You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Mark: My name is Mark Bertrand. I am a senior product manager at a company called Sprout Social.

Suzanne: What is Sprout Social?

Mark: Sprout Social is a social media management platform. We create a platform for brands to manage all of their social media all in one place. Everything from managing large-scale social media campaigns, doing customer service through social media, and providing analytics and reporting on those activities.

Suzanne: Now, let's go back in time for a moment, Mark. We'll definitely talk more about Sprout Social later. Your background seems to be an interesting mix of product management experience, sort of official product manager title, and what looks to be much more entrepreneurial, sort of a couple co-founder stints and business development type stuff. So tell us about how you ended up here.

Mark: Sure. All of it was by accident. So yeah. You kind of hit the nail on the head. I have a ... I guess, going all the way back to college, I graduated at school with a degree in entrepreneurship and finance. So I always wanted to do my own thing, obviously went to school for it. At the same, got a degree in finance. Thought that was pretty interesting. Interviewed for a few jobs and realized, I had no desire to do that for a living. Wearing a suit, doing that whole thing just sounded terrible.

Suzanne: What would a career typically spit you out at on the other end?

Mark: That's a good question. There are a lot of paths to take. But something like private equity or financial analysis roles. Something like that. I don't know long-term because I didn't explore it enough, but I knew that all the entry-level positions would not have been nearly as interesting as I would have liked to do. And I think I went into it with all the wrong reasons. And I knew just going back to why I went to school for entrepreneurship, I wanted to build things. So that's really what was driving me, so I knew a role in finance wouldn't provide me with any sort of, I guess, any sort of ownership and ability to build anything.

Suzanne: Do you remember the first thing you ever built, like even if it goes back to childhood? Like, "This is the moment. I've created."

Mark: That's a good question. I mean, I did all the Lego sort of things like that. The first thing that comes to mind though is my first website I built, because that kind pretty close to this. And I think I was at seventh through eighth grade, and built it off of like whatever software came on the computer, and I got it on the Internet. And I was like, "This is insane." Like I can do this?

Suzanne: This is early days of Web.

Mark: Yep. Very early days. And then, just kind of ... yeah, always, always have been putzing and playing with things, and yeah. But that was the one that sticks out in mind. It was like the first thing that clicked. It was like, "This is cool."

Suzanne: All right. So you're heading down the finance path, and then you have a glimpse of your future, and your future is wearing an uncomfortable suit and you're like, "Forget it." What happens then?

Mark: I decided against probably all better judgment that instead of me getting a job right out of school in 2008, which was a tough time to get a job anyway, that I'd go ahead and start a eCommerce site.

Suzanne: I'm sure your parents were thrilled by that decision.

Mark: Oh, certainly thrilled to know that my college degree in finance was going to be put to good use. So yeah, I started an eCommerce site, selling blueprints to contractors online. Didn't know anything about construction or printing for that matter. Just knew that I wanted to, kind of be, in this tech space and at the time, I don't even think I knew what a startup was. So I kind of started this thing, and kind of was struggling on my own, had a few friends who were also doing some online stuff. And through them and some other folks, and kind of discovered what a startup was.

And as a result of that, at the time, it was like 2009 or so, 2008, 2009, Chicago had a smaller tech scene. I'm totally making this number up, but a couple of hundred of people in it. And I started getting more involved, and I got involved with a organization called Startup Weekend where and I organized along with a friend of mine, a few events here in Chicago and actually done a few around the country. And that's when I kind of realized what a startup was. I'm like what this thing that I've always felt would, could actually convert to in reality.

So through that, through that experience at Startup Weekend and my own background building in eCommerce site, I kind of hooked up with a couple of guys and did kind of turn into to my first startup.

Suzanne: Your first official startup.

Mark: First official startup.

Suzanne: Pause for one second because you've said so many things here, and I want to make sure that I drill into some of the ones that had caught my attention.

First, did you build that eCommerce website, that first one? You did?

