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Keeping Right Relations

with Bettina Elstro of Product Managers Association - LA
Nov 09, 2016
15
Back to Podcasts
15
Keeping Right Relations | 100 PM
00:00
Keeping Right Relations | 100 PM

Suzanne: You have this long background in product management, as you described, and you kind of have covered it from all the angles. You've covered it from the marketing side. You talked about being sort of a web scientist initially. How would you describe yourself as a product manager if you had to kind of go out and market yourself in present day? What kind of product manager are you? Your unique product management complexion.

Bettina: I would say that I'm someone who wants to push the envelope on what is available to us from a technology standpoint, so how can we leverage existing technologies and put it to some new application and kind of see what works. How can we operate on the fringes of what's possible and what we can create that could revolutionize everything. I think those are really, really fun, but I'm also the type of person who just really likes to run with something and see it through, right?

I think there's different types of product people, so there's a lot of visionaries that exist, but then there's also the day-to-day executors, and I like wearing both hats. I was late to this interview because I was reviewing a pull request, and I was like, oh crap, I needed to leave. I have an interview.

Suzanne: That was you being the executor and getting it done?

Bettina: Yeah, working on all of these tiny details and getting stuck in that, and you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. I need to be there," but I also love looking at something from the bird's eye view of where could this go, and what are the higher implications of this?

Suzanne: It's an interesting perspective hearing you say that because I think fundamentally the role of product management is the strategic role. It does require you to be sort of outside and elevated, and I think there is a tendency because so many of us come from practical disciplines, there can be a tendency to hover or get comfortable in hard skills. I'm really, really great in Pivotal Tracker, so I'm always in backlog grooming when I should be out talking to customers or when I should be thinking about the roadmap in a more visionary way, and so do you think ... It sounds like the integration of visionary mindset and execution mindset is that right blend, so do you think sometimes people peril being too much one way or the other? Have you seen that in your peers?

Bettina: I don't know if I've seen it necessarily in peers, but I've seen it across different organizations. I've seen where ... Some companies are successful at business, and some aren't, but there's a lot of people who say, "Well, the product people need to be like the strategic ones," and then like, the product owner is, or the the business analyst, is the day-to-day, detail-oriented person. I guess that can work, but I would prefer to wear all the hats. That's just my preference.

Suzanne: But yet you've worked in a number of enterprise organizations. I think this idea of wearing a lot of hats seems like it's a privilege if you see it as a privilege that belongs to smaller organizations, sort of scrappier startups, whereas once you become part of the enterprise, there's one person for every one-fifth of a job that exists, so how do you negotiate that desire and then still thrive inside of that kind of environment?

Bettina: Well, I mean, I think it just goes back to how do you want to organize that company. I've actually worked a very large company where the product manager was supposed to do both strategic and product ownership like writing the user stories, doing acceptance testing, and everything. I think that's probably the right way to go about it because otherwise you're playing a game of telephone with people, and nuance gets lost. Details get lost.

What I've seen work well is delegating other things such as working with UX designers because their obsession is how are people going to interact, and then the product people will say, "I want this outcome," and then they can go figure out how it will work and you'll get there, right? I think that's a good way to not work a million-hour weeks.

Working with good QA people and developers who are going to think about those edge cases and bring them to top of mind for you when maybe you haven't thought of every possible scenario, right? Communicating with all these people and say, "This is what I'm looking to do. Let's kind of hash it out and figure out how we're going to build this," right, and kind of have that collaboration from a very early standpoint.

Suzanne: Right. You had said to me before, the success of a product manager really has a lot to do with their ability to form a cross-functional team. Can you talk about what does that mean, and what has your experience been with that?

Bettina: I think that, first and foremost, the scrum team needs to be really tight. There has to be this established relationship, and people need to understand what their role and responsibility is within the team, and people within the team need to have this team mentality of if we fail, we fail as a team, but if we win, we win as a team.

