Put Something Out and See What Happens

Suzanne: Talk about the getting everybody to row together. You know? You guys are have writers, you have editors, you have designers, developers, social media people, there's all of these people sort of serving these very specific departmental functions and then there is this kind of bigger vision for the company. You know, you're connected to where you want to go. How do you get all of these different people to get behind that vision? Is that challenging?

Nina: It's very challenging because I'm used to working with people who think the same way as I do. Like, whether it's developers or designers or people in the field. Then when I go and I talk to writers or social media people, it's very fascinating to see the way they process information. It's, I think, one of the jobs that you also end up doing as a design lead or product manager or project manager, even. It's kind of figuring out how to place all the pieces of the puzzle together.

One thing we've been working on as a company is core values. Everything we do is tied to these three core values. We have to remind ourselves and our team that I know this is really hard, but we got to do it because 1,2,3. Then when it's done you see how valuable it is and how we all grow as a team. The next time it'll be easier and then easier and easier. I think that essentially understanding that people are very different and starting from there is what helps me kind of place all of them together.

Suzanne: I know your CEO well. I know you guys have a great dynamic. He puts so much trust in what you do. I've had people talk about the product management role as being like the CEO without any of the power. You have all of the responsibility but then you're ultimately constrained because you still have to sort of report up in whatever that construct is. Do you see that as a challenge or is it an opportunity? I mean, how do you feel about having so much responsibility and still ultimately having somebody else be responsible for the bigger vision and holding that up? How does that work?

Nina: I think that I've been very lucky to work with a CEO who understands the value of product. We've been both learning together how to make this better and how to build better products and how to create a better team. It is challenging at times, but I think I've been very lucky that it's not ... I don't feel like it's an issue. I hear a lot of people in this space complaining about how difficult it is to work with people who don't really understand the value of x design or the value of product or like spending so much time on product in general. I don't feel like it's a big issue at Hip Hop DX, luckily.

Suzanne: One of my students said to me yesterday, and I thought this was fascinating. He's part of a start up, they're well funded, they're moving into series B, they're scaling at rapid pace. Brilliant founding team. Sort of all of these Ivy League business school academic minds and it's complete chaos because everybody is very, very heady. There's not that right blend of people who understand how to be out of their heads and into the practical execution. Or even like what you were talking about earlier. Knowing the different people on your team and figuring out how do I translate to get them aligned. What's going to motivate person A is different from person B and I do need them all rowing together.

Nina: Mm-hmm

Suzanne: We take for granted, I think, to some extent that by virtue of being inside the space, we value things that may or may not be valued on the outside. This is another thing that I talk about a lot in product class. You can't look at things through the lens of your own world view. Especially for you, you're a top notch designer. Everything you see, it's like if the design is poor, you might make a conclusion there's no value in this product. Nobody else could possibly see value.

This sort of brings us to this concept of customers. Knowing your customers and knowing your users. What kind of work have you done in your time with Hip Hop DX to really understand who are the people that are interfacing with this product?

Nina: We have recently started to understand how important this is. Although, Hip Hop DX is 17 years old, but they have never done this before. Two things that we're doing right now because it's accessible. We already have these systems in place, is our comment system on the site. We talk to people all the time. We see that the people who comment are, we have some returning people. They use the same names and it's very easy to start a conversation with this people. We're starting to get to know people from the comment system and we use the same approach in social media, where we have our team talk to people on like Twitter or Facebook and just engage with our audience. That's one way we use. I call that like user research plan A?

Suzanne: Did you say plan A?

Nina: Plan A because it's already there. We don't have to go get a team from outside to do testings or ... Like, we already have it.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean they're giving you ... They're saying, "Hello, I'm here on the site and I have stuff to say."

Nina: Exactly, so all we have to do is answer and ask, "Where are you from? What do you do?"

Suzanne: Yeah.

Nina: A lot of our writers have fans, which is really, really nice. People go in and read the articles that say, "Victoria writes." We've had a few people actually come into the office and just ... Because we invited them through these conversations like, "Oh, you're in LA. Stop by and let's go get a few drinks." We spend time with our top readers.

Another thing that we're doing which doesn't, it's not really engagement, but through video we kind of test what our audience likes. If we put up a video of like the top 5 Jordans coming out this summer we get killed in the comment section. But if we put up a video for like the 5 best rap lyrics of 2016 people like that.

Suzanne: You get killed, and this is curious to me and also when you say Jordans you're talking about Air Jordans.

Nina: Yeah.