Mark: I did not. I built out a lot of sites that fed it. But I paid somebody, I think like a thousand dollars, who was a friend of a friend, to build out the initial one. And afterwards, I didn't have enough money to keep paying this person. So I actually had to figure out how to do ... any sort of development on- I had to make changes for a customer that, and to just make changes on it in the internal processes. So I actually figured out how to hack on it enough. It was in dot net. I still don't know dot net but I was able to figure out enough to make it work.

So, no, I didn't build it. That was kind of a learning experience in and of itself-

Suzanne: All the Microsoft-certified developers listening in are just cringing right now. They're like, "That's how people won't hire us. They're trying to hack their way through the sophisticated framework."

Mark: Yep.

Suzanne: Why blueprints? I mean, this is so curious. You said you had no connection to the construction industry. Where did that idea even come from?

Mark: It came through a friend of mine, and the idea was an SEO play. So through a different friend, we had the idea that printing large format blueprints, we had the connection to do that. The idea was that if we could get feeder sites through all the major cities, chicagoblueprints.com, Los Angeles blueprints, et cetera. we could probably drive some traffic through SEO. And it was pretty successful, but at the time that the concept was pretty successful driving traffic. At the time though, construction wasn't really bustling in 2009. So it's difficult to keep that going on a scale that was, had any sort of growth or at least maintain my lifestyle, so that was when I decided to kind of move on to something else.

Suzanne: So you get in, you started getting hooked into the early startup scene here in Chicago. You connect with the fact that you're a startup entrepreneur, even though you didn't necessarily have that language when you launched the first business. And then, what happened?

Mark: And then what happened? So through Startup Weekend, a company came out of it that was getting a little bit of traction. I'm at the, the two founders of it, through Startup Weekend, they were able to get some investor interest coming at Startup Weekend. And they kind of turned to me and said, "Hey, you're in this startup thing. You kind of know some folks. You have a business background. We don't. We're both engineers. Do you want to kind of come on board?"

So along with myself and two other team members, kind of formed this company, which was called[Cloud Bat 00:08:54]. They raise some money, they went to an incubator in San Francisco called AngelPad, and through that I kind of was thrust into real startup world. So I was brought on there as a business person. I kind of better know how to make money and like ... I think that role was business development, but we didn't really even know what that was probably at the time in a real context. But that was kind of my first experience as a product manager, building something from nothing. But it was four engineers out of the five people, so I was only non-technical person at the time. And kind of realized there was a need to do some project management, and make sure that we actually kept moving towards the goal and what we're trying to build.

So through that, I did a little bit of research of like, hey, how do we manage team of engineers and get things done? And I think like Trello came out around then and I realized what Kanban was, so I was like, "Alright, let's try this thing and see if we can make a little more progress than we're making right now." Because before, we were kind of like herding cats. We had a bunch of ideas and we're going after everything, and I was like, "Alright. Let's try to formalize this priority a little bit and like go after one thing at a time until we actually ship it."

Suzanne: Right. This is really good stuff because I consult a lot of startups. And I think one of the patterns of startups, I mean this is true in anything, right? You don't know what you don't know. So you just sort of come together and then you kind of do it.

Do you ... my first question, I want to come back to Kanban in a moment. But my first question is, given your experience being part of a couple, kind of, early stage, scrappy but ambitious ventures, being the business guy to engineers, et cetera. Do you think there is a sort of ideal construct of a startup team that, you know, because you wear so many hats, if I were wanting to start a new business with somebody, who should I partner with so that we have the right spread of skill set, just in your opinion?

Mark: That's a great question. I think it's important to be pretty open to where your shortcomings are. So through the process of my first true startup venture-backed, I kind of realized my big shortcoming was not being as technical as some of the people around me, not being able to speak with a lot of the engineers. That's since changed and now, I think someone for me personally with a heavy sales and marketing background, would be more beneficial to partner with, versus before when I did my first, and was involved in the first startup, it was someone that had to be technical because I had no idea how to do that.

So I think it's being aware of where your shortcomings are in terms of the full package. What are all the needs of your business? You know, if you're building something, you know, what is the scope of that? How technical does someone need to be? Are you the right person to build that or not? Then how are you actually going to get it into market? And do you have the skills for that?

