The Queen of No

Kasha: A lot of times in tech, and I've been on both sides and I think because I came from an art background where visually it was what is your ascetic, what does it look like, what are you trying, I mean constantly it was like what message, what are you trying to translate, what does your art mean, what is your voice. So even though I'm not necessarily putting a photograph or a painting together, I still think about that product in that term because someone is going to look at it that was not connected to it that may not read the copy, that may not follow the instructions, that may miss the navigation bar, and all these things, and what does it mean to them. They're the whole reasons. A lot of times we can get very in love with ourselves, that we're technologists and that we're driving the future and that people are beholden to us.

I can see both sides of it and I think it's pretty funny because at the end of the day I'm like "I building a website or a app that I could also kill a month or two from now if it does horrible or terrible." I want that person to be excited about it or be interested and play with it just like I would, so the consumer is my focus. I think about that more probably than anything and I'm definitely, I hate to say like all these cliché like user centric, but I think about them because I have to remove myself because when you work in tech you can become extremely biased and especially when you work so close to it and you work with designers and everybody's patting themselves on the back. Then when you get that first round of analytics reports and you realize that nobody's using it and then you have to start putting the pieces together-

Suzanne: That's product management right there. "Oh guess what, we actually don't have any user and spent the last three months arguing about what color magenta the background should be."

Kasha: The background was going to be and if this button was going to be to the left or right. That is what, I mean product management to me if I really peel back all the layers is personality management. I do have a product to deliver, but I'm dealing with all these big teams characteristically some big personalities, especially coming from entertainment, and everybody thinks that they know best what's for the project and I have to kind of be the voice of reason. I don't want to call myself mama, but sometimes I'm like "Okay. Let me hear what did this one do? What did that one do? Okay, yes. I understand." There's a level of diplomacy that comes along with that because even though I'm definitely user-centric and I'm design, I can be on Behance day and just falling in love with people's portfolios and looking at cool fonts and color designs and animations - I have to think about does this make sense. Would this user know, like a friend of mine who works in insurance she has no clue about any of this stuff or nor should she. She just has a goal that she wants to use this and she's trying to accomplish it and if she's distracted by the design then that's a fail to me. I don't care how much I love it, I don't care much the designer is, so that's a hard place to be in but it's also the place that I'd rather be than so in love with myself that none of my products are successful.

Suzanne: In my product management class we do a lot of hands on activities. The learning is the doing. I always like to add a layer where within every activity, there has to be an appointed product manager. The students are at once, learning the concept, whatever we might be focusing on in that particular class, but then they're also, I think, learning the real job which is now you have a bunch of people. They're all talented. They all have different backgrounds and they all think they're the most right. Maybe you also think you're the most right and your job is this integration piece. That mama and also having to tell somebody no.

Kasha: I'm the queen of no. At first I was afraid and then now I just I feel like I should have a sign in my office, "Come in so I can say no." Then that's a whole other issue when you get further along in your career because it's like now when you hear anything, the word no appears in my head before, because I'm so driven to launch. I love to listen to people, because I like to listen and just understand what they're really saying. I know that I don't know everything and if I do then there's a problem. If I hear something that doesn't make sense or isn't necessarily for the product, whether it's from a resource or financial, but there's something there that I'm like, "You know what? This is not necessarily, I don't agree 100% with the idea, but I can take this into evaluation." A lot of times people just want to feel like they're contributing to the pot.

Especially in a tech place and coming from entertainment where you have marketing teams that, not even really sure how this gets made. Sometimes they live in this idea that we just press a button and it happens. Then I have developers that they want to feel empowered and not just feel like they're meeting requirements and then cranking out code for something that they're not even connected to. I like to listen and hear all of that, but then I still have to make that decision at the end of the day based off my experience, based off my gut, based of analytics, based off of what the business need is. Does this make sense for the product? Is this right? If I say no today, doesn't mean that it can't be a yes in the backlog.

Suzanne: That's just what you tell people so they don’t feel so bad when you say no to them for the hundredth time.

Kasha: Yes.

Suzanne: There was something that you told me that kind of stuck with me and I'm hoping you'll speak about it here with respect to working at a product place and having this question of "Can I really do this job if I don't use this product. If I don't love this product, if I don't think it's cool." Talk about your point of view on that.

Kasha: A lot of times, and I'm a thinker and I can analyze all day long until the cows come home, but some of the basic questions when I'm building out a product, even just when someone comes to me and they're like, "Hey, we want to update the app. We need the app to do X, X, Y and Z and then I might ask, "What's driving this? Are there user complaints?" Especially if it's an established project or if it's completely new and they're like, "I want to see dragons come out the desktop and shake my hand and tell me to watch this television show." I wish that was a fake request, but-

Suzanne: That's a true project you're speaking about.