Outside of that, I think it's also really important to be very connected with other departments in the organization who are going to be interacting with your tools. In an e-commerce example, you want to be really tight with marketing because they're the one who's going to market your product, right? You want to work with customer service and understand you want to make them happy too.

If you want to know how operations is going to work and how your product is being shipped and understand how each person is doing their job and actually have empathy for them and understand what their day to day is like because they're going to give you really good insight on what works for them and what doesn't work for them in terms of your product, right? If you're looking at some kind of inventory system, let's make sure that the people who work in the warehouse are comfortable with how that inventory system works, and it's efficient for them, not just efficient for executives, right?

Suzanne: You're speaking very diplomatically than some other people who have come on the show, and they talk about what you're really talking about, which is the demands of other departments on product, but it's making me think of a question that I haven't asked, but I'm curious about your perspective is, we focus a lot talking about what does it mean to have to work with developers, how do you negotiate conversations with designers. What do you think people outside of the product department think about product managers?

Bettina: Wow. It depends. It very much depends, and I think … the onus is on the product manager to establish good relationships, so I've seen situations where, if you don't talk to your stakeholders, then they're just going to steamroll over you, right? If you're not going to establish some kind of relationship with them and understand what their concerns are, then why would they want to help you?

I know I'm speaking very generally, but I remember I started ... It was one of my first product rolls, and I drove like 90 miles to a different office, and I met with the operations team. I met with a VP, and he was like, "Listen, if you're going to be successful here, you need to make sure that all of your ideas are vetted through us or at least let us know what you're doing so release day doesn't come, and we're like completely surprised and thrown off guard," and I thought, okay, he's probably telling me this because other people haven't done that, and that just really stuck in my mind. I think ... That was many, many years ago, but that advice has always stuck with me.

Suzanne: Did you comply, or did you go running to another company when you were sort of faced with that?

Bettina: Oh, I complied. I think that was like my second week of work there, so, I mean, you kind of have to comply, but it's really helpful because ... And I guess I'm just talking in terms of internal software that other people are using, or even maybe it's like, oh, I'm rolling out something to customers, and if I don't get it vetted with customer service, then they might get flooded with calls, right?

Bouncing your ideas off of other people who have different perspectives with how to interact with the product, they're always going to give you good feedback, and it's really, really important to maintain those relationships and maintain those communication channels because they're also going to help you think of things that you hadn't thought of. I mean, I think as product managers, we're like jack of all trades and master of none, but I do think that that we should be masters in communication because we need to keep people updated on what it is we're doing because it affects them.

Suzanne: One of my mantras in life is the quality of your life is directly proportionate to the quality of your relationships. Sounds like that's equally true in the context of product. If you're not keeping right relation with key stakeholders, as you described, it's going to be a shit show.

It makes me think of another interesting point. Everybody's talking about Lean, and it's one thing to take up the ideals of the Lean movement, and it's certainly one thing to apply them in the context of a startup environment. I think, as we're seen more and more enterprise or larger organizations are becoming interested in what does that mean. Also, this is case in point, in this VP of Operations telling you, "Everything is going to be fine as long as you run everything by us." That inherently creates a roadblock to Lean thinking. I mean, there is a necessary feedback integration loop that comes with scrum, that comes with the approach, and then there also has to be room to say, "I'm empowered to come up with ideas and move on them, and if I have to start running around and vetting it with everybody ...

Bettina: Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point, and I mean, I would say that the way around that is to include them in ideation, right? Include them in your design sprints, include people who you would consider subject matter experts in X, Y, or Z, have them come up with ideas because they're going to think of things you didn't think of and have them feel included, right? If they're all gung-ho about one thing that you know it's going to bomb, at least let them open their mind to everything we think about as a product team and show them, "Hey, this is our process, and this is how we think about things, and this is how we prioritize features." I think that's one way around it so you don't have to have all these different people check a box before you can move forward.