So the perfect mix is probably a blend of every skill possible, and being overly focused or expert in one space doesn't translate super well to startups in my opinion. You kind of have to be a jack of all trades and be able to get-at least be open to getting dirty in every aspect of it.

Suzanne: I'm surprised given your deep dot net experience that you found yourself struggling to communicate with the engineers early on. Can you talk just a little bit more about that? What was that experience like, of realizing, "I don't have this language," if you will.

Mark: Yeah. It was a pretty early realization I had that we were integrating with a lot of APIs. We clearly had a database. We had our Web app. We were building an API and we were building a mobile app. I didn't really know how all those spoke to one another. I pretty much no idea how they work. So that was when I realized that okay, I'm not kind of speaking the same language as these guys, and I need to at least understand how this system works. That was kind of the realization was that okay, these guys are just speaking a language that is foreign to me.

So I decided and asked them one day, "How do I start learning this, like I'm on my own?" And they were super helpful and kind of pointing me some resources. And actually through this experience, through that startup, learned Ruby on Rails. I don't remember if I contributed any code to that. I don't think I did at that stage. But at least I gained a basic understanding of conceptually how a Web app and mobile app speak to an API, and just how things are built, and gained more of an appreciation of how they're built and what it takes for developer and engineer to put something together. And through that kind of experience was able to kind of speak the same language as them, have a better understanding of the tasks needed to complete something. And that was very beneficial as that process went on.

Suzanne: Do you feel, so given that you have this business background and clearly the entrepreneurial spirit, how has your experience changed working for the last number of years as you have in sort more structured roles? Do you feel in any way held back, or it's helped you to grow as an individual?

Mark: Yeah. That's-

Suzanne: Did I just push on a pain point? Yeah, I want my own business again?

Mark: Yeah. So I definitely have the, and this is no surprise to anybody, but I definitely have the entrepreneurial bug and want to go back and do my own thing. However, working more of a structured environment has taught me one thing that I didn't know I didn't have before, and that's managing and growing teams is a skill set that is ... I think very ... difficult to even understand if you've never done it.

So if you've always been in startups, and experienced very small teams, which I had until a couple of years ago, I'd been in only those teams. It was kind of impossible for me to conceptualize what are the skills needed to grow a team or be part of a growing team because we're at Sprout now, 300 employees. I think when we started, we were 150. I've built out, worked with engineering team to build out a growth team here. It started like one or two, I think two of us, two or three of us total. And now, I think we're at a total of eight, nine or ten.

So as I grow, and then ... that's something that with my goal of going back and starting my own startup and wanted to grow something to hopefully very large, that's something you don't, that's a skill that you can't really learn unless you've gone through. Of course, you can't tell someone like this is how you would do it, at least not in my opinion.

So being able to at least go through that process with Sprout and better understand what it takes to grow and kind of the pinpoints along the way has been hugely beneficial. So I think that will be applicable to when I want to go back and do my own thing some day.

Suzanne: Well, let's dive into it just a little bit. What are some of the things that you specifically learned from growing a team? I mean is it are you talking about the actual recruitment process? Are you talking about how the dynamic changes when it's, first it was just me and so and so, and now it's me and so and so, and that person and this person? Help us to understand that journey a little.

Mark: So developing a new team internally, there is a trade offs in what I would do to the road map on another team. So you take one or two engineers or designer out of the team and put them on this new team. What are the trade-offs and what are the benefits in doing that? So that's something that's interesting, looking at the whole company on a road map and where you're going. And better understanding what the impacts are and weighing those. You have to be pretty thoughtful through that process. I've got to learn through some great team members here how, have some frameworks to do that. So it's been very interesting to be a part of that.

And then, growing a team from those two to three people to ten is interesting. Everyone works a little bit differently. Everyone has different motivations. They want to do different things. So that's a different piece to tackle once you start growing the team. It's been a really interesting process.