Kasha: Yeah. I have to sit there and then I'll listen and everything, but I think about this because I'm creative. I want to be like the queen of cool. I just think, "Is this cool Kasha? If you didn't work here, would you touch this? Would you care? Would you be invested?" That's a hard place to be in because a lot of times maybe the answer is no, but that's okay because then I'm like, "I'm not necessarily the demo." I still have to think in the mindset of someone who maybe is less tech savvy, maybe who's just trying to get their footing together. Maybe is trying to get ready for a family reunion or a high school reunion or whatever it is. Take myself out of it. It can't always be the coolest, shiniest thing in the world, but I can also put a little bit of those finishing touches in the design that make it feel like it's a product that I would be proud of and that I would want to use. If I have this problem, is this one of the contenders that I would like to use?

It's hard sometimes when you're being driven, especially in entertainment coming from that world, where these ideas were coming from a department head and they don't know how technology works, but they know that they want this thing and you have to do it. That's when it gets hard and you have to go to a designer and explain this idea that really doesn't make any sense and then you're going to have to make sense of it. That is product management 101 in my book. I take very little information, probably no kind of end result and then make it malleable and make it into a product, into a viable product. That's what I do. A lot of times I do think, "Would I use this? Is this fun for me?" I go back and forth where I'm like, "Okay. This is not about me. This is about what I'm committed to for the consumer."

Suzanne: Right. I think it's a lesson for all would be and maybe current product managers out there. This is not the role if you want it to be all about you, because it's actually not all about you. It's all about wrangling the different people and getting them to be bought in or we talked about recently rowing all together as a team. If you want it to be all about you, you should be the founder.

Kasha: Right. That's okay. That's okay to say that, but a lot of times I'm riling the team. I have to keep, especially when I've come from big teams and then come to smaller teams where it's more of a startup environment where you can see the dev going off to one side or you see everyone frustrated. Part of my role, which is not written in the job description, it's not on the wall, is I want this product to deliver and if I need to rile my troops up to get it done, then that's what I need to get done. "Hey. We've had some roadblocks, we're going to do this." A big part of any products or things that I've seen, especially when a launch is going off the tracks and there's more code problems, and there's more bugs than you would ever want to imagine, you have to be that clear vision. You have to be that leader and you have to be that voice of reason that's telling people that it's going to get done even if you're not fully yourself that it is, but you still have to ... That's when I get back to owning the product. You have to own it, because that's what I'm going to deliver and you have to make those critical decisions like what can I live with if this goes out to launch and what can I realistically fix.

Suzanne: You're not in entertainment anymore.

Kasha: No. Let go of entertainment.

Suzanne: Let go of entertainment. We're here. We're at Beachbody.

Kasha: Yes, we're at Beachbody.

Suzanne: I could just spend the rest of the conversation saying Beachbody. Tell our listeners, first of all, we're actually at Beachbody on Demand.

Kasha: Yes. We are.

Suzanne: Tell our listeners who might not be familiar, just super quickly, what is Beachbody and then what is Beachbody on Demand.

Kasha: Beachbody, if you know any of our fitness programs, we're a lifestyle brand. We are the creators of several programs for libraries for consumers wanting to work out or a direct response company. You might have seen us in our infomercials. That's how we became our namesake, Beachbody. We create programs such as P90X, Insanity, T25. We have a slew of super trainers. Tony Horton is probably our most recognizable.

Suzanne: I just saw him at the airport. I was like, "I think that's Tony Horton." I really wanted to just get up in there, but I thought no. It's funny because it wasn't here in LA. It was in Toronto. I was just going back to visit and then I found out he was there doing an event. That was my big celebrity moment. So many celebrities in LA. I'm like, "There's Tony Horton."

Kasha: We're a billion dollar company, billion dollar revenue generating company. It's been an amazing journey for me to get here. What started probably about 2 years ago was Beachbody on Demand, which was to take our library and our catalog and create a streaming service. In some ways we want to be able to service our consumers as obviously tangible video items become more and more obsolete and the market is changing. We want to have a streaming service that keeps up with people that want to work out daily, that want to change their workouts, that want to have flexibility and also want to test out new products. That's the team that I'm part of which is Beachbody on Demand which in West Lake Village.

Suzanne: Have you been here ... Because the product is fairly new.

Kasha: Yes, it is.

Suzanne: When did you launch?

Kasha: We launched, I want to say about a year and a half ago.

Suzanne: Were you part of the team?

Kasha: I wasn't part of the team. It was a small team. It was probably about, I want to say, a dozen people and our CEO which is Bill Bradford came. He actually is a former Fox, Vice President for Fox.com and he started this division at Beachbody On Demand. They started simply with just having a few of the program libraries, video player and we've grown out the product and we're growing it everyday and making it more reliable, more user friendly to better serve our community.

