Hardware Product Development

Joe: My name is Joe Dahlquist, I am a product manager, actually VP of product management of a cybersecurity startup that’s based out of Carlsbad and I’m here today to talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart, which is product management. I’ve been a product manager for 15 years now. I started with a company called Rockford Corporation, a car audio company based out of Arizona.

I spent 10 years developing new products there across a number of different brands and divisions. Another four years at a company called Chamberlain, doing primarily access control products and garage door openers, gate operators and things like that. Then moved into software, where I spent four years doing a SAS software solution in the realm of higher education and then most recently over the last few years in the cybersecurity space as a product manager for a network security company that’s a tech startup.

Suzanne: You know a little bit about this topic it sounds like.

Joe: Just a little bit yeah.

Suzanne: 15 years is a long time, you look like a young guy. I guess product has been good to you.

Joe: It’s been good to me, product management can be stressful but it can also be absolutely fascinating and enthralling. It’s something that obviously, I love doing. Otherwise, I probably would have moved on to other things after 15 years but I got started when I was pretty young as well. Just out of high school, I started in a technical support department for a car audio manufacturer. Being a typical 90s, 16 to 18-year-old my two favorite things were cool cars and loud music. I wanted to see if I could put those two together and turn it into a career and I did, I was able to. Starting in technical support, I was speaking directly to customers every day, all day long, via phone, via email.

Suzanne: What are people complaining about in the car audio space?

Joe: “My amplifier doesn’t work, I don’t understand how to install the stereo, I’m not sure what size of a box to build for these big subwoofers that I purchased from your company.” There’s a lot of intricate, not only audio reproduction science and theory but there’s also a lot of 12 volt electrical challenges for somebody that wants to try and do it themselves. Inevitably you get a lot of younger guys typically that save up from a summer job, buy some loud stereo equipment for their car.

Suzanne: Put it all in a Honda Civic.

Joe: Put it all in a Honda Civic and then try to get it all working themselves to save a few bucks or they have a friend that knows how to “install". We’d field calls from them and they’d be running into some kind of a problem with the product itself or they’d have questions that weren’t maybe obvious or the answers weren’t obvious to them. I was able to catalog all of the typical complaints, typical questions. When I had an opportunity, I was invited to join a beta testing group at the company, get my hands-on products before they actually hit the store shelves and got into the hands of customers.

I was able to understand what kind off improvements we could make that would make our customer’s lives easier, make the product more intuitive to use or install, address requests, feature enhancements, new types of products that customers were asking for and then be a conduit for all of that information back to the design and the engineering and even the manufacturing teams. We were building that product in Tempe, Arizona. It was all made in the US at that point.

I must have struck a nerve with somebody in the product management side of the operation there because they asked me, “Have you ever heard of a job title called product manager?” I said, “No, I didn’t know what that was,” and he said, “Well, you get to do all of the things that you seem to love doing every day for a job, coming up with new ideas for products, working directly with customers to understand what kind of problems they need solved, what kind of products they’re willing to buy, what they’re hoping comes next in the subsequent year. That was my first foray into product management, it was very late 90s, early 2000s in the car audio space.

Suzanne: That was at Rockford.

Joe: That was at Rockford.

Suzanne: They were manufacturing car stereos primarily, is that what the product was or there were more products?

Joe: They were, primarily … When I joined, we were a privately held company. We were just a car audio company speakers, subwoofers, amplifiers. Rockford had been around for almost 20 years at that point. They’d been started in the 70s and they were very successful, they were one of the more familiar and famous brands and at the time very large industry. Rockford then had an IPO and we acquired a number of companies that were not just in the car stereo space but in the audio space in general.

We acquired a home theater company and then another home theater company. We acquired a professional audio company. The kind of company that makes equipment for recording studios and concerts and big facility installations, where you’d have speakers all over the place piping in music, headphone companies and microphone companies. At that point I was really geeking out on the science and the theory of audio reproduction and understanding how difficult certain environments make it to try and faithfully reproduce audio the way that the artist or the recording engineer wanted it to sound when you played it back.

I started to dabble in all of the other divisions and became a part of a team that did a lot of the innovation and even looked at companies that we were thinking of acquiring to see what kind of technology, what kind of people, what kind of benefit they might bring to the organization. I got to spend some time doing a lot more than just car audio.

Suzanne: Do you remember the first product that you worked from idea all the way to execution?

Joe: Vividly actually, yeah.

Suzanne: Tell us about it.

Joe: The first product that I got to work on from conception all the way to getting it on the shelf was something that was really innovative at the time. This would have been early 2000s, MP3 was something that most people did not know. It was not a buzzword yet and we didn’t even have flash drives or SD cards at that point. There was this way of storing digital information on a little memory card called MMC or Multimedia Cards and they were very expensive, they were about $100 for an 8-megabyte card.

Suzanne: I remember these days just to say.

Joe: You remember these days?

Suzanne: Yeah.

