales funnels do you think is going to be involved in this brand new product that you're making? And they just like, we don't know. My guess is your company has 1.5 million in this and you don't know. Do you think that maybe is a good idea? So first of all, if you want to be a champion, if you want to have an impact broader than the code that you write, the stories you write, or the mockups that you do, you need to understand how your business works. Do you know how you make money? Do you know what the levers are of your business in terms of revenue and cost? Do you know what the main metrics are? Do you know who your customer is? Have you talked to them? Have you listened to them? Have you gone through whatever documentation you have or whatever research exists? And if you have those two things in place, now you can start from somewhere. You can start to ask questions. So why, why are we doing this? How is that helping us? Help me understand where these goals are. And you can start to ask questions. You can start to understand. You can start to make suggestions. You can start to advocate for a certain point of view. A lot of people I talk to say, I just want a seat at the table. Like, you don't get a seat at the table if you don't understand what they're talking about at the table. If when you arrive at that table, you are not prepared to say, I see what we're trying to drive here. Here's how I think we can get there. Here's how I think we can, you know, this kind of decision that we make. When you can have that conversation, you can sit at that table, you can be involved in it. But until you've done the work to really understand things, and many times you have to seek that information out, it may or may not be available to you. But if you could talk to those people in those organizations, and then you can turn around as a product manager and make sure in a way that they can absorb it, everybody else who's touching your product understands it too. That's the first step. And then people can start to ask questions and suggest trade-offs and suggest alternatives and come up with ideas that are going to further advance. And then I think you're going to see a lot more opportunity to have an impact, to shape the conversation, to shape the decisions that are happening in your organization.

Yeah, thank you for that. I appreciate it. I, you know, I do want to ask And I know that a lot of this book, this is sort of like a culmination of, you know, the work that you and your company has been doing. But research has gone into this book too. And I'm just curious if throughout the process of whether it was researching or just, again, creating the book in the first place, like what surprised you? Like, was there anything that you sort of uncovered where it's like, man, you know, even in all the work that we've been doing with companies, like, was there anything that sort of stood out in particular as a surprise?

It's a good question, and one I've gotten before. A lot of what we wrote about in the book was definitely our own experience in working with our teams and our clients. We definitely looked— did more broader research on industry trends and then looked into specific case studies. I think one of the things One of the most fun things was getting to talk to a lot of my colleagues. So I run product UX in our consulting practice. I only touch about, directly touch about 45% of the 3-pillar portfolio. So I got to talk to a lot of people across the portfolio, you know, all of our clients of things they were doing and talking to our customers. And one of the stories that I loved was I was talking to a team working with a major media company. And they were up there helping them improve their products that troubleshoot video signals. So when you're having a hard time when you're streaming something, how do they chase that signal all the way through all their huge, humongous systems to figure out where it's going wrong in order to make changes? And, you know, what she told me was that she was doing a user interview with someone at the organization and the engineer was sitting next to her taking notes. And all of a sudden he's like really intensely taking these notes. And when the interview wraps up, she looks over at him and she's like, "So did that work?" She's like concerned. She's like, "Did I do that? Was that bad? Was that good? I don't understand what just happened there." And all of a sudden he looks around like, "We've been debating that for 2 weeks and now I understand what I have to do." And even though I've seen that play out so many times. Context is the thing that blows my mind. There was another story where a client is in home improvement and they sell a particular type of home improvement product, and they were working with a team in India, and it wasn't going quite well, and it should be a little better than it is. Started to look into it, and And all of a sudden someone figured out nobody in India buys this product. It's just not something that people buy and put in their home. So the notion of, you know, you and I bought auto insurance, you may have bought a home, you may have rented an apartment, you may have gotten a life insurance policy. Some people who are working in these have never done that and they have no idea how those things work. And what came up again and again, and it was— its impact was even more than I thought, is the importance of context. A lot of times people don't invest in context. Who is the customer? What are they trying to do? What is this thing? How does it work? What are the different drivers here? And so the people who have been successful are just product managers who are enormously patient, who really spend the time to make sure the team understands the context of Here's the situation. Here's what they're trying to do. Here's their goals. Here's what's the blocker. Here's what I'm trying to do next thing. Here's how I'm going to know I'm being successful. Now help me figure out how to do it. Not the ones who say, and I'm going to tell you exactly in significant technical detail how you're going to do it, but really investing in that context and understanding what they're trying to create, who they're trying to create it for, that they are vastly more successful and everyone around them is more engaged in what they're doing and they're thinking more and they're having to specify less. They're not having to write 4-page user stories with everything detailed out because people know what they're doing and they know where they're going and they're able to make interpretive leaps that would have never come out if that product manager tried to write the whole everything and decide everything themselves.

Well, I, I appreciate that. Time kind of went by quick. Like it's already 1:30 basically. So I know there were a couple of questions we didn't get a chance to get to. I do want to give you the opportunity to share, you know, and I think I put it in the link here, but maybe you could talk when, if people want to learn more about the product mindset, like where can they go and just how can they keep tabs on, on you? You know, I think you're on, on Twitter and such, but maybe that's a good way for people to connect with you. Maybe you could just talk about that.

Sure. So if you go to productmindset.com, you'll find out how to get a copy of the book. We also did research with Forrester surveying 145 product leaders across the country about some of their priorities and some of their challenges. And so that's research that only came out a couple months ago, so it's pretty fresh, and you can get that there. It's available. I'm on Twitter on Jess Hallway, and so I'll be happy to answer questions that folks might have. There's, there's a lot we didn't get to today, so hopefully it's helpful. And, and if, you know, if there are other ways where it can be more helpful, let me know. And if there are things we got to fix in version 2, that will somewhat hurt my heart, but I'll be okay. So let's, let's get to it.

Well, I just shared a link to your Twitter, um, in the chat so people could maybe keep tabs on you there, and they can ask if there's a question they wanted to ask that we didn't get a chance to. But Jess, I appreciate you taking the time. You know, thanks so much for, for this. And yeah, I'm excited to to get through the rest of the Product Mindset, and hopefully everybody can check it out too.

Thanks so much for having me.

All right, we'll see y'all next time. And, um, by the end of the week, there will be some more industry interviews that we'll be posting, so keep your eye out, and I will see you in a future session. All right, thanks everybody.