Suzanne: I'm a customer.

Kasha: Yes, yay.

Suzanne: Just want you to know. I'm a relatively new customer because I didn't actually know-

Kasha: That it existed.

Suzanne: Yeah, is that on purpose?

Kasha: It was a soft launch. We definitely offered it if you had purchased a package through DVD, you could opt in. There were certain digital marketing campaigns. One of the things that are challenges is people know the products, they may not know the brand Beachbody. They know Tony Horton, or they know Shawn Tee or they know Autumn. They don't know necessarily that we're part of a global product. We're part of a global brand. That's one of the things as we work on just having so many products out there, that we're streamlining everything under into one uniformed brand.

Suzanne: What's interesting is Beachbody on Demand is in some way, it's its own product.

Kasha: Yes it is.

Suzanne: You have your own office. You're way far away from Beachbody.

Kasha: We're run like a startup.

Suzanne: You run like a startup, but there's a vision for this product. There's a roadmap for this product and at the same time, there's so much legacy with the other brand. How is it negotiating ... When you're a startup, most of the time, it's this is our new idea. This is what we're doing. You guys are sort of inheriting a bunch of legacy bits and saying, "Make this work in a new configuration.”

Kasha: Right, and it's definitely, it's a big challenge, because you have all these legacy APIs. You have all these legacy protocol and processes that does not necessarily support us for our vision. We have to ... What we always talk about is our technical debt. We have hired some very smart people to figure this out and as much as I'm like, "Pull the plug and start from a clean slate," that's not always the best in a business that has five or six years of these kind of systems that are dependent on each other or this goes here. We're taking it piece by piece to integrate it, but still at the same time continue on to make sure that we hit our product goals. Sometimes we have to scale back or we have to put a pin in stuff, just because we have to wait for other infrastructures to either catch up or they have to be augmented or they have to be sunset themselves.

Suzanne: With a product that's live in market and I'm talking a little bit about road mapping here, you get to a big launch. You're out. What is the sprint planning rhythm here? Are you immediately going to kind of the backlog, and then starting to work on refinements and new features or is there a defined period of let's just do nothing and collect some date for awhile? How continuous is the integration, I guess is the question?

Kasha: For my products, I will speak, I launched a reality, Beachbody also launched a reality show a few weeks ago and we're in episode nine and ten right now.

Suzanne: Wait, what's the format?

Kasha: I'm sorry.

Suzanne: Tell us about this. You are in entertainment.

Kasha: I am in entertainment again. I keep trying to hold that back, but it doesn't go away. We launched a site called thetwenties.com. The premise is twenty trainers in their twenties competing to be the next Beachbody summer trainer.

Suzanne: The next Tony Horton.

Kasha: The next Tony Horton or the next Shawn T or the next Autumn. Yes, super fit people put in a house in Hollywood Hills, if you think of early Real World, and kind of cameras turned on them and a bit competition and seeing if they have the personality and what it takes to be part of the brand.

Suzanne: Is that exclusive to Beachbody on Demand or where do people watch that?

Kasha: If that have cable and they have Pop TV they can watch it on Pop TV, which is former TV Guide Channel, and they can watch it exclusively on Beachbody on Demand. Every Monday is when we launch a new episode at 10 am.

Suzanne: Oh my God, who is going to be the next super trainer?

Kasha: Actually, October 17 the public, whether you've watched the episodes or not or done the workouts, it's open to vote on help us determine who's going to be the next super trainer when it's down to the final three. A little bit of my old voting American Idol in there and people can vote and see if they can pick who they would like, and they can vote up to five times a day and they can also hashtag a vote on Facebook.

Suzanne: So you created a reality TV show, but that's just one product within the ecosystem. You role is what, director of product management? You're the boss. You're a boss, you're somebody's boss.

Kasha: Right. Somebody's boss, yeah. It's yet to be to be determined. In the boss of me so that's a start.

Suzanne: That's the best boss to be.

Kasha: Yeah, exactly. That's the easiest one. I get assignments and I try to take, being from like I came from I was heavy in product management, then now transitioning to more of a director role and that's more in strategy side. From inception instead of being a project kind of handed to me and figure it out, now it's from the perspective of okay what is our strategy, what is the business goal of this, where does this fit into the product roadmap, and back to again does this make sense for our consumer based all of the QA testing that we've done.