Joe: We had acquired a company that had figured out how to wirelessly transmit MP3 audio files from the house in your computer to a car stereo or a home stereo over the air using Bluetooth and using Wi-Fi, which were also relatively young at that time. We had this great idea to be able to pull into your garage or pull into your driveway and automatically update all the MP3 files that were on your computer into your car so that you could then drive to work of run to get some groceries and be able to listen to the same thing that you were just listening to in the house by moving those files.

We had a long-winded product development cycle, we had to find a hard drive that could actually sit inside of a vehicle and go over speed bumps and bumpy roads and not skip and not have issues. We brought that product to market and the first company to sell it was BestBuy. It was way ahead of its time, it was something that excited half of the people that looked at it and tried it and confused the other half and shortly thereafter the iPod became so commonplace that it really was the only way to consume MP3 audio files. Our product died a sad slow death in the face of very rapidly changing marketplace with the iPod.

Suzanne: A little interesting aside about this, which is that I worked for some time with BestBuy in the warehousing. It’s possible Joe that in another life I was fork lifting all of your surplus inventory. It is a sad story but at least it’s …

Joe: But what was not a sad story are the innovative products that that led to. Right on its heels, we were able to do a wireless sound processing device for cars that gave people who loved tinkering with their car audio systems the kind of controls that they had never had before that at the point had never even dreamed were possible. The ability to shape the sound of each individual speaker in a car, implement time delay so that you could sound like you were in a much better environment for listening to music than the small confines of an automobile.

We created, to go along with it, the ability to control it all through an iPad, not an iPad the iPAQ, the old Hewlett Packard iPAQ. In some ways, I tend to think of that as the first mobile app that maybe was ever available in the car audio industry that we used to wirelessly control that and again that was all back in the early 2000. It led to some great innovation and was another notch in the belt of the long journey of MP3 becoming a mainstay of how you listen to audio.

Suzanne: Well there’s so many pieces that I want to dive into but I want to go back first. You mentioned you had this long product development cycle when you were talking about this Wi-Fi, MP3 transfer system. How long first of all are we talking about from, “Hey, we found this company that has this bit of technology,” to, "We’re in BestBuy?"

Joe: That process probably took about 18 months, which wasn’t untypical for the kinds of hardware products that we were building then and I don’t know that it’s changed much since then either. Some of my product development cycles have been maybe six or eight months on the fast side, on the very accelerated side. Then 12 to 24 months is pretty commonplace. There’s a lot that goes into getting a hardware product ready to go on a shelf.

Suzanne: I wanted to ask specifically about that, you’re a young guy at this time, you’re excited about technology. One of the questions that comes up a lot in my classroom on this show is how technical does a product manager need to be? I’m curious about two things, the first is how much did you actually understand about this technology and then who were the players because you don’t have … In a SAAS product we have user experience designers, we’ve got project managers, we’ve got web developers there’s a different constellation of folks I imagine that come together to bring this highly technical product to life.

Joe: You’re absolutely right, you don’t necessarily have UX designers, instead you have mechanical designers, designers that are going to tell you how the outside of a product should look. Then you have mechanical engineers that figure out how to actually build that product and make it manufacturable but yet still have the elements of design that you began with, something that still looks nice on the outside. You have electrical engineers and folks that are helping you do layout and selecting the individual electrical components that are going to be used and you often are developing, designing, licensing your own circuit designs as well. In many cases with Rockford patenting those designs and creating some intellectual property.

There’s still a gaggle of people that are involved and there’s a lot of similarities between the SAAS world of product development and the stakeholders and the areas of expertise that you need compared to hardware. The titles are a little bit different, the areas of expertise are a little different but to answer your first question, I was pretty technical. I understood the product, I understood how it was supposed to work, how it was supposed to be installed but I was certainly no engineer.

I think an area where product managers can get caught up sometimes is trying to be the subject matter expert in an area that they don’t need to be a subject matter expert in and that product managers, I know myself at least. I’ve really had to choose my battles and choose where I spend my time. That’s why you have an engineering department that’s great at laying out a circuit board and getting it all to work, that’s why you have mechanical engineers that are going to design the heat sink or the housing or something and make it functional.

What you have to do as a product manager is figure out how to connect all of those people and get them all working on the same project at the same time with common goals and a common understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and then yielding to those people that have that subject matter expertise in the different areas that you need.

Suzanne: Steve Jobs talks about customer research and the problem with customer research is this, sometimes people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Given that these were sort of highly innovative products using technologies that the average person wouldn’t even understand to begin with and your role is to package them up into something that could be valuable. Can you talk a little bit about the customer development process in that, how do you ask somebody if this is a good idea when they probably don’t know what you’re talking about?

Joe: Yeah, it’s a great point. I think that in almost all product categories regardless of what type of product it is and whether it’s a tangible product you can hold in your hands or it’s a price of software. You’re always going to have customers in varying degrees of how frequently they’re going to interface with the product, how emotionally attached they are to the product. We would rely heavily on what we called super users, the people who lived and breathed the products that we created. At Rockford, I kid you not, we had people tattooing our brand logo on their arms. They were that emotionally attached and invested.

Suzanne: If there's any of Rockford listeners out there with tattoos please email them to at @100productmanagers.

Joe: You’re going to be surprised at how many submissions you get actually.