Suzanne: Right, right. Interesting. Talk about, if you're willing, take us through kind of the day in the life of an enterprise product manager starting with coffee because I think one of the things ... We talk a lot on the show about demystifying product management, and I think one of the things that continues to be unclear or mysterious, certainly to people who are new to the field or who are just working in roles for the first time, is the rhythm, right? The rhythm of day to day versus the rhythm of a launch versus the rhythm of a crisis. When you talk about product management, what does the average day kind of look like?

Bettina: I think that's ... Well, okay. I actually really like product management because no day is the same, so I could start the morning up in the clouds and in the evening down in the weeds or vice versa. I think the difference between working in a small company versus working in a larger company is you just have a lot more meetings, and you have a lot more people that you need to stay in communication with. Those are the challenging things where you have to be very careful and protective about your time because, if you're not, then your entire life can get sucked into meetings, and then you're like, "Oh, wow. It's 5:30, and I haven't written a single user story for my grooming session tomorrow." I think that you need to prioritize your time accordingly.

Suzanne: Right. Time management is maybe the single hardest personal productivity skill to master. That so few people are actually even connected to their own time, how much time it takes to do, and yeah, there is that perceived sense of, "I'll get to it," which is one of the reasons I like tools like Pivotal Tracker or JIRA and velocity as a concept. I mean, we, at the Development Factory, we've brought agile processes across all of our departments, our marketing is agile, when are we really going to get that thing happening versus just a feeling of stuff might get done.

Bettina: Yeah, and I mean, using good tools, using good communications tools are going to help you decrease your number of meetings, so yeah, using things like JIRA or whatever to convey oh, this is what all the teams and working on in the upcoming sprint. These are our goals for the upcoming sprint using ... Gosh, I don't know. Even intranet pages just explaining, "Hey, this is my vision for this product, and these are the high-level problems that I'm looking to solve," and, "Oh, here is a dashboard of our metrics and how we're pacing and where we're going." Providing all of those high-level details might actually save you a few meetings because people can just go look at that and get a better understanding of what it is you're looking to do.

Suzanne: Right, this idea of optimizing internal communication introduces a whole world of potential processes. I want to go back to my question about a day in the life of, rephrase it and see if this offers a different perspective. There's this idea that what you're really managing at any given time is short-term initiatives, mid-term initiatives, and long-term initiatives, and maybe that's another way to bring color to your statement about no one day is the same because one day you might be all about the short-term stuff, and another day you might be sipping on coffee literally or proverbially and thinking about the big picture. What are just a handful of things that live in those piles in your experience?

Bettina: Yeah, I guess ... That resonates with me because bigger companies have bigger time frames. If you're at a startup, you might just be thinking of how am I going to get through the next 90 days without running out of money, whereas, in a larger organization that's well funded, how will this decision affect us in five years? How is this going to work when we know we need to upgrade SAP, which is going to happen, and seven years? Trying to understand should I do build something? Should I buy something? I think build or buy is more explored in larger organizations because there's just bigger budgets and more money and understanding where ... I guess roadmaps were just longer, and so you have to understand what your product's life cycles are and how they all connect together and interact together.

Suzanne: Right. I like to reflect a lot about this idea of what is the right environment for me. Part of why we talk about these concepts is because enterprise isn't for everybody. Startup isn't for everybody. It's such a sort of very different beast, and if you're the kind of person who's like, "I don't want to commit to this relationship right now because I might want to go backpacking in two months and sell my car." Then the last thing you want to be doing is roadmapping seven years into the future.

Bettina: That's true. That's true. Somebody told me not too long ago that I am a startup wolf in enterprise clothing. What was that? You’re a startup product manager disguised in enterprise clothing, which I thought was like, yeah, that's pretty true because I actually love the fast-paced nature of startups. I love how you might pivot twice a day, but what I don't like is the risk, so I don't like knowing, "Oh, no. I might be out of a job tomorrow," because I've got bills to pay. Trying to find the larger companies that are willing to invest in like self-disruption is what I'm really interested in right now.