One thing I did want to answer was that question about how do once something launches how quickly am I iterating. A lot of times I have, I'm a perfectionist at heart which can be a good and bad thing, a lot of times I have like a when you go through QA and you start getting down and down closer to launch, I have a set of books and I'm like "Okay. There is nothing as perfect, there's nothing as pixel perfect in my mind and there's never this sense of done" like "Oh, I'm done. That launch, don't ever have to worry about that again." After something launches I'm usually trying to fix the things that I couldn't get in before pre-launch and these may be things that necessarily wouldn't be a deal breaker from a consumer facing perspective, but they're just an enhancement from like a UX, they will just make this process smoother or maybe it's changing an alignment of a button or maybe it's smoothing out the flow on mobile.

So depending on what it is, I'm usually trying to get that into a sprint for the next two weeks. Then as we start to get analytics, that's when it's the real decision making and you have to put your product role hat on for real of what am I really going to fix at this point. Am I going to iterate on this product? Because part of this role is making those very hard decisions of I'm just going to let the baby be because the numbers are not matching and the level of effort it's not worth it to go back and keep cutting and preforming CPR on a site that's not preforming well.

Suzanne: Right, I mean that's such a hard thing talking about lean metrics. Even I'll use 100 pm as the example. We have very specific goals right now, and of course having a long tech background and the same, I wouldn't describe myself as a perfectionist but I care about design and I care about usability and I look at the site everyday and I think "oh, we really should reverse those buttons" or "We should do this thing" and then I have to remember that's not related to your primarily goal right now. That's a hard part, not tinkering with it and because it's not that it's not broken per se, it's just that it's not the most broken.

Kasha: Yes, and my thing that I'm always thinking it doesn't look right. At the end of the day I'm like "This looks terrible to me. Why can't I fix this." But I have these other things that are bigger fish to fry that I need to get done and it could be back end, it could be from an infrastructure, it could be from a CMS. That's another thing that I'm as much as I'm user-centric on the front end because I started in content distribution I'm kind of always leaning to that team that I want them to have the flexibility to do their job as easy as possible. If there's maintenance issues, if they're putting in content updates and they're not showing up on the site that's a problem to me versus changing the text size.

I have to make those decisions and then if the numbers are starting to get lower and lower, then I really have to make the decision am I going to fix this, is this something that we will reuse again or is this that hard pill to swallow, this was your four hundred fifty thousand dollar life lesson project. I've had those before and they're not fun, but they teach you so much more than the ones that are great and people are like blogging about or pinning to that maybe no necessarily even had anything to do with you but the product is so good or people or so interested in it, they'll just take the site or whatever integrated marketing or that came along with it.

Suzanne: How much is the feedback that your team, you and your team, are responding to coming from pure analytics versus customers? That's kind of part one, and I guess I'm curious about customer feedback in general in terms of are you going out and soliciting it or is it coming to you whether you want it or not?

Kasha: It's coming to us whether we want it or not. Our consumer base, which I'm very proud of and very proud of the organization. They're very vocal. They feel like the brand itself supports that. You have a voice. Let us know if we're not doing something right. People still call into customer service and that's how serious that the company takes it. A lot of the feedback, now this feedback could be from Beachbody on Demand, not necessarily a project that's related to me. If that feedback, we definitely have someone on QA. There's people that even answer complaints on Facebook, down to figuring out what is this user, what is their platform, did they make the iOS update that we pushed notification two days ago. We take all of those complaints seriously.

When it relates to a new product, for me I'm going to rely on the analytics if I don't have any fires like, "Hey, I've tried to watch this and the video player keeps crashing," or "I've tried to log in and it keeps crashing." If I don't have those type of urgent fires to put out, then I want to see what the numbers are doing. Are people even engaged in the site? Are they watching the videos? Is anyone sharing about this? That's when I start to, in my thought process, decide what are going to be my next steps? As far as am I going to reiterate on this, or am I just going to kind of leave the product as is?

Suzanne: That's an interesting point. How quickly is it, "Let's just watch conversions for a week. Oh man, we're not converting at the percentage we hoped." Then do you start going toward change, or do you say, "Well let's give it one more week." This is, I know, the job.

Kasha: I probably would say I want to see some type of activity at least in the first two to three weeks. Then I start to take myself out of this and of course it's my product, it's my baby. I want it to grow. I want it to do all these things, but how much marketing has been put behind this? Is this trending on any social platforms? Are we seeing a response or is it just likes from people that are actually on the show? If I start, if it's been a month and coming from television where they pull the cord so fast, you kind of get the sense if something's going to do well or not. If it hasn't picked up by that third episode, then the reality kind of sets in.

Suzanne: Everyone's getting letters in their mailbox. "You tried."

Kasha: Yeah or their emails or you start to see the placement of it just kind of shift from being in the first position closer to third or fourth or the rotation. Television is hard in any, especially for broadcast. Then to be a channel, a fitness platform and offering this. Which I think is a very cool and creative idea, but it's like we also have the struggle of people not being familiar with our brand but maybe they like reality shows, or maybe they are kind of hooked into the idea that there are these people in their 20s, and can they really do all of this stuff? Can they make it?