Suzanne: Wow, we’ll throw it in the show notes.

Joe: Those folks they provided a lot of great input to us. In many cases, they were the dealers, they were the distributors, they were the installers of those products. They had a unique perspective on what we were building and what we were selling. They’d provide us with very candid but also very self-serving feedback. "I would like that to be blue instead of red, I would like that to be bigger or smaller instead of the size that it is now, I’d like it to have 1500 watts instead of 150 watts."

We also used focus groups, where we would bring people in purposefully that weren’t familiar with our product and would ask them to choose from one of maybe 10 mechanical designs or different aesthetic directions that we might be going with a piece of equipment. We would collate all of that feedback both from people who knew exactly what we did and were very familiar with our products to also users that had no idea who we were or what our products were used for. That was all information that went into the research that we performed.

Something that I found interesting over the years though is that you don’t always need feedback directly tied to your product. Sometimes, in fact I think more frequently than sometimes there’s surrogate information out there that can help you make decisions, trends that are happening in the electronics field in general will have some influence on what people want from your specific type of electrical product or software product or any number of things.

If we think about the influence that modern design has had across the board whether it’s a washer and drier or a refrigerator or whether it’s the iPhone that we all carry around in our pocket or something along those lines. Trends in general, what is popular and what is gaining in popularity all speaks to what people want. Sometimes you can take a lot of queues from just the general direction that other industries or other niches are heading to inform your own design philosophy and what you want to build for your customers to anticipate what’s going to be hot next as opposed to what’s hot now.

Suzanne: I’m glad you bring it up, it speaks to the ongoing pulse of market research that is so much part of the role. You always have to be trying new things, seeing what else is out there, looking beyond just your direct competitors as you say for clues in the market of where we could cobble together something that makes sense. I’m curious, let’s now go jump ahead to the boxes are at BestBuy and they're collecting dust, the sales folks can’t move this because you say the customers are confused. What happens at that point? Is it just like, “Well, that was a loss.” What does the company do once you’ve shipped all of this physical product and it doesn’t connect with the market?

Joe: What you start to do is you start to explore the specific reasons why it’s not connecting to the market. You try and gain an understanding of whether it’s something that can be trained or taught, whether it’s something that just needs to be presented in a slightly different shade or in a slightly different manner. With those products, what we found was that although the purchasing audience here in the United States wasn’t snapping it up as quickly as they could, the same kinds of markets in other countries were absolutely primed for that product.

What we ended up doing was taking a lot of that product and selling it to the EMEA, to Asian countries even to South Africa. Where the point in time on that trendline of MP3 is being understood and MP3 is becoming something that you only use your iPod for. Then even the trendline where that became high fidelity versions of electronic audio files used in higher end home theater systems to replace … You remember the old CD carousels where you could 100 or 500 into a carousel. MP3s really did change the face of audio across so many industries but it didn’t all happen in the same place at the same time. There were markets that weren’t as far into that kind of evolutionary path as the US was. We found a great home for those products overseas.

Suzanne: You pivoted?

Joe: We pivoted.

Suzanne: It’s interesting, we talk a lot about the launch, then sell conundrum again in internet product space because there is so much opportunity to integrate feedback, to iterate rapidly, which we’ll talk about but the place you almost never want to be in with an internet product is, “We’ve built it and now it’s the wrong thing.” You’re there and you’re saying, “Well, there is still a way," even with manufacturing being done even with product physically shipped there’s an opportunity to revisit the strategy and try to find the success.

Joe: There is and at the time that we had launched that product it required purchasing other products from us as well, which meant that we were unable to address some of the market. We made some design changes to that product and made it accommodate any audio system that you wanted to put it in even if you didn’t purchase those other bits and pieces from us, from the company. That again opened it up to a wider audience that had said, “I’d be interested in that if it was packaged a little differently, if it was more like an accessory that I could add to my car and less of the center piece.”

We went on to have pretty great success with that product but to your point it took changing it and massaging it and responding to changes in the market, changes in what our customers wanted and how they wanted to purchase and use the product for us to finally strike gold with it. One of the great things about product management is if you do it long enough you can pack on all of those hard lessons learned and hopefully not repeat them painfully again.

Suzanne: It really does shine a light on this fundamental distinction and you’ve got a lot of experience in this, which is you talk about an 18-month product development cycle, you talk about creating a product that except for a few super users giving you a few clues is really a gamble because the technology is new. You don’t really have any choice other than to build it and deploy it and see because you’re a year and a half in front of the go-to-market, which is just so different.

Can you talk about how that … I guess this would be true in fashion, it’s true in automotive, it’s obviously true in electronics. How does that change the product manager role when you’re trying to, you’re solving problems today for something that won’t be known in the customer’s world for another year and a half or two years. Cars it’s like seven or something.

Joe: Indeed, these very long product cycles make it very challenging and you’re right in many cases it is just a gamble and you have to wait and see how the market is going to accept your product, but understanding the changing landscape within your own competitive space is important. When you become a subject matter expert on your own market that you’re serving with your products you understand pretty quickly who the competitors are that are setting trends, who the competitors are that are following them and you aspire to be one of those trendsetters as a company.