Suzanne: I mean, I did have the original Air Jordans. I feel very close. Is it that they don't ... Are the comments, "Why are you talking about shoes? Bring us more hip hop," or are they just perceiving that you guys don't know what you're talking about when you say let's ...

Nina: No, it's more like why are you talking about shoes? We got the same reaction when we wrote about fashion at the Met Gala. We started to realize that our audience actually values more classic, informative and not necessarily trendy.

Suzanne: Right. They're purists.

Nina: Yeah.

Suzanne: Hip Hop DX fans are hip hop purists.

Nina: It's great because we always knew that we're a legacy brand and this kind of assures us that we should stay a legacy brand and not try to branch out to being not like a culture magazine or not go into fashion and Air Jordans or what was Rihanna wearing last night and stuff like that. It's been fascin-, like the process has been fascinating so far. I'm looking forward to digging more into getting to know who the people who read the magazine are.

Suzanne: Right, well and exactly, the metrics if you were to take a validated learning approach to the evolution of the product which is what you're doing, then you try things and you get that instant feedback to say, "No, we're off course and we need to kind of keep one foot on the ground. Pivot either back toward what was working or a way into something else because we haven't quite found it."

I would imagine, equally, that's challenging. I mean for, you say, a legacy brand so on one hand here's this company that's built up, right? Seventeen years is a huge accomplishment for a magazine to be around. I mean, everybody is trying to get into the content game now. To think back to putting it out there at that time, but yeah, how do you evolve a product because you want to grow. You don't want to just be flat lining after 17 years. What's the challenge there? Figuring out what's next for a business that's been around for a long time and wants to be around for a long time more I would imagine.

Nina: I think what we're focusing a lot on at the moment is video. Growing our video team, getting more video content, especially exclusive video content where we send out teams to get news from the field. That's one thing that we have the whole team definitely focusing on. On the other side of things, there's product where we have this publication that's 17 years old and it's been going great so far, but like you said, how do we know what's next? It's one of the challenges that I have personally been facing because deciding what's next is kind of on me. I have to go to my CEO and say, "Hey, this is what we should do because look at the numbers. This is what we're going to get." I'm learning how to do that right now which makes everything a lot harder.

Suzanne: When you say, "Learning how to do that," do you mean learning how to road map with confidence? Or learning how to bring that to a stakeholder and kind of hold your ground and say, "This is what's right."

Nina: Oh no, I'm good at that part.

Suzanne: Okay.

Nina: I think road mapping the whole thing and actually measuring how this can ... How can we get a return on investment if we build out this product? How will this increase our page views or get us more readers? How will this make things better, basically? Because going into a new product is very costly and we can't just decide that, "Oh, let's do this and see what happens," because we've tried that before. Where we design and we develop a new product and it's out there, but oh, nothing happens. Well of course nothing's going to happen because we didn't stand behind it. We're recently learning as a team that we put the product out there but it's not done. There's a whole process behind it that comes with it but no one taught us that so we have to teach ourselves and lean on our very nice developer to help us out.

Suzanne: That's what I call the, "If you build it they will come," myth of, certainly, of so many entrepreneurs. You know, we run a development company here. We get people all the time come in and say, "You know, I've got the next billion dollar idea and I just need you to build it," and a lot of times they want you to do that for free, as well. They're going to pay you back later when they make their billions, but putting ... I say, "Okay, let's just play a quick role play game. Let's just say that I build your product and you have it tomorrow. What's your strategy for acquiring users?" Right?

Nina: Yeah.

Suzanne: This is, I think, this is the disconnect. We just assume that once a product exists everyone will just be tripping over themselves to use it forever and pay for it when in reality you'd be lucky if you could even do a smoke signal and get anybody to find the web page to sign up, let alone actually start signing up and referring users and all of these things.

I like what you said about that. Okay, we've birthed this thing, right? We may have gone about it the wrong way. We may have gone full forward into putting the product in market, now it's there, we have two options; we can just let it die on the vine because we didn't think this through or we can start to try to evolve the product and evolve the strategy for getting people to connect with it. That is product management, I think. That's the process. Right? That iterative, "Just keep changing things and doing things and measuring and doing until something starts working."

Nina: Yeah, and I think was, for me, that was a very hard thing to let go of. Like the fact that oh, it has to be perfect and then we put it out. Because that's the way I was used to with packaging. That's the way I worked with packaging or with exhibition. Like, you can't hang this on the wall if it's not perfect. You can't have people come and look at this beautiful exhibition if it's not well put together and everything is in its right place, so I looked at product the same way. Then I realized that it's not that way. It's okay to put something out and see what happens. See the reactions of our readers. What do they have to say about it? They're going to be the people using it and then fix it and iterate more and then more and more until you get to a point where you're very happy.