Suzanne: What kind of product manager are you in terms of skill sets? You were talking before about compressions and FTP. These are relatively technical, then maybe also not to somebody who is deeply technical. They're like, "Psh. FTP." When we talk about that blend of business acumen, design experience, technical marketing, all those things that can inform a product managers resume, what do your levels look like?

Kasha: They probably skew heavy on design and UX just because I still love that. I love tinkering. I love building stuff. I forced myself early in my career, for good or bad, I've had people tell me, "Oh, well, you're not going to understand that."

Suzanne: Really?

Kasha: Yeah, you're not going to understand that.

Suzanne: Do you think that's because you're a woman?

Kasha: I think that's because I am a woman, and I think it was because-

Suzanne: I'm going to flip a table.

Kasha: I think it's because it's easier to tell someone what they're not going to do, then take two minutes to explain what it is actually that you're asking for.

Suzanne: Queen of No, what did you do?

Kasha: I was kind of, I was like, "Oh my God." In my head, I was like, "I've been insulted. What do I do?" This was at a senior level. I thought, "Okay." I thought, "Maybe they're right. They're right today, but they're not going to be right tomorrow. They're certainly not going to be right two months from now." I am very resourceful. I know how to use Google.

Suzanne: She can get in a forum like you would not believe.

Kasha: I can get in a forum, get in a Slack chat, AskADev, "Help me understand this from a basic principle," because a lot of what I do in my role is explaining what the process is or what the product is to people who have requested it, but don't even understand, or even know what it's going to do. They know they want this thing, but they're not even really sure what they want or how it's going to work. The biggest role is that I have to be able to communicate with everyone from a senior tech lead all the way to someone who's maybe just a brand coordinator. They're just like, "Hey, I just want to see from a social standpoint would this be possible.

I never discount anybody's ability to understand something. I have had people tell me, "You won't understand." I took it upon myself to learn and figure it out. For a long time, I was in content, when I started at Disney with ABC.com I was in content management. I had come from Pros Production so I'm used to compressing files and queuing stuff and the CMS was archaic. It was a nightmare and I just couldn't understand if you look at the hierarchy and by the time it gets to this content producer, they're the last ones on the totem pole, but yet they have the most important role and they're tools are ineffective. I just wondered, "Why did they build it this way." I'm sitting there asking questions, thinking to myself like, "Why is it built this way? Why does it have to be so difficult," because when something breaks, the content producer is the first one that has to hear about it. Whether it was them or not. They have all of this responsibility but they have some of the worst tool sets to do their job.

I took that with me, even though I transitioned into product, that I want to make that person who's doing that, who doesn't necessarily have to be tech savvy, but they know that they have to fulfill a role of getting the content posted and launched by a certain time. That should be the easiest thing and then they can focus on managing multiple sites or managing other platforms. Yes, I've had people tell me no and that I wouldn't understand. That's okay. When someone tells you that, you should thank them. Then you should prove to them through your success that they will never say no to you again.

Suzanne: Do you keep a little scratch paper. It's like checking your drawer every once in awhile. "Oh yeah. That guy."

Kasha: I try not to hold on to too much stuff because then I don't want to be bitter and I don't want to block the stuff that I need to focus on. It definitely goes back in a bookmark where I'm like, "Mmmm that was interesting. I wonder why they said that." Then as you go further along in your career, you may have people tell you no or that you come from this background or this skill set. APIs are still kind of a foggy place for me. I don't necessarily want to build APIs and I don't want to always be involved in ERDs and figuring out entity flows.

Suzanne: So many acronyms in product. I had a student in my class whose product, we do, the task is to conceive a product and sort of build it out coming through to the end of the product was essentially an encyclopedia of product management acronyms.

Kasha: Then sometimes I'm in a meeting and I'm like, "I have no idea what they just said." Sometimes people use the technical language to keep the information and to keep their importance even if they're not necessarily what they're saying is true. You have to understand the language. You don't have to understand, I don't want to go back and start inspecting and reading code and looking for reading each line of code, but I want to have an understanding that I can have a conversation with a dev and that they know that I'm serious and that I'm involved in it. Not from a dictatorship like, "Do this now," but that, "Hey, let me understand what you're saying." We always deal in truth and logic and code, help me understand what is the blocker.

