SHOCKING TRUTH: Product Managers Who Can't Evolve Are DOOMED

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Chats with Jason. I am of course your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. And this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. Now if you've been following my work for some time, you will know that when I talk about experience, I'm specifically talking about four key elements of experience that you need to intentionally focus on. Customer experience, employee experience, brand experience, and product experience. Today I am delighted to have as a guest someone that brings a global wealth of experience, over 20 years of experience, specifically in the product leadership, product innovation space. She's also a co author of a best selling book. Our guest today is the one and only Diana Stemtner. Diana, it's great to have you on the show.

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here as well. And yeah, thank you for introducing me. It always scares me when I hear how long I've been in product management, but it's, yeah, it's been an exciting journey, especially being in a role that changes all the time. And exactly as you said, we wrote a book about it, just helping people navigate the different ebbs and flows of product management, how to get into it, how to succeed at it and where we think it's going next. And it's called Next Gen Product Management and you can find it anywhere.

Amazon, it's a fantastic book, covers so much. We're going to dive into the book in a moment, but before we do, Diana, what have you been up to over the last 20 years?

Summarize that in a quick sentence. My background's in user experience research. That's how I started in product management. I did the typical ebbs and flows, graduating from school, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I went to business school, I worked at a startup which was amazing, did wonderful things. It was designed by engineers for marketers and the marketers really didn't understand the interface. They didn't get it, it didn't reflect their mental models. They loved what the product could supposedly do, but they couldn't figure out how to get it to do that. And so that caused me to go to school again to get a degree in user experience research, specifically human computer interaction. And so my first quote, real product job was user experience research. And I loved it. I loved talking to people, I loved trying to figure out what made them tick. I loved diving into the nitty gritty of why was this easy or why was this hard or what were you expecting? And all of those questions just to get better understanding of them and how they could use our products and how our products can help them. So everything from a customer centric view and I would share that knowledge with product managers and then the product managers would go work with engineering and design and all the other groups. And I'm like, why can't I do that? And so I transitioned into product management, became a product manager and loved it. I had a team that was small and really wily and I worked at Monster at the job site and was responsible for UK and Ireland. And so I had two product managers. I had a data person and a content person. And then over time we started doing more and my role grew and I ended up running all of Western Europe for product for Monster. And it was amazing. We got to be the first, you know, region to be able to launch E Commerce. And that was an incredible opportunity. We did a lot of changes on the job seeker platform. So it wasn't like we just took things from the US and cut and pasted them. That doesn't work for anyone who's done global product management. You can't just do that. And so it was really exciting to be able to work across all the different countries, have all the different nuances in regards to legal considerations, privacy considerations, data considerations, and then being able to educate the US HQ on what did fly, didn't fly, and to be able to do new opportunities as well. So I loved it. But the thing was, I wanted to be able to explore more emerging technologies. And I'm from Silicon Valley, I actually grew up in Cupertino and so everything for me has always been about tech and Munster was amazing, but I wanted to explore all the new emerging tech. And at that time it was mobile and social and I just wanted to immerse myself. And so I went to a digital agency called Razorfish, which some folks may know it's part of Publicis now. And I got to work across lots of different clients and that allowed me to build up, I think, my emerging media lens. And so over time I was able to combine that together, the product aspects and the emerging media aspects. And I started the future technology team at Pearson. And so that brought me into the innovation realm. And I really think that's an area where all product people should have the opportunity to explore. You'll hear it referred to as 0 to 1. That is amazing because you learn that learning in itself is a reason to celebrate. It helps you find out ways to experiment quickly, how to be savvy, how to be able to bring together all the different stakeholders that you need just to See if there's a there before committing to doing something full on. So I learned a lot through that experience, had lots of twists and turns. Pearson was able to do a number of different roles there. And then over time I realized that I loved launching people even more than launching products. I really loved seeing the people on my team grow and develop. And so my most recent pivot in the product form is to do product.

Leadership coaching so much that I want to touch on there. My mind is going at 100 miles an hour. I want to go right back to the beginning, but before I do, launching people. I absolutely love that term, launching people. Helping your team members grow and succeed in their career. What elegant and delightful way to put it. I absolutely love it when you started sharing your journey with us. And it's a great reminder that to be a great leader means you haven't necessarily had it easy. Like you, you haven't necessarily done exactly the same thing since. And I think probably rounds you out, especially when it comes to that innovation space. From my own personal experience, having worked across seven different industries, when I'm trying to problem solve, I'm not just going through that lens of what we do in tech, but sometimes, believe it or not, even what we did in government, which some people will struggle to believe, but it's true. Right at the beginning you said that you joined a team, they developed a product and the concept, shall we say, of the product or the promise of the product was amazing. And that's what people bought.

But.