Suzanne: Right. Now you have a more succinct answer for the next person who asks you what kind of product manager you are.

Bettina: Yes.

Suzanne: You're like, "I'm a startup wolf in enterprise clothing." Metrics. Everyone's like, "Metrics, metrics, metrics," and there's so much tech now around a dashboard for this, a dashboard for connecting your dashboards, dashboards, metrics, metrics. I guess I'm curious, in your opinion, how much are product companies really embracing metrics versus knowing they should but being way more loose about collecting data, analyzing data, responding to data. You don't have to out anybody but just generally from what you've seen.

Bettina: Generally from what I've seen, companies are not obsessed with data and kind of don't care about it, and ...

Suzanne: Interesting.

Bettina: Maybe it's because they're happy with their bottom line. Maybe it's just because, "Oh, well we haven't traditionally done it, and it's too hard to start now." I've actually also seen the inverse where it's like, "We're collecting a crap ton of data, and we're drowning in it. We have no idea how to make any sense of it.

Suzanne: Right. Information overload.

Bettina: I think that it's hard to make data-driven decisions. It's hard to do that. It's hard to know what the right things are to measure, so I mean, I always try. You're never going to have perfect data especially if you're working in older companies that have been around longer than computers. You're never going to have perfect data, and people aren't careful about keeping historical accuracy, so you can go back and look at how is X, Y, and Z trending?

I always try to implement some form or another of metrics, even if it's just ... Even just estimating or guessing. I'm going to estimate that right now we're at X, and I'm pretty sure in six months we can get to Y. I'm going to just make these assumptions and crunch out some numbers, and maybe this is where we'll be. At least you're trying to measure something because otherwise how are you going to know if your product is valuable if ... It's easy to sell software and say, "Oh, well, we've got sales," and that's how you can measure, right?

I guess e-commerce is really easy to measure. It's really easy to measure marketing tools because the data is there, and the money is there, but if you're looking at internal tools, if you're looking at software as a service, then you need to figure out what moves the needle for me, and what moves the needle for my company, and what moves the needle for our clients or our end users?

Suzanne: Yeah, it's funny you say about the bottom line is good, so no one cares, and it reminds me. I worked in hospitality for years, and I worked at this restaurant that basically printed money. It was just always busy, but then it just bled money everywhere, and the owner would kind of breeze in twice a year in his Porsche and pour himself a drink and then leave. It was so bizarre to me because I've always been entrepreneurial, and I thought, don't you want ... It doesn't even matter whether you're making a million dollars a year, five million dollars a year, if you could be making ten just by stitching up a little hole. Don't you want to stitch up that hole?

Yeah, I mean, there's a mentality that probably starts at the top that's either you're the type of person who is fine with pretty good or you're sort of obsessed with optimization. It's interesting to think about how the mentality of the leadership team can trickle down, even to something as specific as which metrics departments try to collect because there's that sense of, "Well, if no one else is watching, why should we?"

Bettina: Yeah, then why bother?

Suzanne: Fascinating. I never want to have an enterprise company. If you ever see me on that track, I want you to pull up this recording and remind me.

With all of your experience, has there been any recent learning on the job where you thought, "Oh, I didn't see that blind spot. I feel new again," from discovering, or are you just like super pro now, and mistakes don't happen?

Bettina: Oh, I make mistakes all the time, all the time. I think that everybody should feel comfortable and celebrate in their mistakes and their failures because you're never going to have all of the perfect information available to you when you start, and you have to pivot. It's kind of more exciting to me to find problems and issues because I'm like, "Oh, I found something that I can learn from," and now because of this, we can decide. We can make a decision to move this way.