Suzanne: It's so interesting because in large part that's part of the classic IT guy troupe of "You're not going to understand," and using technology as a barrier. They can still be even without that troupe, that can still be a barrier to working with developers. There's almost this club of "Show me how serious you are, Kasha, that you actually want to know what my world is." The flip side of that, which you brought up, is the protectiveness of things which I think speaks to ... It's also a cultural kind of indicator that there's a sense of if I hold on to this, then I'll be important instead of being an environment that allows you to feel safe and important as part of the team. How do you as a leader foster that kind of community aside from the gym here. This is a true story about Beachbody that you guys are more or less mandated to work out. Not like you have to be fit, but take a minute. Enjoy our-

Kasha: Yeah, take a minute. Enjoy our gym. Enjoy some Shakeology and know the products. Know the programs that we create here. It's not mandatory, but it's definitely encouraged. You have the option to do that. If you chose not to, no one will frown upon you. It definitely becomes a family atmosphere. You get into sync and you find yourself working out at least a couple times a week.

Suzanne: What about beyond the gym and the Shakeology, what is part of your fostering community.

Kasha: I feel like it's better to have friends than enemies. Early on I'm a very social person, which is kind of, I noticed in my career, a little bit different than the typical tech personality. I definitely like to get in there and know something personal. Not personal where I know the person's life story, but "What is driving you? Why are you here? What is the best part of this project that you want to work on?" It doesn't always work. Devs are devs. Sometimes you can have great relationships and other times you don't. I have an obligation to my consumers, to the business case, to the product to get the best that I can. However I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that. I like a lot of one on one. We have Slack, we have Jira. We have so many means of communication.

Suzanne: You have Slack and Hipchat?

Kasha: Some teams are on-

Suzanne: All the cool kids are on one-

Kasha: Everyone else is like, "I didn't get the invite for Slack."

Suzanne: We worked with Hipchat for a long time. We just finally moved to Slack. It's just interesting. If Atlassian is listening in, there might be an opportunity to understand why are they leaking customers, because it's a good product, Hipchat.

Kasha: It is. I think Slag took off and it became a cool factor. I think it has that cool factor too.

Suzanne: We all just want to be with the quota.

Kasha: We always want to sit with the cool kids. With devs, I make it my personality that I'm here for the devs too. Just like I'm here for design and probably that's why I probably spend a lot of hours in meetings, but I want them to know I'm the face of this product. This is my project, but I want to hear from you. A lot of times, again, part of your role is campaigning and you're politicking inside of your own organization. I think those are the keys that they don't teach you when you're ... No one really taught me product management. It was like, "Here's this project, go figure it out." A lot of times, people were saying, "Analytics, that's too heavy. We have a whole team for that. Don't worry about it. You wouldn't understand it."

Suzanne: Stop saying that.

Kasha: That's okay, because that's that person's issue. It's not my issue, but I don't have to let it be my barrier. I can take that information, and I'm going to be like, "You know what? I may not understand it, but try me. I want to sit down and understand what does this mean when you're saying this tag goes to here and this campaign ID." If you hear something long enough, it's going to start to sink in. I would never let a technical term, whether it's coming from a developer, analytics, I would never let something like that stop me. Just like I wouldn't let a personality of someone that's cut off or who wants to just be in code all day, stop me from having a relationship with them.

Suzanne: You're going to force them.

Kasha: I probably am.

Suzanne: You describe this as a startup, but there's a lot of people here. How big is this company?

Kasha: We're about, I think, about 65 people in the West Lake.

Suzanne: How many in your kind of immediate team?

Kasha: In my immediate team we have about, three directors and an executive director and then two product managers.

Suzanne: Wow.

Kasha: Pretty big.

Suzanne: This is the other thing about product management is the landscape will be very different. How many people you have as direct collaborators, how many designers or developers you actually have at your disposal to work with, to get things done, how much of that work you're also doing as well as being responsible for the strategy. We talk a lot about the distinction between product management and project management is project management is tactical. Product management is strategic, but a lot of the times, you kind of have to be in both. That's hard.

Kasha: It is hard. We were definitely lean here. When I started I didn't have a project manager. I also came from an environment at Fox where you didn't always get, it was like the luck of the draw and that maybe that project manager that you were allocated didn't, we all have different styles of management. I'm very OCD. I want to know what's going on. I want to see my roadmap. I want to see a confluence page. Whatever bells and whistles that I need to make me feel good about the status updates, I want to see that. Not everybody, someone maybe more casual or maybe they like to be more connected to the engineers. It really just depends. If you know a little bit of all those hats, you can wear them at any time. I feel like here, I'm the captain of my own ship. I may not necessarily know what every single engineer is doing, but I should at least have an idea and I should have an idea of the overall status of the project. If I get a great project manager then more the merrier. I can let that off my plate.