But then they bought the product and they couldn't get it to do what they thought that it could. How do product people get themselves in a position where they design a product that on the surface sounds amazing, but the users, the people that they've convinced to buy the product just can't get the value out of it, can't get it to do what they thought it would.

And I think that company was starting at things from an engineering mindset. The customers weren't engineers. And so I think it goes back to some of the pieces that you said right in the beginning. You need to bring together the customer, the employee, the product and the brand, all of those facets together. The company had positioned itself as being customer oriented. It was a customer relationship management company. Its brand was that it was going to bring things to the cloud, make it easier for people to do customer relationship management, and that all of the employees were focused on that opportunity, helping individuals do CRM in an easier way in the cloud. That's what the product should do. But because it was coming at it from an engineering lens as opposed to a customer lens that created that disconnect. And I think that's something that now probably seems obvious to people, but at the time when anything is new, you often don't know all the ins and outs. And so we were learning, we learned we could build something really quickly with engineering, but if it didn't have the right user experience, the right mental model that matched or was at least aligned to what the customers were seeking, getting over that initial hurdle was just too great. And I know there are probably people going, Apple changed the way that we do things or this company changed the way we do things. Yes, there are always exceptions in any type of situation. There are always exceptions, but you shouldn't plan or expect yourself to be an exception. I think a faster way to ramp up to gain advocates and your customers are to really understand them and how they think and act and live their day so that you can fit into their environment without thinking or hoping or dreaming they're going to fit into yours.

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting you make that point about Apple. I, I would argue that Apple didn't get a group of engineers in a room and say let's make a brand new product that will convince people that they need and that they love. I would argue that they said what is the customer lacking today in their experience? And then they went out and built some stuff that at the time seemed perhaps engineering led, but ultimately has proven to be exactly that what customers were wanting. And I'm not saying that as an Apple fanboy, although I am. I'm saying that because if it wasn't the case, every other major tech company in the world wouldn't have copied their work or been inspired by their work. If we want to be politically correct. Interesting that you made the comment that perhaps today it's more obvious that we don't start from that engineering point of view. I would have to challenge that a little bit because I think there are still some people in the product innovation space that are in a bubble. How do you encourage product team members to always keep the customer as part of the conversation in the innovation, in the development, in the journey, in the lifecycle of products?

Yeah, I think you're bringing up really valuable points. And the person who pops into my mind whenever people talk about customers discovery is Teresa Torres. From her perspective, the continuous discovery, I think is a practice that every product manager should follow. There should be consistent, continual customer touch points. Some organizations that may be harder than others, but they'll Always be customer feedback coming in, whether it be through sales, whether it be from customer success, whether it be direct. There are always these methods to consume as much knowledge about how the customer is interacting with the product. If you are early stage and you, you don't have sales or you don't have customer success yet, speak to the customers, go out and talk to them. Even some of the earliest stage companies I worked at just putting an icon on the screen saying contact us. People will amazingly enough, and you'll get insight and then you follow up with people. So when people are passionate about something or to be honest when they're annoyed about something, they're going to reach out. And so you like to have those extremes because then you can identify more people like those that are passionate. You can also determine do you want to service those people that are upset. And there are going to be some customers who based on your insight through your customer discovery that you'll determine that niche isn't for us. And so without having that insight into customers, you'll try to serve everyone or you'll try to serve the wrong people. So you really need that customer knowledge through internal external touch points and the external being the customer to be able to identify where is your product sweet spot and then be able to dial that up.

Yeah, and I think one of the key elements of what we were just discussing was you don't necessarily have to do a long focus group or structured voice of customer surveys for months on end. Like you said, a simple icon saying give me feedback while obviously less structured and there's pros and cons to it, it's a start and it's important to give customers, I think that voice, that opportunity to provide feedback, especially with a new product, as early as possible because it does help you iterate the product and hopefully develop a product that serves your customers, your ideal customer, better. The other thing that I want to highlight to the audience to you listening today is did you hear how Diana said you might choose not to serve that customer ongoing because not every single person in the world is going to love your product. That's why we have Samsung phones, Google phones, Apple phones and even Nokia phones. Still, it's because not everything is for everyone and that's okay. And you can have very profitable business as every brand I just mentioned has proven that by serving who you choose to serve because they will be loyal to you and in some cases fiercely advocate for your brand despite the realities of the product. Excellent, Diana. I'm wondering a bit of a lavender field question, perhaps when you were talking about your career, you made the decision to jump. You went from being in user research into product management and then you saw this evolving landscape of social and mobile and you just kept jumping. What piece of advice would you give to someone today, regardless of what career they're in, around that career progression and giving them the confidence to either make the decision to jump or to stick out what they're doing today?