One of the luxuries we had at Rockford was that we were a trendsetter, we had the luxury of being able to say what is cool and what’s going to be cool a year from now. Then that empowered us to go and build those products. A lot of it was the design team that we had, a lot of it was our incredibly passionate approach and no apologies attitude towards the products that we built and our understanding of who our customers were.

We were not trying to sell product to middle aged moms, we weren’t trying to sell product to my grandfather. We were trying to sell product to 16 to 35-year-old males and we got to understand what it was that they wanted and then also partner with other companies that had a similar DNA to ours even if they were not in our industry whatsoever. To understand what’s out on the horizon, what kind of look, what kind of performance, what kind of technology is gaining traction right now that will be at a point of maturity in 18 months as our product finally hits the shelves that it’s solving a problem, it’s desirable, it’s cool, it’s something that people have got to have.

If I look back on those years where I was building physical electronic products and it was taking a year or two years to get them developed. There were a lot of successes and there were a lot of failures. If that’s the kind of industry that you’re in as long as you understand that that’s a reality of product management and of manufacturing that you’re going to have a couple of home runs and you’re going to strikeout a few times as swell and you bake that in to the risk mitigation that you do into your budges, that you can protect yourself a little bit. It’s a utopian idea that every product you ever going to build is going to be wildly successful and make lots of money and make lots of customers happy.

Suzanne: That’s the dream, that the media dangles in front of young entrepreneurs and says “Instagram did it and so can you.”

Joe: Absolutely but the reality is that it’s a battle every step of the way and sometimes seemingly insignificant decisions like what color LED light should we put on this have massive consequences both good and bad. What you start to identity is that there are things about a product that you can rapidly change in reaction to how the market is accepting of what you’ve just built. Colors, packaging, the messaging that you wrap around that product, how you present it in a display at a big buck store like BestBuy. You can understand that those things are still rather malleable and that you can move pretty quickly on changing something like a blue LED to a white LED.

I remember there being a couple of years in consumer electrics there, where everything with a white LED was cool and new and you had to have it. Everything with a red or a blue LED was last year and it was falling out of favor with people. If you can still change those things to react to challenges that you see in market acceptance of your products. You can take something maybe doesn’t roar out of the gates as a new product and turn it into that sleeper product that takes off but maybe not immediately after you launch it.

Suzanne: How much wiggle room do you get because what I’m hearing you describe is this idea that, “We’ve designed and built and shipped X number of units and we’re ready to ship X number more based on order, but if the feedback comes back there’s a certain amount of wiggle room to go back and modify designs or swap out some component parts before we ship the next batch.” What kind of timeline are we talking about there? Let’s say you get a first round of units on the shelves, it’s not performing as hoped, you do a little investigation, you determine maybe a white LED light is the trick. Is that like you get back to the office and thousands more get pushed out to line or is that another three or four months before you can get that next order out.

Joe: It really depends, if white LEDs are so popular that everybody is ordering them it may be weeks before you can get any shipped from the factory that built them. Then also you have inventory issues to deal with, you have manufacturing issues that need to be addressed. It is very much like trying to turn a battleship when you’re dealing with products that are being produced in high quantities, in high volumes. Simple rather insignificant changes that you might think to yourself, “That should only take a couple of days to start cranking them out with this change implemented,” can take weeks and in some cases even months or might not be financial feasible to do at all in any way.

There’s a little bit of wiggle room but it really comes down to such a case by case situation depending on the product, depending on … We had a lot of luxuries because we were manufacturing product ourselves in the US. I had the ability to walk from my engineering department 50 steps over to the actual production lines where we were doing surface mount and final production and testing of products that we were then shipping out to our dealers and distributors and big box retailers.

I had the ability to force wiggle room even sometimes when wiggle room didn’t exist, to be able to a stop the process a moment and say, “If we ship these the way that they are we’re not going to be as well served as if we’re able to implement this minor change. What are the risks, what’s the financial impact but then what’s the size of the prize that we can go win by implementing this change, by making this change?” Sometimes it nets out to be worthwhile and sometimes you find that it would have been nice to make that change but it’s just not going to be in the cards for this particular product or at this time.

Suzanne: Right, we’ll try for a home run next time.

Joe: That's right and I don’t want to beat up on any other products that I’ve done over the years even in some cases where I didn’t feel like that product was successful. It’s usually in comparison to products that were just wildly successful, can’t build enough, can’t satisfy the demand for them. Most products if you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve spent 18 months building something shame on you if you haven’t done your homework to understand what the experts think, what the analysts and the reviewers, the people that do have influence from the top down say about the direction that you’re taking. If you haven’t put it out in front of focus groups and you haven’t put it out in front of your power users.

If you haven’t used it yourself and put yourself in the shoes of the customer and looked at it from their perspective and then gathered feedback from friends and family, I can’t tell you how many times I had friends and family that say, “Please stop asking me questions about car stereo equipment, I don’t know anything about it.” All that feedback in aggregate is what can keep you from making big mistakes that ultimately cost your company lots of money, can cost your brand equity, some of the gloss and shine that it has and potentially even cost you your job if you really go off the rails there and do something wrong.

