There's Always Going to be Someone Smarter

Liam: I started with Gannett at a little affiliate in Burlington, Vermont, called The Burlington Free Press, one of actually the oldest newspapers in the United States. Also, when I joined, it was right around in 2010, so it was right after a huge market crash, specifically where newspapers lost a ton of market cap. Their subscription revenue was way down. People were not advertising. We had the shift of where people were reading content online instead of through the traditional legacy newspapers. It was a really interesting time for a new person to come in and then have different ideas.

One of the struggles was, how do you monetize the exceptional content that’s being produced by these local journalists all across the United States? One of those ideas was to sell products and services directly, add an e-commerce style feature or functionality to the websites that had … Gannett reaches over two-thirds of the Internet audience in the United States every month. Lots of eyeballs. Let’s monetize it through products. We ideated that, and through school I had some background in basic tech, basic backend dev. We were able to build a platform that essentially syndicated content from different manufacturers of products to these different eyeballs, and do that all automatically. Basically, we’d take your personal attributes, your browsing history. We serve you relevant products, might make you likely to buy that product. Ultimately, we controlled the supply chain from routing that order to a supplier, and ultimately getting it to your door.

It was an idea. We brainstormed it. We did it in Burlington. Worked really well. Generated a ton of revenue. The next question was, how do you make that a national product. The rest is history. At the end, it generated over $50 million of transactional revenue for the Gannett Company. That was the entry into product management.

Suzanne: What an entry.

Liam: A lot of times, people say product managers have to be entrepreneurial. In this case, it was really intrapreneurial. You’re taking somebody else’s money, and you got to show them that it’s a good risk to take to fund this idea, and actually how are they going to extract value from that.

Suzanne: On that first pilot project … You talk about having basic tech skills, basic backend dev. Was it as rootsy as “Hey, I did some coding in school. Maybe I could whip this thing up,” or did you guys actually get the project architected and put together more formally.

Liam: Yeah, definitely. I did all the requirements and the basic UI, the wire frames and whatnot. Then it was just mapping out the … We used this API called Ecom Hub. Ecom Hub essentially can take in orders from different e-commerce platforms and then supply them to drop shippers, then obviously send shipping confirmations and things like that. We leveraged that technology stack. We integrated with that. I think it would have been difficult for a non-technical person to do, because you would have to identify the right technologies. You would have to identify the right platforms that you’re going to use. You sort of have to do a build vs. buy analysis. I think it definitely helped to have a semi-tech background.

Suzanne: I feel like you’re either understating what you mean when you say basic tech …

Liam: I could do basic ‘Rails.

Suzanne: Okay. You’re talking about … It’s not just UX, UI. We’re talking about software architecture. We’re talking about server integrations and all of these pieces. Maybe let me put this a different way. How much did you already know going in, and how much were you just learning on the fly and not maybe exposing that.

Liam: I think there was a ton that I had to learn, but I think I had a strong fundamentals in computer engineering, too, to make that happen. To say that I knew everything that I needed to … I think one thing that you’ll find in product management is, you’re never necessarily a master of everything. There’s always going to be a team of engineers that are way smarter than you. There’s always going to be a team of marketers that knows so much more than you. There’s always going to be a finance person that tells you how you’re not depreciating an asset correctly. It’s definitely … I think one of the things, being a product manager, it’s humbling because you constantly are surrounded by people that are smarter than you and that know their domains better than you. It’s really, how do you take all of those components, aggregate them to make something happen. In that case, I think I was a catalyst to do that.

Suzanne: The translation component … This is something that I talk a lot about with my students is, you have to be a master translator. Developers and marketers do not speak the same language. They don’t even like to be in the same room with each other half the time.

Liam: They communicate in completely different ways. Often, they mean the same things. It just doesn’t translate.

Suzanne: Total Loyalty Solutions. This is your new baby that you’re … What does the company do?

Liam: Total Loyalty Solutions is a B2B software as a service that makes mobile apps for primarily small- and medium-sized businesses. Total Loyalty was founded at the Gannett Company, fully funded. Our parent company at Gannett, Gannett Digital Ventures, sold the assets of the company to Valassis, which is a $2.2 billion direct-mail company owned by Ronald Perelman, a billionaire activist investor. Total Loyalty, what it does is, a lot of times, small- and medium-sized businesses spend a lot of money acquiring new customers. They’re out doing broadcast television ads. They’re spending a little bit of money in Google ad words. Probably if they’re smart, they have some investments in social media, expanding their reach through those channels. What Total Loyalty does, is it enables them to bring the customers back for additional visits. We use custom mobile apps with rewards programs and different types of content to essentially game-ify the experience of users to bring them back.