Suzanne: It's the necessity. It's absolutely.

Nina: That was definitely a point where I consciously felt like I have to make the jump from one phase to the other.

Suzanne: It reminds me what you're saying. Talked about this last night. The conversation around value proposition came up and somebody said to me, "Well, so is value proposition, that's just marketing, right? That's just the message." It's like, the value proposition, the way that you communicate the value of whatever it is that you're doing whether it's the Hip Hop DX site, whether it's one of the products or services that you've built inside of it, that's the message that you communicate. Value is something that we feel. If you say there's value here then somebody uses it and that value isn't there, they're going to know. You can't just sort of slap a value statement onto something and say, "This is great."

Also part of it is really about when we iterate the product like we're talking about, what we're really talking about doing is figuring out how to make this meaningful for somebody to want to use it or to want to return to it or to want to share it. This is how we create value.

Content. Just a side set. I was just wandering in the value place and then ... It's so visceral that you just stay there. This is interesting, right? A lot of times talking about revenue models for businesses, right? Building a publishing business, meaning primarily your customers are advertisers, right? I mean that drives revenue primarily for the business. What I always think is interesting about content models in particular is in order to kind of get advertisers and keep them you have to have this growing/dedicated user base. Those users are so different in profile and need from the advertisers who are sort of willing to get their brands out in front.

How do you, as a product designer, product manager, balance those two needs? Those two very different needs, right? Who comes first in terms of thinking through the user experience? In terms of the decisions you make for the product? How do you balance it?

Nina: For us our readers always come first. When you talked about the challenges with CEO or teams, I think this is where it's a bit more challenging. Where no, we have to think about these 4 million people who will see this ad. On the other side of things, this ad is going to make us a lot of money this month, so we have to put it on there. Sometimes I think it's, I mean, ideally we have no ads, right?

Suzanne: Yeah, sorry Mr. and Mrs. Advertiser, but that's the truth. People don't don't want them.

Nina: I think the compromise that we've all reached is that the ads that we do have on this side are relevant to the content. You're not going to see like an ad for a pasta sauce, but you will see an ad for a show that's happening soon or the new Air Jordans that are going to come out this summer.

Suzanne: We won't do a video about them but we might surface an ad.

Nina: The other project I'm working on right now is trying to place the ads in a place where it makes sense. Where it's not too invasive and it's not a ... You kind of start feeling like it's a part of the product and it's not there to attack you, because that happens sometimes with ads.

Suzanne: Right.

Nina: I think that probably by the end of the year we'll have a better understanding of how to work with the ads and where to place them in a way that's not as terrible.

Suzanne: This is my dream, also, as a ... I want to say as a reader. You know, you brought up the point about video before and I was cringing on the inside because I think I'm the last of the people that want my news in written format. I'm just like I know it's going away. I'm going to wake up one day and it's just going to be videos everywhere and I'm going to have to pack all of my stuff up and go to a remote island.

Nina: I'm actually the same way. I'm like, "Oh, do I have to watch this video? Oh my God, it's 1 1/2 minutes?"

Suzanne: We're old. That's, I think that's the truth of the that. We're old, we want the words, everybody wants them but they want the quick hit of the video, they want the flash. I've gone off track now, but maybe I'll come back. Oh no, ads. Ads. No, I'm back, I'm back, I'm back.

The thing of this is interesting, right? So many sites fail at this. Publishing sites, in particular. Why is the ad experience so crappy? You're on this beautiful, you guys have a beautiful site, right? It's fast, it looks great, thanks to you thanks to your team. I love being on it. Other sites, similar experiences and then it's like I'm scrolling, there's an ad and it's supposed to ... I can accept the fact that there's ads. What I can't accept is when a full screen take over ad doesn't launch correctly, freezes on my screen, won't let me get out of it ...

Nina: It keeps refreshing the site and you have to keep going down to where you were reading.

Suzanne: We've worked a lot with the ad networks. We've worked a lot with advertising agencies, with the clients, practically anything. Part of this is there's way too many people touching this process. This is, I think, what most audiences don't know is that you've got somebody way over here designing the ad, shipping it to this media company. They're placing it. Nobody is technically savvy, most of the time, technically savvy enough to understand the specifications. Even the media companies themselves that give the specifications most of the time don't know what they're actually saying.