I think those tell very good stories. You can try as hard as you want upfront to make assumptions, and I guess that's always very valuable. Make assumptions upfront and then wait until they're invalidated but at least have a backup plan of what am I going to do if the color is blue and it ends up being green. How am I going to pivot from that?

Suzanne: Is there a ... Not to put you on the spot, but ... One of the things, just talking about validated learning which you were just describing, is no matter how much you know, validate it. A lot of things product managers, myself included, I've kind of said, "I fell into the trap of like going straight to feature or straight to design. I fell in love with my solution." Do you have kind of a weak spot that you know in yourself that you have to keep that eye on because you have a tendency that you want to do it this way, and you know it's not the right way.

Bettina: I think I've gotten burned enough in the past where if I don't know why I'm doing something because someone's just asking for it, and I'm just building a solution without really understanding what problem I'm solving for, then yeah, I've definitely made those mistakes, and those are mistakes that I will not make again.

Suzanne: Just going along with something because someone put it on your desk, and you're like-

Bettina: Some executive is like, "This is what I want," and if you, as a product manager do not understand the value of it, and the problem that you're solving for, then yeah, that's very, very dangerous.

Suzanne: Right, and that raises the question of the fundamental challenge of product management is negotiating all of these people, many of whom are peers, oftentimes people senior to you within the organization, and if you're doing your job right, and you're adhering to the principles that you know work, then you're oftentimes faced with somebody driving toward a real bad decision. How do you ... Is it just about confidence and courage? Is it just about sometimes you have to suck it up and let the CEO or whoever have their way, and how do you negotiate that and feel good about yourself?

Bettina: I think the first thing is that ... What I've noticed in our culture in business is nobody ever wants to just complain about problems, and we're all encouraged. Don't be whiners. Come up with ... Be proactive. Come up with a solution, and that carries over into business, right? Oftentimes, you get people just wanting solutions, but you don't really know why. You don't know why they want that solution, and so I think it's up to product managers to really go and uncover those things and understand the root cause.

I equate this to nobody would ever go ... Well, no doctor would ever have a patient walk into their office and say, "I need this drug," and a doctor would just give it to them. A doctor would like, "Well, what are your symptoms? Help me understand why you think you need this?"

Suzanne: Unless they're on the pharmaceutical payroll. Then they're just like, "Try this new thing."

Bettina: Right.

Suzanne: But we digress. You're right. A good doctor would ask those questions.

Bettina: Yeah, and I think a good product manager will uncover. Sometimes what you hear ... Even sometimes the problems that you hear are symptoms of deeper problems, and it can be hard. I mean, it can be really hard to try and uncover deep problems that people might not feel comfortable talking about, or people maybe haven't thought of either and getting in there, rolling up your sleeves and figuring those things out is really, really important.

Suzanne: That's an example of perhaps where the five whys can be helpful is why is that? Why is that?

Bettina: I found good team members, if they're empowered to call you out, then they should because if your team doesn't understand the value of what you're building or the problem that you're solving for, then you don't have their buy in either.

Suzanne: So the advice, it sounds like, is stop and ask why.

Bettina: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzanne: That's just a good way to kind of insert yourself from going too far too fast.

Bettina: Absolutely.

Suzanne: Do you think product management is a male-dominated space still?

Bettina: Yes because I don't know that many female product managers.

Suzanne: I thought maybe you might have said, "Not anymore," but you don't know in the early days, but it's always been male dominated, and you feel that it's still male dominated.

Bettina: I mean, if I could think about my product manager friends or people that I've worked with in past companies, I would say 25% female. That's just a rough guess.

Suzanne: Why do you think there aren't ... I mean, aside from the standard problematic reasons of men in power and women not having access to it. I think things are changing. Do you think that women don't gravitate toward product, or am I just ... Maybe that's sexist of me. Why aren't women around? I want to know. I mean-

Bettina: Yeah, where are they?