Suzanne: How much of that work, you know, because this is, I think this is an interesting piece that we're touching on. Nobody is going to tell you exactly what you need to do. That's certainly true in an absolute startup environment, because as we already said, we sort of don't even know what we're supposed to be doing. But then as the company is getting bigger, I think the higher levels of management are looking to people like you and saying, "Okay, Mark, you got this right?" And so like build your team, and make sure it doesn't suck. And then all of these kind of subtle requirements start to become part of your description, like making sure there's a cultural fit, making sure that morale is up.

This is like the people management side of the product management role. Can you talk about your experience in that, and how that changed your understanding of what you're supposed to be focusing on in a given day or a given week or month?

Mark: The interesting thing about being a product manager in general is that you don't actually manage anybody. At least I haven't found a company that you do that in your specific team. Maybe some PMs but in terms of your engineers, your designers, your QA, you don't, you're not their people manager. You have to convince them or ... bribe them-

Suzanne: (laughs)

Mark: -or whatever it is to kind of ...

Suzanne: Persuade.

Mark: Persuade.

Suzanne: Align them.

Mark: Align then. Yeah. So, yeah. You have to align them around the goal and the mission of the team and the company, we were there to do, and rally them around the road map that they might have questions about or be questioning.

So that's been, I guess from a people management perspective, interesting because you don't have any recourse. Not that you would hang over someone's hat and say if you don't do this, there's going to be ramifications to it, as a people manager. But not having that role has been interesting. So you become a people manager but you're not. That's something that even some people on your team kind of forget. You're not their manager. They look to you for direction setting and for priority setting and what we were there to build up at the end of the day. Like, you're not in charge of their career path. So that's kind of an interesting space you're in. You work directly with other people managers to help say, "Hey, they're really thriving in this," "They're struggling here," "I think this is a growth area" ... and that's been pretty interesting to learn how to be a people manager without actually being one.

Suzanne: Yeah. It's like having the responsibility but not the jurisdiction.

Mark: Yeah.

Suzanne: Which is challenging because you're taking on, I think certainly emotionally. You become acutely aware that you have a responsibility to get things accomplished with the product. And you have a responsibility to get them accomplished in a way where everybody feels good, and everybody feels that they made the right levels of contribution. And you're not the people manager, and you don't have the power to just fire somebody because, for any reason.

Mark: And I think from my experience, specifically I've had really great luck with everyone on my teams. So from an emotional level, I internalize I want everyone to be as successful as possible, so there is a cost and ... I just feel it's responsibility to make sure that a, we're shipping the best thing possible to customers and users, but that we're, I'm making sure that they're getting every opportunity they can have at helping their managers better understand that.

Yeah, it's been interesting not being the people manager, but being I think so heavily invested in the team's development and stuff like that.

Suzanne: Talk to us about what is the problem or need that Sprout Social is addressing and as a platform?

Mark: There are a lot.

Suzanne: Give us a few.

Mark: The way our platform is broken up is into a couple of different verticals. One is analytics and reporting. It's pretty self-explanatory. We provide analytics and social activities. We have our engagement tools which are social. We pull in comments, retweets, ad mentions, onto one inbox where a customer service team can manage any incoming and inbound social request. And then we have our kind of social campaign planning platform, which are publishing and calendar, sort of tooling.

So a social media team can actually plan out a month or week of their social campaign. That's kind of the three main verticals of our platform. That's one of the interesting things about my role in growth in general is helping people find their aha moment, given that we do so many things and we mean different things to different people.

So a customer service person who's interested in finding a better tool to handle all the inbound direct messages and private messages they're getting on Facebook. In Twitter, we have to make sure they can find that very easily in the platform, and then being able to tie that activity to a report that would surface their performance, and they'd be able to show it to their internal stakeholders.

So we mean a lot to a lot of different people, and that's one of the challenges with the growth role here is that we actually, we have someone comes in. They tell us in different ways what they're interested in, but actually what that translates to is a feature and making sure that they find the exact feature that would give me that kind of moment of Zen and like, "Okay, I get why I would use Sprout over something else and why it's better than using the native platforms."

Suzanne: Great. I think what I'm hearing you describe is the idea of different user personas, and those users having different goals for the platform. And so does your role cut across all the verticals, whereas somebody here might be specifically focused on features or benefits within analytics and reporting, your job is to really cut across all of those aspects of the product to make sure we're delivering on the user goals?