Suzanne: What you’re speaking about is that, I say to students a lot the first day of class, “Curiosity is a fundamental quality of product managers because if you’re already in the mindset of “I know,” you’ll never look under all of the rocks that you need to look under, you’ll never start to think differently about situations and it is through asking questions even of unexpected people, even the people who know nothing about car stereos have information to offer if you can ask the right questions.”

Joe: Absolutely right and a lot of times it’s the feedback that you get not from those challenging technical details but it’s the overall user experience, it’s the emotions that a product will invoke with somebody, it’s touching the volume knob and spinning it for the first time and saying, “I love the way that feels.” You don’t have to be an expert to be able to have that kind of an emotional connection to a product and those are some of the big mile posts and the road signs that you’re looking for that you’re either on the right path or that maybe you’re not and you need to rethink something.

Suzanne: I’m lingering a little bit here because like you I grew up in love with electronics as well and it’s easy to now chart back, the path doesn’t look as clean as yours, which was, “I love cars and I love electronics so here I go,” but it was definitely an early indicator of my desire to be part of designing and building and being in technology and thank you for letting me geek out here with you.

Joe: Absolutely.

Suzanne: One of the things I think is interesting about your career in particular, you spent a long time in this space and you built hundreds of products, which is not a common experience for product managers nowadays as well. You might have somebody even in a parallel world that has been doing it for 10 or 15 years but has maybe only owned two or three products in that journey. Talk a little bit about how, do you fall in love with a product and home run or not home run you fall in love with it and you have to let it go on to the next thing, what is that like?

Joe: You hit it right on the head, you fall in love with every product that pour yourself into. That is probably one of the most significant marks of a person who belongs in product management is. I have sent hundreds of products to store shelves and I have end of lifed so many of these products that I’m emotionally attached to as well. There’s this bitter sweet maybe stages of grief that you go through with products as you ideate on something, as you create that first napkin sketch of what it is that you think would be a cool new thing to build.

That also happens to resonate with maybe hopefully the industry that you’re in and the kind of technology that the company you’re working for is good at making but you then spend an inordinate amount of time pouring over the smallest of details, machine head screws or Philips head screws, should they be stainless steel, should they be black anodized, should the packaging be a four-color litho or should we just go for a toned-down craft paper and black ink look.

Every facet of that product is yours or yours and your team’s. You feel like a very proud parent when you do finally get those products out and one of the most emotional attachments that you’re going to have with products is when you actually see people using them. I was as guilty of walking into BestBuy and just creepily hovering in the aisles where my products were and looking …

Suzanne: In plain clothes on the weekends.

Joe: In plain clothes, yeah absolutely and watching people look at the package and read the technical specs and flip it around in their hands and go through that purchasing decision that we all do when we think about buying anything. Then take it home and when you’re lucky maybe write a review about it, do a blog post about it and then get to read the experience that somebody had with the product that you had spent so much time with.

It really is like going to … I have two daughters myself. It reminds me a lot of going to a parent-teacher conference for one of my kids is you get to hear other people talk about something that you’ve invested so much of your life and your love into. Sometimes it’s tough not to take things personally when there’s suggested improvements, things they don’t like but those are just priceless data points to be able to get to and learn from in the next iteration.

Suzanne: You mentioned that when you did eventually move on from the world of electronics and I know it wasn’t just all with Rockford but I'm sort of summarizing a decade of your life. I hope you don’t mind, I’ve just summarized a decade of your life but you went into SAAS after that?

Joe: I did.

Suzanne: I’m curious because you spent so much time in the world of physical product and because the process is so in-depth as you’ve described here. What was that like going from that journey into building software?

Joe: It was shockingly different.

Suzanne: You were like, these people just sitting around doing nothing I mean they don’t …

Joe: These people go off and write a little bit of code and then come back 20 minutes later with something that I had just asked for and I don’t understand how it’s happening so rapidly. I feel like I need to make them prove it that they just did something. I had not expected that things moved as rapidly as they do in SAAS software. I had not anticipated that so many of the challenging areas of electronics or hardware product management just didn’t exist in the world of SAAS but that there were these entirely new challenges that I had never faced before. That I hadn’t gained the benefit of experience and history with to know what to do and what not to do.

Suzanne: You were a beginner all over again?

Joe: I was a beginner all over again, it was as if I had started my career allover after a decade of learning what I thought were going to be the lessons that I would apply to SAS software but it was different. My first foray into SAS software was also framed in a pretty challenging way as well. I joined a company that had been a professional service provider for 25 years. They were very good at providing human based professional services, "We have the expertise, we will work for you, we will give you information, we will do things and then charge you money for it."

The founder of that company wanted to create a SAS software product that would replace the professional services they had been doing. Turn it into an automated piece of software that the customer could use instead of hiring them for their professional services. Translating something that was a human based professional service into a SAS based software application was very challenging. At the time the company also didn’t have a software development team.