Suzanne: Yeah, where are they? I asked this question because, for me, part of the goal, what's so important about 100 PM is to present an inclusive and expansive window into product management, and it's always been part of our core mission. I don't just want to talk to a hundred guys. I don't want a hundred guys to tell me about what's what, but I want to talk to them. I mean, there's great men in the industry. They've got great insights, but I want to talk to women. We've been successful in doing that, but I almost have to wonder how much that is the efforts of us kind of ferreting out those few women that are out there, and let's have that conversation. Why aren't women in product? It's so fun.

Bettina: It's so much fun. I think that software product management is still pretty technical, and that's my guess as to why there aren't more women because I think that there's more women in leadership roles, right? I think product management is a leadership type of role, but it's also combining technical acumen, and there's countless studies that say women aren't really gravitating toward ... Or I guess girls in school aren't really gravitating towards science and math, right, and how can we encourage that? How can we encourage from a young age having girls embrace technology?

Suzanne: By giving them the same cover on magazines as boys get probably, which is like images of computers and mountains and messages that's like, "Ready to conquer the world," versus hairbrushes from that early age.

Bettina: There is this meme that I saw recently, and I'm going to try and find it, but it was like, "What if the cover of Glamour wasn't the Ten Hottest New Trends for Fall and How to Get Him to Propose?" You know, all those headlines that they put on those women magazines. What if, instead, it was like How to Empower Your Team, How to be a Great Communicator, What Are Your Thoughts on Leadership, and ... How would that change our mentality in our culture?

Suzanne: Right, yeah. Start early, plant seeds early, the you can do anything, and that anything is meant to include anything boys can do too. Ghostbusters is a good start, but then you saw what happened with that. Everybody shit all over it because girls can't have nice things, I think.

Have you ever wanted to started your own product business? Startup dreams?

Bettina: I have.

Suzanne: You have done it, or you have wanted to?

Bettina: I have done it. I have done it. I tried ... Well, my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, we started an app company. He's a software developer, and then he just didn't want to work on it anymore, so he dissolved it, but I mean, we got pretty far. We registered as an LLC, and we had a working prototype, and we had content for our app, and I think the idea was good, and I actually still think the idea is good. I ran ... Gosh, this was like ten years ago, I used to have a blog about the Pittsburgh Steelers just because I'm a huge football fan, and-

Suzanne: Are you from Pittsburgh?

Bettina: I'm not from Pittsburgh.

Suzanne: You just love the Steelers?

Bettina: I'm from Cleveland originally, but I went to college in Pittsburgh, and living in Pittsburgh pretty much means that you have to become a Steelers fan. It's like an unspoken rule. It's like a virus that you catch when you're there. I made a blog about it, and at the time, I was trying to learn more about search engine optimization, and so I just applied it to my blog, and it was fun. I just wrote articles about the players, and there were a lot of players at that time that I just really admired because I thought that they were really good role models, and they use their fame in order to help their fans and help society in general. It was fun for me. It was my hobby. I'd just post articles about them and write things, and I made a JavaScript like What's Your Steelers Nickname generator. I tried-

Suzanne: What's the formula for getting your Steelers nickname?

Bettina: Oh, man. I think it was just random. I think it was.

Suzanne: Not like your middle name plus the last name of your first elementary school ...

Bettina: Yeah, I just included actual Steelers nicknames, and you just type in your name, and it just spits something out.

Suzanne: How did you do on the SEO by the way, did you get to the top-ranking position?

Bettina: I was in top ten for a while.

Suzanne: Nice.

Bettina: Which was really awesome, and I earned enough money off of ad revenue to fund a couple of cases of beer every now and then.

Suzanne: This is a great case study. We talk a lot of side projects and the importance of taking on side projects certainly as a way of getting experience when you don't have experience, but I think also as a way of learning things, especially if your job doesn't afford you that room.