Yeah, so the thing that I realized, and it's more reflection, so I think your question is perfectly timed because I can now look back on it, but what I was doing was preparing for the next wave. And so when you see the next wave happening, try to be able to either get ahead of it or surf it. I was seeing mobile and social and other types of digital appear. I loved the company, I loved Monster, but I knew it wasn't going to give me that in depth experience that I wanted. And so for me, in order to get that knowledge, I jumped and I did that other times as well where I saw that I had that foundation of emerging technology which was brilliant, I could then bring that to Pearson and be able to help others make that jump. So I try to balance what's going to help me advance, but also ensure that I'm giving it back too. And so whenever I make a leap to the next place or the next thing, I also want to ensure that I have insights that I can share with people who are doing exactly as you said, trying to figure out do I stay or I go. So my approach has always been look at what's happening next, try to get the experience in that and then help others get knowledge about how they navigate.

Yeah, great advice. Now talking of advice, your book, Next gen product management, future proof your career. Bold claim there. Future proof your career, but I love it nonetheless. Now, of course you're a co author, one of three authors on this book. Before we jump into the book, what was it like writing a book which is a product with two other people?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think it's one of those things. It's my first book and if I had written it in a different way the first time, coming into it with three people as my second might have been kind of weird, but given that it was my first book, it seemed perfectly normal and a lot of advantages. I would say. Teresa Cain, who is one of the co authors, had written a book before she wrote the Two Hour Design Sprint and so she had put all the pieces together to essentially have a publishing house, which is what she has now going with someone else, O'Reilly or whoever it may be. She did it on her own. We were able to leverage her experience to be able to have the book come together. She had a lot of learnings about the structure. When are the milestones for the chapters? How do you find and source and bring on an amazing editor? How do you work on covers? How do you. She had all of that lined up and so essentially was able to give us a roadmap of the milestones that we need to hit to make the book a reality. So it was up to the three of us then to meet those dates. I read a newsletter. Bart, who's also the other co author, writes a newsletter. So for us it was expanding on what we do already. Teresa's got amazing insight from her years in product management as well. So it was blending together our craft as well as what we share with the community today, making it all gel very nicely. Everybody wants to thank editors at some point in time. And yeah, being able to go through, edit it, find spelling errors, layout errors, then make it even better.

Yeah, it certainly is a big undertaking to write a book. I've only published one book so far. I have two in the works. I have a very disgruntled publisher who that, unlike your experience, I'm a little bit behind in some of those deadlines. But promise him if he's listening today, I promise I'll get up to date. I'm glad that you took the energy and put in the effort to make the book possible because it absolutely is an important topic. And I don't think we talk about product management enough because what I always say to people is your product is the thing that the customer is most likely interacting with the most. If you buy a car and drive it once every day, that's probably means that you're spending more time with the product than if you're seeing an ad about the car on TV or that you're speaking to someone in customer service. Hopefully with the car.

Right.

And it's true with any product. I think we need to give product a lot more intentional focus because there's such an impact on the customer's overall perception and their likelihood to come back and buy again or to talk about it positively with their friends and family. And that's ultimately the cheapest form of marketing. Really appreciate that you've taken the time to put the book together. Now I'll say it again. Next gen product management, you kick off the book, perhaps not in the gentlest way, shall we say, because chapter One or sorry, part one. Product management is changing. Better keep up. So here I am, I'm in product management, I've bought new book and I'm just out of the gate. I'm told it's all going to change. So the question to you, Diana, is how is product management changing?

Yeah, and I think it's a constant change. As you said, if people are going into product management thinking that what they do at one company is going to be cut and paste into the next, they're in for a shock and surprise. There will be a lot of applicability, there will be a lot of themes that you can carry through. But I think some of the main changes that we're seeing, it's interesting, they come in and they ebb and they flow. When product management started originally people weren't really sure what it was. Is it similar to project management, Is it similar to program management? And so there was a lot of confusion around what it was. I would say now product management is a thing. And so that's probably one of the big quote changes. It is a recognized discipline. It is something that people aim to be. I do believe that people often find themselves in product management. It's one of those roles where it's better to have a lot of insight across a lot of different realms than become a product manager. To try to just hop into your first role as a product manager without having all that experience. And so the changing aspects are. Product management in the beginning was more of a, I wouldn't say siloed, but more of a kind of its own group. You would have heard the reference to a mini CEO long time ago, not now. But you would have heard that because the product manager was responsible for a lot of the aspects of making something work. And if it didn't work, it was on the product manager. Companies may still adopt that and I still hear companies that do so even though people will say, no, that's not the way. Totally agree with you. But there are still companies that work that way. The other change that we saw is the acknowledgement that all of the roles are equally important. And so when you think of the product development process, there'll be times that design is taking the lead, there'll be that product is taking. There's times engineering's taking the lead, there's time that others are as well. And obviously that changes based on the number of people in your company or your team or your organization. But it's not on one person's shoulders. And I think the phrase is empowerment. And some People will roll their eyes at it. But I do believe to make a product successful, everybody has to be bought in to its success. That means there can't be one person driving it. There has to be a team effort, a team commitment to make it the best that it can be. That is also, I think, a change and one that I hope Sticks will see. But now we're seeing the change in the AI and wondering what that will mean for the future of all the disciplines I just described.