Mark: Totally. My role is for the, from the top of funnel through the end of our 30-day trial that a customer discovers everything that they need to, to make that purchase decision and make it from an educated standpoint. So I'm across-cutting across all the different features to make sure that we kind of service them in a lot of different ways. And there's collaboration with those different teams, but you hit the nail on the head. We have feature-specific teams, that they deliver new features in each of those verticals I discussed. The publishing, engagement and reporting. And my role is to make sure those are surface trials and as we grow into our subscriber base, make sur that our subscribers are more aware of those new features as they come out.

Suzanne: Wait. For our listeners, talk a little bit about the difference between the objectives for, I think you're describing activation in a lot of ways, right? For whatever reason, I discovered Sprout Social. I saw an ad. I was on a trade show. I heard this podcast. I go to the website. I determine that it might be something interesting to me, and I sign up for the free trial. And the thing that's going to convert me to a customer is really rooted in how much value that free trial brings to me, which is, I think, tied to the discoverability of the features and whether or not those features speak to me.

So a lot of your work, it sounds like is, let's make sure those features are discoverable. Let's make sure that the person on the other end is engaging so that they can become a potentially happy customer and move through another funnel anyway.

Mark: Yeah. A hundred percent, my role is making sure that a customer understands the value we have, and like I said before, we mean different things to so many different people. So we are tasked with making sure that whatever they came to do, we're really focused right on the first five minutes of their use. Making sure that we connect them and help convey the value of our features in the first five minutes.

So if they came in to use the Inbox's customer service tool, do they have messages in the Inbox? If so, how do we show them how to mark them as complete, and what mark as complete means? How do we get them to engage with the customer, especially on a new platform, that they may just be...How do we make sure that they understand, like how dos it work in their daily workflow? And that's like 100% our primary focus, making sure that they actually see how they would use this in their daily life, and what problem it would solve for them. That's what they're looking for, right? They coming with a specific problem, they want a solution, so how do we make sure that our big platform that does a lot of different things that people can grow into, from a one-person team all the way to a thousand-person team? How do we make sure that they understand the value and the solution to their problem?

Suzanne: So they need future points. If I want to check up on how you're doing, I should just sign up for the free trial and then I'll know what Mark's up to.

Mark: Yeah. You'll know exactly what I'm doing. Try a couple of them. You'll see some are AB tasks. Like, yeah.

Suzanne: (laughs) Let's go back. When you started Sprout, you actually started on the mobile product management side. So the growth role that you're describing is what you've been doing kind of more recently. When you were brought in, what was the state of the mobile product? What was your contribution during that time?

Mark: Yeah. When I came in to Sprout, my main focus was the iOS and Android apps. We have both phone and tablet apps that mirror some of the functionality, but not all of our Web functionality. The state of mobile apps, it was interesting. We had them built. A couple of different engineers built them more as, I guess I would call it a hack week or just as a side project. The new customers wanted it. They figured out a way to get it done and actually ship something. So it was in an interesting state when I came in. They were out in the world, people were using them, they lacked a lot of features, they were in a state of needing to be elevated a bit, especially--I mean, this is only two and a half years ago. Mobile apps have come a long way since they first launched them in 2011-12 somewhere around there. So they were kind of behind the times in terms of overall experience. So my role was to a bring them up to, and goal was to bring them up to par with the rest of our features offerings. So the Inbox, for example, was missing some features. Same with publishing. So how did we, so was really prioritizing one of the most valuable features of mobile and actually determining what should be built on mobile and what shouldn't, and then setting that, and actually building it out with the team, as well as just overall, user experience enhancements from stability to actually thinking through ... as the platform crew, how do we actually fit this into a very small screen? You have not a lot of real estate. How do we actually do all these interesting things we're doing? But do them on a very small device and make it intuitive and actually delightful to use?

Suzanne: Any particular wins from that journey of bringing some love to the mobile products that you're particularly proud of?