If you're in product management, but you happen to be in a larger organization, and your role is more structured, and maybe you're not really touching the marketing as much, but you're watching all of this exciting stuff that's kind of happening with inbound and with ad tech, and you're thinking, "I want to get in on this. I want to see if I can get to 10,000 page views in 30 days," and then it's having that constant curiosity to go out and play on your own and stay fresh.

Bettina: And it's fun.

Suzanne: Well, especially if you have a cool topic like football.

Bettina: Yeah, and I guess my most current side project is the Product Manager's Association of LA.

Suzanne: That was going to be my next question.

Bettina: Perfect segue.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Bettina: It's been really, really interesting working with this organization.

Suzanne: Tell us about it because there's probably people listening who aren't familiar with it. It's PMA-LA.

Bettina: Yeah, and the website is pma dot la. We've been around, I think, for three or four years. I went to the first meetup ever and got to know the founder, and then just started volunteering. We hosted our second ever Product Camp this past July at Hulu. We had about 300 other product managers attend. Marty Cagan was our Keynote speaker, and it was so much fun.

I mean, I didn't ever think that event planning would be in my wheelhouse, but events are products. There's all these tiny little details that you got to think of or else they're going to kick you in the ass later. It was fun just figuring things out, flying by the seat of my pants because this year we had to register to become a nonprofit, and I'm just like, "I have no idea how to do that. How do I register this business with the state of California, and how do I set up the accounting," so I just kind of ...

Suzanne: We normally have entire legal departments that look after those kind of things.

Bettina: Yeah, but we're a volunteer-run organization, so it's like someone's got to do it. Hopefully I didn't mess anything up.

Suzanne: Guess we'll find out next tax season.

Bettina: Yeah, but it's been great. We have, aside from Product Camp, it was an all-day Saturday thing. Aside from that, we have meetups every other month or so around LA, and hopefully we can increase to more, but we're really looking at what does it mean to create a community of product managers, and how can we better service them, and how can we bring people together, and what things do they care about, and how can we make that happen?

Suzanne: Right. We'll solicit listener feedback on this because I was going to ask you that same question which was exactly. It's what does the product management community need because it is a community, and I was at the meetup, as you know, a few weeks ago at Philosophie, and it was a great event, and I felt ... It was nice to be in a room and be like, "Oh, hey," and "Oh, hey," and all these people that you know from different avenues, but it's funny LA is this big city, and yet there is this very vibrant and emerging community, and I am wondering a lot about how do we nourish it as people who are volunteering in the space of bolstering awareness for product management, bolstering awareness for the real people doing the real jobs. You don't have the answers is what you're saying.

Bettina: I mean, I don't think that anyone has all of the answers, but we should be getting together more and talking about it, talking about what keeps us up at night and talking about like, "Hey, can you help poke holes in my ideas," or, "Help me try and figure this out," and we should help each other.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. I think you're absolutely right about that because we're all sort of doing it alone, and it is, in many ways, new. I mean, as you described earlier, you're sort of able to go back and retrospectively put a label on things that weren't called product management then, even though they very clearly were, and I think there's so many people entering into the space for the first time. There's people like yourself who have been doing it for a lot of years. Every environment is different. The tools are being ushered in. Old tools are being ushered out, and it can sometimes feel there's this sense of, "Am I doing everything wrong, and everybody is better at this than me?" That's ... It's nice to go, oh, no, you're not. We're all kind of making it up sometimes, and then "Hey, here's actually a really cool thing that I used to do that could be applicable," or, "Here's a great tool that we're using that helped us to automate this process."

Bettina: Yep, yep, and a couple of companies back, I worked for this small boutique product management consulting firm, and it was really cool to see and apply methodology that the entire company took in order just to understand requirements that we're going to deliver to our clients, and they had this prescribed approach, and it was great because I'm like, "Oh, wow. You guys crystallized into paper," because they've written books, "You guys have crystallized in the paper what I've kind of been doing, and these are also really great ideas that I'd never thought of, and I'll start incorporating that now," but I think that everybody could benefit from that.