Suzanne: Is an ideal customer a retail or CPG type of business? Who benefits the most from leveraging Total Loyalty?

Liam: The types of businesses that will benefit from a mobile app are those with a high purchase frequency. You’re looking at types of businesses where you have a customer that you could bring back for an additional visit in that month. For example, a restaurant, a quick-service restaurant, a spa or beauty salon. Any type of place where you can bring someone back. Consumer product groups, you would have to make a more … It would be more of a vanity type of application. It would be harder to extract value for the user.

With mobile apps, a lot of businesses want a mobile app, but whenever you’re constructing one you really have to ask yourself, why is a customer or a user of this app, why is it going to add value to their daily life. For a restaurant, that’s easy to articulate. It’s considerably easier to order online through a mobile app. It’s a lot better to have your points on your mobile phone instead of an old punch card or something like that, a paper punch card. It can definitely add to the user experience or the guest experience at a restaurant. That’s why we see a good fit in that vertical.

Suzanne: I was going to ask you well, why did you leave Gannett to come here, but it sounds now like it’s a little …

Liam: It’s another little start-up.

Suzanne: Well, it’s not so cut-and-dried. How did you get involved with Total Loyalty and exit from Gannett?

Liam: Yeah, definitely. I was with Gannett. Essentially one of the presidents at Gannett Digital Ventures, we were coming up with an idea we had … Gannett is fundamentally a marketing and advertising services company. Tons of marketing tools. Tons of ways to acquire new customers. We had to brainstorm on a solution to bring people back. Total Loyalty came out of that idea. There was one or two of us in a room that originally came up with the idea. How do you spit out loyalty applications? How do you enable our advertisers to bring people back? It fit really well within one of our business units. The business unit was called Clipper Magazine. They reach 25 million households every month with direct-mail magazines. The asset really fit well within that organization. We had a team of three engineers that, they weren’t doing anything. We put them on the project; they were extremely passionate about it. Then we just hit the ground running, and 18 months later we have 1,600 subscribers.

Suzanne: It started as a covert ops kind of mission.

Liam: It was sort of an MVP. The original, we just had a CMS that spit out a little provisioning server for an app. Then it iterated since then.

Suzanne: Wow. That’s amazing. What’s the structure? Are you one of many PMs? Are you one of three people that are on this?

Liam: We were originally a sales guy, a team of three engineers, and a product manager. Now we’re up to … I think we’re up to 25 operations and designers, our customer success division. We have a team of seven sales led by a sales VP. Still at three developers; we need some more. Still a product manager. The VP of sales, product management, that’s me, we report up to the division president.

Suzanne: Talk to me about some of the major functions that you’re responsible for in your capacity as product manager.

Liam: Definitely. I think the first thing is, I assume P&L responsibility over making sure that the business is profitable, that it’s scaling in the right direction, that we are going to be somewhere in five years. We’re going to be in a better spot in five years. The next part is, right now we don’t have a marketing team, so all of the product marketing, communications, that all falls under my umbrella. As the company scales, that’s something where I’ll need to train a trainer and bring a team in that can take the responsibilities of that and run with in. That’s something we’re dealing with right now, part of scaling.

It starts in phases. On day one, it’s really starting, who’s your target audience and how do you reach them? For us, it was restaurants, small businesses, spas and beauty salons, and things like that. We had to assemble a sales team. The first thing is, you go, “Well, what sales team would be the right fit for selling this?” It’s hiring that team, getting them running, and going through the different phases.

The next phase was, “Okay. We have clients. This is great! The velocity is improving. How do you service these people?” Then it was coming up with the customer success division. Where are we going to base them. Where’s a good place that you can get affordable talent that can deal with technology, design, mobile apps, and really make sure that we exceed customer expectations.

After that was done it’s, “Oh my gosh. All of this just doesn’t work together. There’s so much being done by hand. How are we ever going to scale?” Then it was trying to … This is month six. Let’s try to find some efficiencies here. Let’s improve the content management system. Let’s make sure that sales force speaks to the content management tool so we’re not doing double entry of data, and that the processes actually make sense. The unit economics makes sense to build a mobile app for these SMBs.

Now we’re at a cool spot. Now it’s about scale. Now it’s about taking the sales division, it’s about taking the customer success division, and it’s about taking our engineering team, and it’s how do we multiply that by ten times. How do we go from 1,600 clients to 10,000? That’s what we’re working on now. It’s a little bit of everything.

Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when, as in your case, you’ve been involved with the company from inception, where you’re actually watching … I think of Bullseye framework; I don’t know if you read Traction?