I always think of product as I'm focused on the product delivery, where the project manager's focused overall holistically. I'm focused on this individual feature set, but that project manager is there to make sure that we work together to make sure that all the features are delivered. That's kind of how I like to run when I work with a project manager. I don't necessarily always want to be giving them tasks that I can't do, but I'm like "Hey, be the eyes that I don't have. Be the stuff looking for the stuff that's two steps ahead of us. If we're going to deployment, is everything ready on the branch release." Those are the kind of things that I see project fall in to, because those are always the things that I'm always running behind like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. "Oh, did I do that? Did I say in the Jira ticket that it was approved." Then if I have that project manager that's communicating out to that other team, that offshore team, then it just allows me to then go back out to the brand teams and communicate them to let them know and they feel reassured and we're all looped in to the process.

That takes time and it takes definitely finding your stride and finding the right personality match to do that, because I definitely can get in a silo where I want to go off and do wire frames and I want to write requirements. Then there's all these other little-

Suzanne: I think you're the first person in product management in history that said on the record, "I just want to hole up in my office and write requirements all day long."

Kasha: I used to hate it. I will say, I used to hate it, because it's like, "Oh we got to go and do this thing and I'm going to whiteboard it. Everybody likes to put a cape on and think that they're a superhero." Then when you actually have to write it, it forces you to think. Again, I'm going to say coming from a creative background, I write stories and I make people up. If I was in a place where we had personas and we had done some type of character imaging then that's great. A lot of times, I'm just thinking, "Who is this person that's coming here? What does she look like? What's motivating her?" Then that helps me, even if it's obviously fictional, but it helps me tell the story about what this user experiences and the why behind it.

Suzanne: But that is personas. When you say if we had it, is that because ... This is kind of another thing that comes up a lot is the difference between what we would all do in every product company if we were playing 100% by the book or books versus what we actually have to compromise and sometimes that's we don't have the time or the resources.

Kasha: I don't have the resources like having a fully flushed out persona. My personas are definitely more fictional just based off, I might have a light demo that we skew higher for women that are 30 to 45.

Suzanne: I'm in your demo?

Kasha: Yay.

Suzanne: Taking care of my needs.

Kasha: I know that we skew higher with women, then my user story, I'm going to make her female. I'm going to give her a name and maybe I just have a vision of why she's watching the show. It's not necessarily fictional as far as like, okay the numbers are there but I don't necessarily have the pinpoint of the geographic or how many times this user has come in. We collect that data, but do we have the product support to go in and then with analytics investigate and then create these personas. We're not at that point, but the framework is there. In the meantime I still have projects that I have to write requirements for. For me, it just, if I put myself in that place as that user it just helps it flow about what I'm trying to do. It takes out all the fancy bells and whistles. I should be able to explain it in a couple of sentences what I am trying to accomplish.

Suzanne: What you're user is trying to -

Kasha: Yep, that's right.

Suzanne: One of the things for us here at 100 PM is our promise, our value proposition. We hope is get the job, learn the job, love the job. We're trying to inspire people to come join us in product management. We're trying to inspire people who are in it to not feel so alone or in this idea that they're not doing it right. Let's talk about those starting with get the job. What advice would you offer for somebody, maybe somebody's listening in going, "I would like to go and work at Beachbody on Demand, because that sounds amazing," and they've got to eventually get through you. What should they do to be a great candidate?

Kasha: A great candidate, I would say research our current products, be honest. I love it when people bring critical feedback and are honest with me about it because that's what I get paid to do is to figure out the wholes and the problems, but also besides just telling me the problems, show me how you think. That's the biggest thing. We can all do process. We can all get into Jiro. We can write user requirements. Some of us can even wire frame, front end, back end, whatever. I don't get a sense of who you are if I don't know how you think. What's the motivation behind how you would resolve things. Also, have personality. A lot of this is people management and personality management. How would you solve something when someone tells you no? I'm usually the decision maker in some ways, but then I have a boss too. If he tells me no, okay, well am I going to fight for this or am I going to figure it out. If someone on another team tells me no, or they just refuse to do it, how do I navigate through that?

That's the skill set that I really want to see. I can definitely teach someone or they can grow into managing the product the way that they feel is best suited for them to get to their goal, but how do they really resolve problems and their personal conflicts? Do they get involved? How do they grow their network? I have people that I've worked with, devs that I [inaudible 00:54:27] they love because we figured out problems offline, after hours because we're just constantly cranking and pushing. You have to kind of be in it from a passion standpoint to do that. It's not just "Oh, I gave you requirements, go. I threw it over the fence, get it done.

Suzanne: I share the sentiment entirely. Hard skills, many of them can be taught, but soft skills, certain soft skills really can make or break you. I think confidence, by the way, is one in this business because of all of the different people that you're steering. Are there hard skills, if I were saying to you, "Okay. I'm already good at all that stuff. People, no problem. I can navigate any conflict." Are there some deal breaker hard skills that it's like, "You're not ready for this job."