Mark: Yeah. Overall, stability. We were able to get a level that is, it was very ... exciting. We're like 99.5% crash-free users. That was something that was a goal that we set out from the beginning. And then we brought most of the features up to a level that was in line with the web app.

All in all, it wasn't probably the sexiest of experiences on mobile in terms of, we weren't coming from zero. We weren't really able to innovate from nothing. We had a frame, I had a framework and a rails to go on say, we're building towards this. It's already been established by [Webs 00:30:42] so just go, determine what should be built on mobile and then build it out.

So I was very happy with the progress we were able to make. Now if you download the mobile apps, our new PM's taken over in the last six months, but they look great. They're very, they're at a much better level than they were when I got there.

Suzanne: Did your Sprout Social Inbox ever capture an ad mentions like, "App Sprout Social. We're loving the new mobile app!" And then you printed it up and put it by your desk.

Mark: A couple of times, yeah. I didn't print it out but I definitely shared the obvious flack. And it was a good moment because ... Of course, people who have a good experience, you hear of them. People who have a bad experience, you hear from them. Times as much. So you hear all those rough experiences and you're like, oh, man. Then you finally see a good one, yes!

Suzanne: The experience that you are describing just now, versus the one that you're currently working in, so you're mobile product management role here before you moved to the growth. This is an interesting split on how the product manager can differ. One of the things that we talk about a lot on the 100 PM show is, precisely the fact that the product manager experience can be so different, depending. Depending on the product within an organization, depending on where it is in the life cycle ...

The experience you describe for the mobile app is a lot more design/development-centric. Granted, there was some constraints. As you said, we have to kind of work backwards what we have as a Web app and what we started from the mobile app. But a lot of the work, it sounds like was improving usability, introducing features in a compelling way. Growth is a very different kind of mentality. Can you share a little bit from your perspective of how your learning has evolved from being design/development-centric to what you have to be learning and doing now in this new role?

Mark: Sure. In mobile, particularly here, it was more of execution against a road map and more of a product manager. So very focused on shipping, very focused on engineering design. And I knew that I ... I felt very confident in my ability to do that, had a lot of feedback internally, that yes, I was performing at a pace that I was almost happy with, I was shipping. So I actually talked to our CO Justin and said, "Hey, I have this background and this interest in going back and do startups." Right now, what I'm not getting is the ability to tie in revenue and sales and business objectives with shipping, and that's something that I'd really like to do. Additionally, there is this opportunity at Sprout that we're not focusing on, really optimizing the trial experience. And I'd really like to do that and through a lot of conversations, we were able to say, yeah, I think this aligns with your objectives and the business'. Let's do this."

I think it's taken a lot of ... it's definitely a different approach, and it changed like Day 0. I'm thinking about how does this all affect the customer’s trial experiences, primarily where we're focused on. There are business objectives, but we want to make sure that using the product experience and shipping stuff, that we're still in line with the level of design and features that we're shipping to our subscribers. But how do we make sure that we're testing and working more towards the business objectives, which is increasing revenue, increasing our conversion rate.

Thinking more about the business objectives and the context of all the road map and planning that we're doing, the growth team has taken some ... a definitely different shift in mentality and thinking. But one that I felt has been very interesting. Being able to think about, "Okay, we're building this. Ho does this, how do we actually present this to a customer who hasn't even paid us yet?" Additionally, the feedback we get is different. So on mobile, and on any of our Web features for subscribers, we get feedback in a lot of different forms. The reviews in app store, through actual emails to support, through conversations with our sales team and our support success teams, versus our feedback loop on trials is whether or not they paid us.

And to me that's super interesting. Kind of what I originally set out to do when I wanted to start working on growth was that, to me, the most sincerest form of feedback and positive affirmation--you built something useful, someone actually reaching into their wallet and paying you for it.

So we have a different feedback loop. It's interesting to work on something, where some customer's paying you and they're, "Hey, look. I really want this feature in there" or "I really want this improved." But it's a lot harder to ask someone who didn't subscribe like, "Hey what were we missing?" Versus somebody like, "Hey, what are we missing? Let's build this out for you and make this better."