Suzanne: Right. All right. Product managers everywhere come to the next PMA. When is the next event?

Bettina: Oh my gosh. You know what? We don't have one set yet?

Suzanne: Oh, Bettina. Okay. Product managers everywhere, by the time you listen to this conservation, we will really try to have that next event online, pm.la.

Bettina: It'll be on our website as soon as we've got it set.

Suzanne: Aside from your organization, are there any recommended resources that you would want to kind of add to? At 100 PM, we have kind of an ever growing, recommended reading list, and it's not just reading, it's podcasts, it's blogs, it's anything that you think, "You got to know this." It doesn't have to be product management but just that somebody that has impacted your work view, life view, or I don't know.

Bettina: I read the Silicon Valley Product Group blog, which is Marty Cagan's blog. I don't think that's anything new, but what I think is important is focus on the stuff that the kids like and that kids are doing, and kids ... Putting that into loose quotes, but we need to look at the generations who are younger than us because I'm old enough where I remember in high school signing onto the internet for the first time through AOL.

Suzanne: That sound, the dial-up?

Bettina: Yes, of the modem? I remember that, but you know what? There are people entering the workforce today who just grew up with the internet, and so the way that they're going to think about things are going to be completely different, and I think that it's always really important to care or understand what they care about and use the apps that they use.

Suzanne: Do you have any millennial influencers or products that the kids use that you've taken up in your life as a way of connecting?

Bettina: Let me see. I'm going to look at my apps.

Suzanne: Yeah, it's like these are the moments where I'm like, "I'm old." Well, it's funny why it's called the reading list, and it's not a reading list is precisely because I think everybody wants to read their news and read their information because I want to read my news and information, and then I realized. I've had conversations with people, and I'd say any books? "Oh, I don't read books, but I've got 20 podcasts I can tell you about," and I thought, "I'm old," but also this is important.

Bettina: This is kind of an older one, but it's called Neko Atsume, and it's this game that you can play. You basically just have a patio, and you can put out food and toys, and then cats will come. It really appealing to the crazy cat lady side of me. That's a game I really like. I actually bonded with one of these interns that I worked with a couple of months ago because she had a Neko Atsume lanyard, so we had something in common, which I think was pretty cool.

This is actually really funny. Last year, I was in a fantasy football league, and the commissioner was a lot younger than me, and he was like, "Venmo me your $20 entry, or if you're over the age of 25, you can PayPal it." I was like, "Damn."

Suzanne: Are you on Venmo?

Bettina: Well, yeah. I joined after that. I was like, "I'm not going to be outdone."

Suzanne: I love Venmo, but yeah, it's ... They have one actual fatal product flaw, in my opinion, which is that two people can't bind to the same account, so if you're married, you have to have a separate Venmo account which is a major oversight on the use cases.

Bettina: But probably their users aren't married.

Suzanne: Is this you telling me I'm old again in a nicer way? I want to reflect back to you ... First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

Bettina: Thank you for having me.

Suzanne: It's awesome.

Bettina: This has been a blast.

Suzanne: Also, we're so lucky to have you because we talked a little bit before about women in tech and where are they, and we want you, and we want you to come up, and I also love that you're here kind of shattering the stereotypes with your Pittsburgh Steelers blog and your fantasy football and all of these and embracing the technical from a very, very early age. I think it's very inspirational for people to hear and say, yeah, there are so many different ways, not just in which product managers can look but what it can look to be female identified and embrace ideas that aren't typically associated with that gender and fucking rock it and be incredibly successful, so thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Bettina: Thanks for having me, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Awesome.

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Product Managers Association - LA

Founded in 2012 as a small meetup group, PMA LA has grown to a membership community of 2000+ professional product managers. Their mission is to provide learning and networking opportunities and great events for the community. The group is free to join and open to all digital innovation and management professionals.
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