Kasha: Right. I would definitely say you should have some sense of technical workflow of understanding how websites are built, understanding process. Every organization has different process. We call ourselves agile, our version of agile here. Also, having a certain level of personal organization. A lot of times, I'm connecting the dots. I'm connecting people and being able to handle multiple problems at a time and also being able to make a decision maker. Just because someone is at a project management level, doesn't mean that they're not making decisions. How are you going to actually drive the product. If you know code, that's always helpful. I would never turn away someone that knew code and if they knew some type of basic design. Photoshop is a pretty given would be helpful. I'm trying to think of ... I feel like if I had to peel back what is it I actually do, I'm like, "Wow, what would be the ..." They don't necessarily have to have a web background, but I'm always fascinated when people come from different industries. Especially if they come from design or if they want to get into this. What's the driver for it.

Suzanne: Having a why. Why do you want to be in product?

Kasha: Yeah, why do you want to be in product. I got into product because it was frustrating with the tools that I was using. I had no idea that it was going to grow into what it is, where I am today. At the time, I was just like, "I want to know how this works." I was tired of people telling me that I-

Suzanne: You were spiting, you were learning out of spite.

Kasha: I was like, "No. What do you mean no I won't understand."

Suzanne: For learning on the job, for you personally, what's the hardest lesson that you had to learn on the job or a skill that you kind of came right up against and thought, "Well, I need to bolster that."

Kasha: Definitely it was backend and architecting on the CMS. I definitely had an understanding of fields and mapping and that kind of thing, but I didn't understand, ironically from an image asset from compressing when you have all of these listed in a field and you're adding all these images that basically it increases the page of the form and it just causes more problems and connecting to APIs. I was pretty in my stride of just working on multiple projects with my head down and not really having that space to think and not necessarily having guidance. I remember on one project, and this was just like a marketing to kind of announce that we were in this OTT space and devices.

It was this one project and it wasn't going well. I could not figure out. I just like was in a box. I couldn't figure out and understand what the devs were talking, the project, the scrum master. None of it was making sense. We essentially got to launch and we got to launch. It wasn't great. It was late. Just to create this one series of to manage devices which was a promotional. It wasn't even actually managing. It was like to tell people, "Hey, you can watch this on your device." It was something like 48 assets. That was a big pill for me to swallow because it never occurred to me that I should be auto-sizing down or that I should have it in one image source. It was like in my face. Everybody was looking at this form and they were like, "Why did you build it this way?" I did not have an answer. I just was like, "Well, I counted for all the images." In my efforts to just go, go, go and push the product and make launch into this date, I lacked the thinking part of the whole operational standpoint of does this make sense.

That was one of the most frustrating lessons, but it was one of those things that now when I build something it's like, "What are we going to do with the images," because then it takes longer for the page to load. That's longer, harder on the devices." Even though some of the are specific and Roku has different ones and Samsung ... To be all these things. If you're not thinking strategically and logically even when you're building something, it's like you're shooting yourself in the foot before you even got out the door. That was one of the really hard lessons that I had to learn. Then I had to go back and fix it, because it was my bed and I had to lay in it. That was my project to swallow that I had to figure out.

Suzanne: How do you ... That's a very specific, applicable certainly in your background and what you're doing here. The problem is you don't know what you don't know. Is it just what's the advice there? Is there advice there?

Kasha: I think the advice there is, don't be so gungho to get to launch that you're making decisions that are going to hurt you in the long run. All I was concentrated on was getting to launch. If I had consulted maybe a senior product manager or even consulted some of the devs, the one thing that I have noticed with devs is that they may not say anything but if you ask them, then they have a whole bunch to say. I had to be the driver in that. My advice would be when I'm seeing these things that I kind of was fuzzy. I was just like, "Well that's going to be a lot of images." Then I kind of was like, "But no one said anything. I need to get to launch. I guess it will be okay." In some magical world in my mind, I thought it would just be okay.

It's just like when we have bugs and you're like, "Those bugs will go away. They'll be okay," but stuff doesn't go away. You have to confront it. If you don't know it, speak up. Ask someone. Even if it's not necessarily your direct report that can handle, that goes back to the whole thing about building your network. Sometimes in organizations a lot of people may not have your back. You may have to have a resource outside just to pick someone's brain and be like, "Hey. I want to bounce something off your head. Does this make sense? It feels a little bit fuzzy to me. I need help." At one point in my career, I just was afraid to ask because I was always like, "Nope. I got this. Project management 101. I'm doing it." I had this little checkbox, but I didn't necessarily think of the bigger picture.

Suzanne: What about falling in love with what you do. You love your job.

Kasha: Yes, I do.

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