Suzanne: In the product management class that I teach, I spend some time on a unit focused around customer acquisition and funnel-building. And I have this student say to me recently, "Do we really need to know this as PMs?" And what you were just talking about reminded me how important it is to understand the sales and marketing side of the business. And so if you are, like your role in mobile, maybe as a PM you won't be touching it as much. You particularly sought it out, probably because you come from that business background, because of that entrepreneurial side. But do you have an opinion on how much a PM should or shouldn't know about sales and marketing?

Mark: I do. And this has differed, or changed, very drastically over the last, probably three to four years. Initially, I was very much of the mindset that I should build something and build it great. And if I build it, everyone will want to pay for it and come. That's just how things work, right? If I build something great, people will come.

That is not at all true in my experience. Having an audience and having someone who can take someone through the experience is, depending on what you're building, of course, is super valuable. And that's the one thing that I realized over the years of building my own side projects and working in different startups. Even at a large company sales and marketing is hugely beneficial, and knowing even just a little bit about it, how the process works, should inform a lot of your product decisions. And it does especially right now on the growth team and the trial funnel. There's a lot of other inputs from sales and marketing, and customer experience for Sprout specifically if 30 days to make a decision whether or not they're going to buy. We have control over what they do in the app. We're sending them emails. Salespeople are talking them, providing demos. There's webinars, there's a lot of inputs into that trial experience, understanding of the strategy and what that looks like helps inform the decisions you're making a product of how customers are perceiving what you're actually building.

Suzanne: This is a big office. How many folks are here at Spr- Oh, you said about 300.

Mark: Yes. Last I heard, it was 300, but I think every two weeks we bring in a lot more people in.

Suzanne: It's basically doubled since you first joined-

Mark: Yeah. Definitely has doubled.

Suzanne: What can you say about your personal experience going from typically smaller teams, three people, ten people, maybe twenty people, to being in an organization of, I mean, 150 and now 300?

Mark: When I started, 150 was about the biggest company I ever thought I'd work at and wanted to work at. So being at 300 is pretty insane. And we're going very quickly, and it's growing everyday. We're running out of office space already. So it's been a different journey and experience in that regard.

I don't know how to this exactly, but I was ... it was interesting to go through like a performance review process compared to something where you have four or five employees, or four or five team members where it's a pretty constant performance review like, "Hey, you're screwing up" is generally what happens in a startup. Like, "Hey, you need to do better at this." Having a more formal process like that, having meetings, having more just formality around everything was a pretty interesting learning experience and did take some adjustment. As we grow, we're introducing different things from our teams splitting up into smaller teams, that are actually just the same size as they started out with. And they're just inflating. So there's a lot of different processes and different things that have come up from 150 to 300 growth trajectory. But from 4 to 5 to 150 to 300 is like...At 4 or 5 you have to do everything. You don't have a choice. I'm only a product manager. At a 300 plus company, I'm much more specialized. I'm a product manager but I do other stuff too.

Suzanne: Is there a ceiling for you as to the biggest company that you would want to work? Or are we at it right now?

Mark: I don't know.

Suzanne: (laughs) You don't ready to dive into a thousand or I think like Groupon here in Chicago has 15,000 people. Something like that.

Mark: Yeah. That is a ... I think we're, I'm in a unique position. I think we're past my threshold. But being so early in the product team, and how our product team runs at Sprout, we still have the autonomy and we report virtually directly to the CEO still. So that to me is super important, being able to better ... to understand our mission and our objectives for the year directly from the CEO is hugely beneficial and kind of a threshold. So I think 15,000 personnel is probably a bit too big for me. But I think we've passed my threshold but I'm happy here because of the, kind of unique position we're in.

Suzanne: Well, you're still growing. I saw a sign downstairs. I think did it say like, "Always be growing"? Something like that?

Mark: Yes. Yeah.

Suzanne: Is that a Sprout Social value?

Mark: That's a Sprout Social value. And it's a nod to the name. Yeah. I've seen that all over, yeah.

Suzanne: Let's talk about growing in the form of advice for some of our listeners. If I want to get into product management, what would you say to me?