Liam: I have not, no.

Suzanne: Great recommended read. They talk a little bit about the efforts that it takes to move the needle when you’re in that “getting those first few customers” phase, are very different. It’s a very different complexion, very different strategies that work. It can serve you, versus once you get into that 10,000 users or 100,000 users and suddenly strategies like targeting blogs, while they may still be effective, it’s not effective in a measurable way because you need to go to the power of 10, not five more people.

Liam: A lot of times there’s a lot of obvious problems to solve. It really comes down to prioritizing where can you extract the most value in that day or that decision or really on an engineering roadmap in a product feature.

Suzanne: Right. One of the things I laugh about, I teach a lot about some of the current tools and frameworks that are available, things like Business Model Canvas, Lean Model Canvas. I think, “Man, where were these things when I was making all of my first mistakes and products along the way.” How many of those types of tools have you in your experience adopted, versus, “Oh it would be nice to have the time to do a proper Lean Model Canvas exercise, but we’re just going to kind of wing it.”

Liam: When I was originally in the incubation stage, Lean methodology made a lot of sense to me. I spun up a few MVPs and whatnot back in the day. One was a gift card product for SMBs as well. I think it’s a great way to validate assumptions and identify product-market fit. Even when you’re growing as a company, there’s opportunities to have small little pilots and to test little things before you necessarily scale them.

Long story short, I think different methodologies and different texts, if you will, are a great way to learn from others’ mistakes, and also a great way to refine your product management capabilities. Getting different influences and whatnot has definitely made me a better product manager, and I think it’s also allowed me to accelerate my career a bit and constantly be learning, and learning more about how I can better execute different products.

Suzanne: What would you say is, if you had to describe to me your special blend of skills, the recipe balance that goes into making Liam great, what is that?

Liam: That doesn’t even …

Suzanne: Liam cocktail!

Liam: Definitely. I think mine is, it’s having strong technical fundamentals, but being able to communicate to an end user, listen to an end user, and extract what they need and what I think would be valuable in the short term for that product, take the best things, and assemble the right roadmap for the future. I think it’s a combination of strong tech and good product marketing.

Suzanne: That’s you.

Liam: Yeah. Just a good fundamental marketing and tech in there.

Suzanne: If you were giving advice to somebody else, some up-and-coming product manager, some career changer, what do you think is the one non-negotiable, essential skill that you have to have if not for anything else. This is a part two: What’s the one essential quality of a person that’s, if you’ve got this, you can do this. Skill and quality.

Liam: I think you have to be comfortable with handling ambiguity. I think you have to be able to be a good listener and be able to handle ambiguity, assemble all of the different stakeholders and really be able to make a decision on how you’re going to extract the most value from whatever the next steps are. The big thing with being a product manager is being able to say no. A lot of times, you’re saying no to great ideas. A lot of times you’re saying no to concepts that could potentially make a lot of money. Ultimately, as a product manager, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity, and you have to be comfortable with coming up with a roadmap that you think will get the different stakeholders the most return on their investment in both time and engineering resources. Does that make sense?

Suzanne: Yeah, I think it does. When you talk about having to say no, is that fiercely protecting the product roadmap? “Great idea, but that’s not what we agreed on. Great idea, but that’s going to take us down a path...”

Liam: Scope creep is incredibly dangerous. I think it’s saying no to good ideas because there are other ones that need to be prioritized higher. There are other things that … That stakeholder may not realize it, but based on your vision and based on your modeling, based on your expectations of your existing roadmap, you can hit the ground running and execute on that. Ultimately, the company as a whole will benefit. A lot of times … A good example is, marketing might have an ask. Ops might have an ask. Engineering might have a ton of technical debt that they need to fix. Ultimately, all three likely can benefit their respective organizations and even each other. Ultimately, you only have so many resources, and you got to figure out which ones make the most sense to execute on.

Suzanne: Are you the type of product manager that when you leave the room, everyone’s, “Ugh, Liam always says no to everything.”

Liam: I don’t think so. I think they … You always want to be inclusive of ideas, but I think you have to set expectations as far … My goal is at the end of a backlog grooming session, if you will, is that everyone will … It will be clearly articulated where their stories, their user stories or feature requests, are in the product backlog, and their relative prioritization to one another. I would hope … You know, a big thing about being a product manager is being able to represent everyone that isn’t in the room. That could be a user that uses the product. It could be a marketing director that’s not at that meeting, and representing their interests. I think the idea is to get a consensus, or at least an educated idea of why an organization is putting resources against different features and whatnot and moving forward with it.

Suzanne: What’s the first hard lesson you ever learned on the job?