We had a lot of work to do, we built a team, we interviewed stakeholders, we invited lots and lots of existing customers and the kinds of customers we thought we would get by building a SAS software product into our offices to ask them questions, to interview them. I went out and embedded myself in the offices with the people that we had targeted as our customers just to live a life in their shoes and see what kinds of problems that they ran into, where they spent the majority of their time and how I can maybe make their life and their work a little bit easier. That all eventually became a set of requirements, which then became a set of functional specifications, which then became design documents and ultimately became a SAAS software product.

That entire development process probably also took nearly a year but what I realized is that the entirety of the product is as malleable as those very few things that I could change in that small wiggle room space with the electronics that I had been working on for so long. Changing the names of a button in the software, deciding to move to dropdown lists as opposed to text fields. The departure away from something that required customers to install software locally to a fully cloud based application were all things that we were able to implement so rapidly after we had built the first offering, the first version of the software.

I was absolutely hooked, I was hooked on the fact that we could see changing needs and changing problems in the ways that customers were using our product and then react to that so rapidly and be able to come back to them in a matter of hours or days with something that had solved an obstacle with a completely different way of interfacing with the software or with a whole new module that added functionality that wasn’t there before. For me having spent so long with products that did take a long, long time from inception to completion that it was just highly addictive to be able to move so rapidly through the development phases and respond so quickly to changing needs and desires.

Suzanne: Talk to us about your latest venture.

Joe: My latest venture is probably the most exciting venture, I’m having more fun right now in product management than I ever have. I am at a tech startup in the cybersecurity space based out of Carlsbad, California, it’s called ThreatSTOP. I joined ThreatSTOP because their product and the way that they’re trying to solve a very big problem in the world of information and IT security is one of the most innovative approaches that I’ve seen in a really long time. I felt when I first looked at the company like I was seeing Uber three years before Uber launched when it was just still an idea of Lyft or any number of highly successful things that was maybe just slightly ahead of its time but is just a no-brainer way to solve a problem and it’s really the first time that I’ve worked for a truly VC backed tech startup.

That means wearing a lot of hats, that means working a lot of long hours, it means everything you try and accomplish is challenging and I love every second of it. I’ve brought four new products to market in the last year and a half and some of them were completely new products from scratch and some were products that I don’t think anybody at the company would have envisioned us having or even being in the direction that we would have gone a couple of years ago but it’s because we’re still doing the product-market fit dance and we’re learning lessons, we’re making improvements and we’re responding to what the market wants.

I also happen to choose to come work in an industry where the competitive space and the problems that customers are trying to solve is in constant flux. Unlike most industries out there the realities of what your product should do and the reason why people are buying your products don’t change from day to day or week to week but in cybersecurity there can be an attack type, whether it’s something like ransomware or something like phishing that does not exist today but might exist two months from now and needs to have entirely new products and approaches thought start up to combat them as rapidly as possible because breaches are happening, companies are showing up in the headlines having lost sensitive customer data almost every day now. It’s a space that needs great products and great innovation to solve those problems but the problems themselves are changing almost as rapidly as I’ve ever seen.

Suzanne: These are also digital products, this is software based solutions as well?

Joe: Software based solutions.

Suzanne: Once you got a glimpse into the easy life of soft product you were like, “What was I doing all of those years? Now I have time, I can see the kids, I can take them to the recitals.” No, I’m just kidding, of course there’s a lot of stresses.

Joe: There’s a lot of stresses and actually if I look down the pipeline over the next couple of years, I would not be shocked if both software and hardware come back into my job where I am. There’s a lot of benefits of having completely SAAS based, cloud based software that you install on other people’s products, other people’s hardware but there’s also opportunities sometimes to take a step back and say maybe we could do something better there and build our own hardware that our own software runs on as well. No promises but I’m not writing off hardware product development for the rest of my career that’s for certain.

Suzanne: All right, ThreatSTOP is the place to keep an eye on for Joe and innovation to come.

Joe: Indeed.

Suzanne: To go back a moment you talked, when you did make that jump from physical product into soft product. You talked about there being a bunch of new challenges that you weren’t ready for. Can you remember some of them that being a beginner again and going, “Oh I don’t know this I’m not in this world.”

Joe: Absolutely, I know if I were to tear open most pieces of electronics and a small flashlight I can identify just about everything that’s in there. I know what most components are doing, I can understand why an integrated circuit might be on that board. I can figure it out. When I started to first pull apart software I had no idea why anything was there much less what it was doing. I had no understanding of why someone might choose a SQL database over a Mongo database for a particular use case. I was not an expert in the field of security, I had been a hobbyist looking at this industry from afar for a very long time.

There was a lot of new technical ground to cover for me. A lot of questions that I had to go and ask, a lot of white papers and a lot of books that I had to go and read to at least get to a place where I didn’t feel like I was just making it all up. Although I was able to draw a lot of parallels between the product development process and the stakeholders, the players, the functional departments that are involved in the product development process for hardware and although software had some parallels there, there were some similarities. It was also very different, I didn’t have mechanical engineers, I had UX designers. I didn’t have electrical engineers, I had software developers.