Then the impact is to the user. Like you brought up, meanwhile you have to manage this. You're going, "I know that these ads, relevant/not relevant could actually interrupt the user experience that I'm trying to control and create in terms of value over here." Do you just like throw up your arms at that point and say, "Dammit!" Leave early?

Nina: I mean there are frustrating days where I've left early. That's for sure. I think that one ... Well, it's such a mess because we really don't have control over the code or an ad that just takes over your whole screen. There's really nothing we can do about that. I think that as not having control over how it's written or how it's placed is definitely a part of the problem. Because a lot of the times something doesn't show up on the site, like a whole section will just be wiped out because this ad is blocking something on the site. We have to go in and try to mess around and see what's going on there. That's definitely part of the problem.

But, one solution that we've found is moving to companies that allow you to kind of edit visually, so we can use the same type phases as we do on the site. We can use more or less the same colors. We can change the background of the ad. We can control the size of the video or the size of the image. Those are a little bit easier to handle because we feel like we have a little bit more control over how it looks, at least, and it's not going to jump in your face. It's pretty consistent. It just shows up between like when you're reading an article it just shows up elegantly at the bottom. It doesn't threaten anyone ...

Suzanne: It feels consistent.

Nina: It feels consistent.

Suzanne: Bless the typography.

Nina: Those are the types of ads that I enjoy working with.

Suzanne: I'm not familiar with the technology, so what are some of the companies that ...

Nina: It's called, one company is called Shared Through.

Suzanne: Okay.

Nina: They're great. Even on a personal level, like they invite us out to their conferences once a year. We know the people. There's someone to call, someone to talk to, so it's not like this big corporation that there's nowhere to reach and they have a really nice platform where you can go in and see how many people click, what happened, how much money you've made and it's easily, you can place it anywhere you want on the site, which makes things a lot easier for us. I think that working with companies like that makes things a little bit easier on the experience side of things.

Suzanne: Yeah, a big part of experience is will there be somebody to pick up my phone or answer my email.

Nina: Or like, the site is not loading, who can I talk to?

Suzanne: Right, right, absolutely. These are things that get overlooked a lot when we scale or when we focus on the wrong things. Well, what about that part of our value proposition that said we want to be a good partner to our publishing businesses? Share Through. This is the ad plug. Share Through is not a sponsor of this show, but maybe they will be in the future.

Talk to me about tools. Any cool stuff you guys are using? Software products that you're falling in love with that you want to ...

Nina: Oh yes. I have recently fallen in love with Sketch.

Suzanne: Sketch.

Nina: Sketch is ...

Suzanne: Were you Photoshop before?

Nina: I always hated Photoshop. I was never good at it. It's just too clunky. You can't really get to what you want very fast. I always knew that Photoshop is not the tool I need to build up these great products. After moving to Sketch I use it for everything. Like anything web design related, anything product related happens in Sketch. The nice thing is that it's very community because a lot of people are developing really nice plugins that help you do things. Like measure spaces between elements or export it to, what's it called, envision or proto.io, or stuff like that. It's very, it's a growing platform. It's very, very, very nice.

Suzanne: Sketch. I was hoping you were going to say Pivotal Tracker. I thought that…

Nina: And Pivotal Tracker. I recently discovered that they're offices are in Santa Monica. I was at the Apple store and I was like, "Oh really? Pivotal Labs are right here? Well wait a minute. Maybe I'll just go visit."

Suzanne: Just pop in and get some quick scrum lessons.

Nina: Pivotal has definitely changed the way we work.

Suzanne: What were you using before? Remind me. You were doing, writing Git-

Nina: We were doing it in Git but I was also sitting in the same room with our developer so it was more like, "Hey, let's put stuff on the board and see how it works."

Suzanne: Every developer's dream, by the way, is to have-

Nina: Really?

Suzanne: Is to have somebody standing over their shoulders saying, "Try this? Make that blue. Move that over 30 pixels."

Nina: It's really, really efficient, because like I put some stuff there last night and I woke up this morning and it's all done. I have my comments in there from the developers and I see what's going on all the time and it's very, very easy to communicate.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah and Pivotal Tracker, we're big fans of Pivotal Tracker. I mean the magic part is also about having, obviously, established good process with your developer team because the magic is, I put in a ticket, it's clear and then it moves along like a thing of beauty. Pivotal gives us that level of transparency to see the product.

I think what's fascinating as well is, and it's been our experience in this with clients. We used to let clients give feedback in whatever format worked for them because we wanted to make the process of working with us as convenient as possible. We thought Pivotal will be too difficult for them to learn. They're not going to want to do it and then we realized that we had to force that shift. We were losing too much time transposing feedback from one platform into another.