Liam: Gosh, there’s so many.

Suzanne: You can just pick one. It doesn’t have to be the first.

Liam: I think it’s managing for perfection. As a product manager, you want the best solution at the cheapest price possible. One example is, a big part of our e-commerce vertical at Gannett was an email that was sent to 4.5 million subscribers at the time. We had a really great marketing director who had a really great email marketing manager who wanted an email template that was fundamentally challenging to script correctly. Long story short, we delayed an email, just an email template, an HTML email template, which HTML in email can be difficult sometimes … Essentially, we delayed it six weeks because it was off by six pixels. We allocated a developer and a half to essentially six pixels for six weeks. Essentially, I think it came out to $8- 10,000 worth of cost. Now, the email. Incredibly important. Generates million of dollars of revenue every year. The six pixels? Probably not so much. We would have been all right. You got to know what you’re working on. Sometimes, you can’t have everything be perfect.

Whose decision was it, we must have … That sounds like a designer. Usually designers are the ones that fight for pixels.

In that case, it was the email marketing manager. I tried several times to move on. It got elevated to, in our case, our general manager. I lost the battle for five weeks; won it on week six. It happens, it happens.

Suzanne: Absolutely. I brought up Traction. I’m wondering, when you talk about always learning, are there any must-read books, podcasts, blogs … What do you think is the, “If you have not read this manual, or if you don’t follow this person, you know nothing. You’re missing out.”

Liam: For me, I’m really interested in SaaS companies right now for the domain that I’m in right now, software as a subscription, building, increasing your monthly recurring revenue of a product, reducing churn and things like that. I want to give a shout out to Jason Lemkin, who’s a VC, one of the founders of EchoSign, the company acquired by Adobe that does the contracts online. He has a great blog called the SaaStr. I think it really gives great insight to anyone who is interested in building and scaling a software as a subscription product. Based out of San Francisco. They’ve really helped me justify my revenue model at Total Loyalty Solutions. It really helped build that product. Lots of influences there, from hiring your first VP of sales to managing teams of engineers and putting all the financial metrics in order. Good stuff.

Suzanne: What advice would you offer somebody with that age-old dilemma, “I’ve just completed a course at General Assembly. I’ve got my product management certificate. I’m ready to move into this space. I’ve got no experience.” How do you make that move? How do you make yourself hireable? How do you find the right job?

Liam: From my experience, product managers are people who like building things. My experience and the best product managers that I know who have evolved to C-suite spots have all had a vested interest in building exception products. Any person who wants to get into product management, first it’s an interesting career. You’re not an expert in anything. You’re a master of absolutely none. I think the only places where you can get the well-rounded knowledge that you need to be a product manager is by building your own products. Going out with a few friends, scripting a few lines of code that solve a problem, and then maybe bringing that to market. Almost being a founder yourself.

The second is to go to a larger company and learn something well, and figure out how to make it better. Once you learn how to make it better, pitch your boss, or maybe build your own product that solves a problem, and go run with that. A lot of times, product managers are almost little founders within an organization. They need to understand the vision, they need to understand the roadmap, and they need to be confident in the idea where they’re willing to put their own political capital or personal capital within that organization out to bat for that to really make it happen.

My advice would be to go just build something. Whether it be a tool, a software product, or a solution, go out and solve a problem somewhere. It’s not just going out and applying for jobs. Product managers … I think it’s one of the easiest places to get a job for if you’re building things because you’re constantly getting recruited. There’s constantly different ideas out there that you can help execute. It really comes down to how can you help a team get to the next level. That comes from just experience of making things happen.

Suzanne: Great. Last question for you, Liam. I got all these little sound bites. This is a life amassed in sound bites. One of the ones I use is, “Whether you think you are or whether you think you’re not, you’re right.” For me, it’s all about whatever you think to be true about yourself, a situation, I can’t change your mind. Jack Trout talks about this in Positioning. Once a customer has made up their mind about a product, that’s what that product is about, so you want to own that position. Do you have a sound bite or a mantra that you live by, something that you feel comfortable to share?

Liam: Sure. I’m a big believer in, there’s a lot of obstacles that are good problems to have. A lot of times, when you’re building a solution, someone’s going to come up with an objection. “How are you going to do that for 100 people?” Or, “That isn’t going to work now.” I think a lot of times, good product management means having the right solution for that time, not the best solution forever. If you have a product, do things that don’t scale at first, but continuously see how you can iterate, improve the product so it scales. Keep on making the product better every day. Keep on moving forward and you’ll get through it.

Suzanne: Great. Thank you so much. That was awesome.

Liam: Awesome.