I didn’t have to worry about physical packaging of my product but the user experience packaging and the delivery packaging of that software was similar but very different. I had to understand what the phases of product development were that impacted software releases. I had to understand what a release cycle and a release schedule was like and why you don’t ship new product updates for software on a Friday before you go on a long three-day weekend.

Lots of lessons and as long as I had been in product management I remember thinking to myself, “This is hard, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this. This is so unfamiliar and strange," and yet what I found was that it appealed to my curiosity as a product manager. It was new information I could go and gorge on and try and soak up and learn from others and it certainly brought new challenges. After a dozen, maybe or so years of doing product management and feeling like I had my hands around it, like I understood it. I was ready for some new challenges, I was ready for something to shake me up and make me uncomfortable.

Suzanne: You disrupted yourself.

Joe: I disrupted myself and it’s worked out so far. It’s very different, I think that any product manager regardless of what field you’re in whether it’s tangible or physical products that you work with or whether it’s SAS software or whether it’s mobile apps or whether it’s a professional service. I would certainly recommend exploring other fields, other walks of life to product managers out there because you never know if you’re going to love a new space and a new way of delivering and a new way of developing until you’ve tried it.

Suzanne: That’s what inspiring about having you on the show. I hope for folks who are listening in, who are either working in the physical product space or have thought about it because it is different. You’re shining a light on a quality not maybe of every product manager but it is consistently true of people and why they end up in this space. We want to touch everything and know everything and do a bit of everything.

I give this advice to folks if they solicit it. I try not to go around just offering unsolicited advice but if they solicit advice about, “What’s the right place for me?” It is important to look at yourself and say, are you the type of person that thrives getting elbow deep into a bit of everything and if yes you need to be in an unstructured, fast paced, half-baked environment because the more scaled an organized is, the more divided the processes are.

There’s a protocol for that you’re not just going to go and disrupt the factory floor. There’s a whole assembly line that’s going on but then there’s equally environments where it's like, “I don’t even know if we have a policy for that, I guess let’s just wing it.” Knowing about your own self is an important part of figuring out where to be and then as you say trying different things. If you get really, really comfortable it’s like flip a table, go do something else, be a beginner again.

Joe: Exactly and when I look back on my career, I spent some time in a senior marketing role, I spent some time in a senior sales role. There was one company I was with where we developed a product and I just didn’t have the sales team to go and sell that product so I became the sales guy and I was very passionate about the product, it worked in my favor. I was able to make my numbers as a sales guy as foreign as that even sounds now to say it.

Having experienced what it’s like to be one of the stakeholder that I’ve had to work with to been the other side of the table, to be the marketing person saying, "I wish I had a product manager to give me these bullet points, the technical specs, to give me the ammo I need to create a piece of marketing collateral for this product." To be the sales person and say, “Boy, I wish I had a product manager right now to do these things,” really enlightened me on what it is that’s most important that I can provide to those people for the rest of my career. “How can I be supportive and empowering to my marketing department, to my sales department?”

You’re absolutely right that means getting elbow deep into just about everything, whether it’s doing financial calculations on a product development effort to understand, “Does this have the potential to be profitable for us, should we go and do it?” To be able to say, “Here’s the most important things to market about this product because I understand the market that we’re selling to.”

All the way back to my roots to be able to sit down with the support team and say, “These are going to be the common problems that people run into and here’s how you solve it for them.” Having an opportunity to live in different roles that are all customers of product management has made me probably a more competent, more capable and maybe a more well-rounded product manager and has been a big part of the fun as well.

Suzanne: Joe what advice do you have for somebody listening in that wants to get into this space?

Joe: My first piece of advice is find an industry to work in where you like the products, where you think of yourself as a customer perhaps even. It’s going to go a long way into helping you make the right decisions from a product management stand point is if you are emotionally attached to that product. Be a relationship builder, it’s probably one of the most important capabilities of a product manager is to be able to go and build bridges even where bridges have been previously burned or where bridges have never existed.

Good product management is such a big cross-functional macro level effort that involves every department and every person that having relationships with those people, with those departments pays off in spades when you’re trying to get things done. Probably the last couple are never be afraid to voice product ideas, ideas for enhancement, ideas for improvements. I like to think of everybody that I live with, work with and see on a daily basis, whether it’s the person giving me coffee at Starbucks or whether it’s my wife and kids at home or whether it’s my coworkers or external customers. I am constantly bouncing ideas off of people to see what they think.

I know that nine out of 10 of them nothing will ever happen but it will still be information that helps color a much larger picture and helps inform how to make better decisions. The last piece of advice that I’ve got for people that want to try and get into this industry is join beta testing teams, be the person that reviews products that you buy on a blog, online on the company’s website that you bought it from. Think about problems that need to be solved and how you would solve them if you could go and build something to do that with and maybe last but not least is just jump in. It can be scary, product management is not a career path that most people understand.

I know for myself every company I’ve ever worked at has had a different expectation and a different idea of what a product manager is and sometimes 50 different titles for that role. Jumping in and just trying it to see if you like it is sometimes easier than you’d think and it can start like I did with just providing feedback about what I liked and didn’t like about the products that the company I was working for was making and there’s lots of avenues to be able to start providing that kind of information.