We've seen this amazing thing happen with clients that being on Pivotal, it's like it removes this layer of anxiety that was there. It's like, "Oh no, I'm good. I just have the project open and I check on it," and then the connection to things like scope creep, or the impact of change becomes more shared by stakeholders. Because you can, in real-time see the impact of rejecting a ticket or introducing a new feature however minor you might think that it is.

Nina: Yeah, it's been a good change for us. Also, on a personal level, another really good tool/resource has been Medium.com. I'm in love with Medium.com.

Suzanne: Are you talking about medium the blogging platform?

Nina: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Suzanne: Are you on it?

Nina: I am on it.

Suzanne: How come I'm not reading all your ... What's your username here for me and the folks listening in?

Nina: It's ninazidani or sunbird3000, I can't remember which one. Probably my Twitter name.

Suzanne: You really need to get better at self promoting.

Nina: Yeah, yeah, I didn't take that into account. Medium is incredible. It's a platform to share everything and anything and just meet people. It's nice because whenever I'm there I just read stuff that I'm interested in. It feels like it's my world and I don't have to make an effort to see what's going on because it's all there.

Suzanne: Right. Do you get the daily digest from Medium and you're like perfect, they've curated exactly what I need to ...

Nina: Exactly.

Suzanne: Anybody out there that you would recommend? Just people that you follow that you think are- This is why you like medium. I love medium too, by the way. Glad to hear you say it. The written word, the long form word is returned in the world of medium. Any great folks in the design space and the product space, in a completely different space that ...

Nina: I've been following Geoff Teehan or something. Had a product on Facebook. I've been following the Development Factory.

Suzanne: Oh, that's good. Yeah Geoff Teehan. Teehan + Lax, that was the UX firm, they were in Toronto.

Nina: Oh really? I didn't know that.

Suzanne: When the Development Factory was in its infancy in Toronto we were very avid followers of the work that they were doing. Touched a couple of the same projects at different ends of the production spectrum. They had a very poignant farewell to the end of Teehan + Lax and then they moved on. Yeah, great. Thank you for the recommendation.

Nina: I think he also wrote about it on Medium at some point.

Suzanne: Yeah, cool. You're doing all of this stuff, if you could hire anybody as the next person to start to offload all of the responsibilities that come with product management. You can only have one.

Nina: I know the answer to that.

Suzanne: You do?

Nina: Yeah. I've been dreaming about it.

Suzanne: You have?

Nina: I'd hire a visual designer.

Suzanne: You would?

Nina: Because it has become, I don't want to say a burden, but it's a part of my work that I don't enjoy anymore. I just want to have someone else do that so I can focus on actually understanding the users more and working more on like measuring metric side of things and making sure that this is worth the investment. I think more product management and less worrying about, "Oh, we made this blue but it should be red," which has been great. I've enjoyed it for many, many years but I think it's time for me to move on.

Suzanne: Pass the baton?

Nina: Exactly. Definitely a visual designer would be great.

Suzanne: That's the other indication then that you ... We talk about product management as being sort of that little pressure cooker center between the worlds of design and technology and business. One of the challenges that can happen is, especially if an organization is smaller, that center is bigger. You're in the middle of all those things, but what you're actually doing within each of those domains is way more involved. That can be the danger ... You can't see out and above if you're sort of down in the trenches. Whether you're coding or whether you're practically designing or whether your raising money or going out and engaging paying customers, if you're doing all of those things then you can't be thinking about the whole in the product management capacity. So you're hooked, is what you're saying. You love this job.

Nina: I love it. I definitely love it. There's nowhere else I'd rather be.

Suzanne: Battered and bruised and nowhere else that I would rather be. Fascinating. Do you have like a ... I always talk about like a quote that if we would put it on a mug and it would be like this is the mantra that Nina guides her life by professionally, personally?

Nina: Oh, wow! Well, it doesn't sound ... Haven't written it in a fancy way yet, but I always remind myself that design is a holistic concept and whether it's building a product or organizing your closet or buying sheets it's the same. You apply the same thought process to it. I use that everyday. Whatever I'm doing, it's how things are. Design is a holistic concept.

Suzanne: Nina, thank you so much for taking the time. It's really been great hearing from you and Hip Hop DX.com for everybody listening in. Go check out the site. I follow. I love the content that you got. I'm a little out of the loop, but I'm really trying to learn about what's happening in the industry, so thank you.

Nina: Thank you.