Yeah, I think AI is one of those topics that keep coming up certainly on this show and I'm sure in most people's lives today. But I've been a advocate of technology that enables us to become more efficient so that we have the ability to spend more time focusing on what matters. And by that, the people that we work with, that we serve, whether they be our team members that work for us, whether it be our colleagues or of course, our customers and our communities at large. I'm not going to take a prediction on AI. I famously made a bad prediction on social media and then started talking about it so on on stages. No, this thing's not going to stick around. And then 12 months later it's part of a keynote. But anyway, you said to the audience straight out of the gate, you're knocking us between the eyes, telling us that everything's changing. I just want to reassure the audience though, the person that's listening today, that the book is one that takes you on a journey. It covers everything when it comes to really being product manager, that can evolve with the changing needs of not only consumers, but importantly how organizations work. And I love that you really have bookended the book. You start with everything's changing. And then of course towards the end of the book you start talking about how to future proof your career. And part of that is also how to become a leader within product management. I really love that you do cover that full gamut. It's not doom and gloom by any stretch of the imagination. There's a so much in this. But I love that you even get into the details around keeping sponsors happy. Now in organizations, I would say the larger they get, the more sponsors you end up having, but which is not necessarily a good thing. But what is the role of a sponsor when it comes to product management and briefly. And secondly, why is it important to keep them happy?

So sponsor may mean a different thing to different people. So from the perspective of a sponsor, they're often the executive who is advocating for your product at the most top levels. They'll be also the flip of a sponsor who may not be advocating for your product. And so you want to ensure that those individuals have insight, in their terminology, of the benefit the product can provide. And what I mean is each of your stakeholders, each of your sponsors, will have certain trigger points. That's because they're human. All of us have certain interests or certain aptitudes that we listen into and lean in for, and others that. It's nice. And so you really need to understand your sponsors as humans, because you need to talk their language. You need to be able to negotiate, influence them as, as a human, as a person. That often means getting out of product speak and being able to talk to them in terms that really resonate with them. With some execs, it'll be numbers. With some execs, it'll be hitting all of our goals or milestones on time. With others, it'll be surpassing the competition. With others, it'll be a foray into a new space. And so by spending time understanding and listening and just observing your stakeholders, you can get insight into them, what makes them tick, and be able to use that to have an effective conversation and build up the rapport.

Excellent tips for us there. And I think a great reminder that even outside of the product management world, most of us in business have some sort of stakeholder or sponsor that we need to have advocating ultimately for us, or if they can't advocate for us, that they're not doing the opposite. Right. Silence is better than not advocating for something. Now, I love also that in the book, you take us a step further and you talk about balancing that need between two worlds, really, of sponsors and users. And I think that is something that's absolutely worth our audience members diving in the book. Because as you know better than I, what users want and what sponsors want can sometimes be completely different. I am conscious that our audience has been with us. The listeners, the people watching on YouTube have been with us. I do like to keep the show fairly tight because everyone has a busy schedule, including you, Diana. Again, thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go, though, as I mentioned before, I hit the record button, I usually wrap up by asking one last question, but you've just been so amazing. I'm going to ask you two. I hope that's okay.

We'll talk quickly.

Yeah. For the novice out there who perhaps hasn't ever worked in product management or had anything to do with a product manager, what ultimately is product management about?

It's a great question. Product management is about encapsulating what the customer wants within an experience. And I will say within an experience because they're physical products as well as digital products, but taking what the customer wants, needs, and typically in the guise of solving a problem for that and putting that experience into a product, into a solution.

Yeah, yeah. And a product can be a physical thing. It can be a service. It can. It can be many different things. It can be software. Fantastic. Now, the very last question, Diana. What's one thing that someone listening or watching today should start doing or perhaps stop doing as soon as they finished this episode?

It's funny because we're talking about a podcast, and the thing that I would say is continue doing is listening. And I mean that just in the broad sense, because oftentimes product people feel we need to speak all the time, whether it be to our stakeholders that we talked about before, the sponsors that we talked about before. And I would turn the dial the other way and listen. Listen to your customers, listen to your sponsors, listen to your stakeholders, listen to the colleagues that you work with. Because that emotional intelligence, that knowledge, that insight that you gain from listening is what I think really differentiates a standout product manager from the rest.

Fantastic piece of advice. Remain curious. Listen more so that you can deliver more. Diana, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks again for your time.

Thank you.