I said last but not least but the most important thing a product manager can do is get out of their office, not be confined by the walls and not do product management in a vacuum with people that you see every single day and that you work with every day. The real answers, the real brilliant ideas and the real innovation are going to happen when you get out there and you actually talk to customers and you go and see what it’s like to work a day in their life or to live a day in their life and what kind of challenges and problems they face and how you might be able to solve them.

Suzanne: This is something that I bring up a lot of as well, which is you have to learn how to do the manual work before you can leverage technology and process to scale it. In the same context of customer research and development sure use Typeform, use SurveyMonkey and get a thousand inputs but if you don’t know how to construct effective questions, then all you’ve done is sent a thousand bad questions out. Practice talking to people first.

Joe: Absolutely, I think that most product managers and there’s a lot of flavors of product manager, there’s certainly technical product managers who maybe don’t need to interface out there with customers as much but most product managers are people-people, they like talking to people. I love talking to people and that’s one of the attributes of great product managers is that they’re not afraid to go out there and just have a conversation, to stop somebody walking down the street and ask them about the product that they’re holding in their hand what they like about it and what they hate about it and why they bought it and what else they considered.

That’s even when it’s not your product that’s in their hand, it’s somebody else’s. It just helps you understand the psychology that underpins all of the decisions about what to use, what to buy, how to use it, when to stop using something and change?

That to me now going on 15 years later is probably some of the stuff that interests me the most. I’ve read all of the books I could find on project management and product management and how to implement processes that aren’t overly cumbersome, that are efficient and timely, how to build processes that don’t exist or improve ones that do, how to do the blocking and tackling for product management.

I’ve read a lot of great books over the years and now what I really get excited about is the information and lessons to be learned that are maybe a couple of steps removed from direct product management but yet have such influence and such impact on it like what makes things popular, why do things get trendy. It’s that fine balancing act between things that are familiar and yet innovative at the same time but not too innovative and not too familiar. You have to strike that perfect balance and now I look to try and apply some of that to what I do as a product manager in my role today.

Suzanne: You talked about resources extensively, either from the canon of classic product management, books or ideas or in this newer terrain that you’re describing of psychology based, anything that you want to contribute to our ever-growing list of I say books, blogs, podcasts anything that you think is interesting and worthwhile for our listeners?

Joe: Find and consume every magazine and piece of trade publication for the industry that you’re in. I try and actually carve out almost an hour everyday just to read what’s going on in my industry, whether that’s going to Alder or CrunchBase and reading about the comings and goings of people and press releases for the industry that I’m in or reading something from Forester, IDC or Gartner to understand what the analysts think about the industry that I happen to be in.

The classics Haines and Steve Blank and Steve Jobs and so many of the other thought leaders in the industry have put out. Product managers you’re so lucky today, 20 years ago, there was nothing that you could read on good product management yet. It was a little ahead of its time maybe still then but now you can open Amazon and go to the book section and type in product management and there’s more material there than you could probably ever realistically read in a lifetime.

Pickup things that seem interesting to you. I just finished reading a book by an author named Derek Thompson called Hit Makers last week and it touches on something I just mentioned, which is why do things get popular, what makes for a hit whether it is a fashion trend or whether it’s a new piece of electronics or whether it’s something maybe even larger scale than that like a change towards renewable energy versus fossil fuels?

In that book, he does a fantastic job of helping people understand that it is a balancing act between things that aren’t scary, that seem similar to other products that they’ve used or other trends that they’ve followed and yet also have this edge of innovation to them. Where’s it’s obviously progressive, it’s not been done before and yet isn’t so innovative that it’s scary and unfamiliar.

Those are lesson that I’m trying to apply to ThreatSTOP where I am now because we do have a very innovative product. In fact, maybe too innovative sometimes. Solving some real problems but doing it in a way that is maybe unexpected for some people. Trying to find that balance where maybe we can make it a little more familiar to get the adoption that we need but also keep the innovation to solve the problem from a technical standpoint in a better way than it’s being solved currently is hitting the sweet spot where I’ll have another home run.

Suzanne: I love your approach, I love listening to you speak, I’m mindful that we probably need to wrap it up here. One last question before we go Joe, is there a personal mantra or a professional mantra something that a little bit of wisdom that you use to guide yourself in the world that you want to leave me and our listeners with before we go?

Joe: One of my mantras is and this goes for my life as well as my career is the golden rule of understanding others, understanding where they come from, understanding what makes them happy, what makes them unhappy, trying to put yourself in their shoes with almost every decision that you’re going to make that is going to ultimately impact them as a user or a customer of your product or your service. If you can continually think and focus on why you’re doing this and who you’re doing it for as a product manager, you’ll find that you rarely go wrong. The only replacement or improvement for that is actually asking and talking them.

Suzanne: A friend of mine used to say the golden rule is treat others as you would like to be treated but the platinum rule is treat others as they would like to be treated and it sounds like-

Joe: It's a great saying.

Suzanne: That’s what you bring to your life to your product management role. Obviously, you’ve been successful. Thank you for being here on the show, really appreciate it.

Joe: Thank you for having me.