Mark: I have talked to a lot of different friends and friends of friends about that exact question. And I would say, I think if you're listening to this podcast, you are on the right path. Just identifying what product management is. But the main piece of advice I generally give people is to build something. I do not think it's a requirement to be technical. But going through the process of building something is super beneficial to better understanding what your role would be. And when I'm interviewing somebody or talking to them, if they've shown any sort of initiative to build something, whether it's a website or something, or a blog or something they're interested in, actually working on a Startup Weekend project, working for a non-profit and kind of going through the process even once ... to me, that shows that they truly are interested in what they'd have to do everyday, and at least got a taste for it. Especially someone coming from the ... from no experience in product, I think, that's usually beneficial. I would say if you're really interested in, you don't have to be technical, but learning some sort of better understanding of how even HTML, CSS, JavaScript work, you can go as far as Ruby on Rails or Python. I think that's pretty beneficial even on a basic level.

I would not say it's a requirement, but to me, having a technical understanding is really helpful when you're talking with engineers on a regular basis.

Suzanne: I'm just curious because you said you've given this advice to some friends of yours. Do these people come to you saying, "Hey, I'm interested in product management and I understand that you do that. Can you tell me?" Or they don't even know what product management is and conversation starts there?

Mark: I've had it both ways. A few friends of mine have stumbled into like, gone through startups, realized that somewhere in my trajectory here. But ... and I have come across okay, I have this entrepreneurial background, I've built things before, what does that translate to in a bigger company? And product management encompasses all aspects of what you've learned as a founder. So I had it from that, they identified it on their own. And then I got it through somebody like, "I want to build stuff. What is it you do?" And I kind of explain, "Oh, I guess that would be a good fit." I actually have done something similar at my role as more of a project manager on a technical project and it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's pretty similar to what I do." So that works both ways. People really discover or stumble upon it. A lot of people also don't know what I do because I tell people I build Web apps and mobile apps. It's easier than "I'm a product manager," and like, "What is that?" I've got to explain, "Oh, I just build apps." "Oh, that's cool." And then a week later, they're like, "I have an app idea." And I'm like, "Yeah."

Suzanne: Yet, part of the dream for 100 PM is not just to honor our mission of bringing actionable advice for excelling and succeeding in product management, but that other people will one day have a definition for what is product management. Because I don't you're alone in this regard. I have many guests on the show, they're like, "Yeah. My friends and family still have no idea what I do all day long."

Mark: Yeah. So I listen to a couple of the other podcasts and one thing that came out, in a few of them was that brand management was their original product manager. I was a product manager for about a year, and my wife is a brand manager in the CPG world. And we didn't put two and two together ourselves until like a year later. She was like, "Oh, that's what product management is? That's what I do." (laughing)

Suzanne: What a nice bonding moment...

Mark: We're too much alike, I think.

Suzanne: That's funny. What about hard lessons from the job, either from your own experience, do you remember kind of a first big mistake, or a failure if you will, but you learned from? Or else things you've seen from other folks as they've been trying to work their way up through the process?

Mark: Yeah. Through my own experience, you have to be opinionated, have a backbone about your opinion and be able to justify it. But don't have an ego. You will get slapped down pretty quick. And that's happened. And it was ... ego was bruised, but I took it as a learning experience. It was important to recognize the line where you can't across, but to always justify all of your feelings. So having a strong opinion about whether or not you should build something, how it should be built, is part of your role. But being able to listen to other people's opinion and not have too much an ego that you don't hear them. And that you actually kind of bring them into your decision-making process, is something I've learned very early on in product role.

Suzanne: I think that's excellent advice, not just for succeeding in product, but succeeding in relationships in general.

Mark: Yeah, definitely.

Suzanne: What do you love about product management?

Mark: So this, yeah. I love a lot of it. I love all of it. My hobby is doing exactly what I do at work. So I go home and work on side projects. I always have an idea for a new business, new product, and actually build them at home. So I like that I get to do what I love everyday, and I get to ship. There's nothing more exciting to me than actually getting something out into the world and somebody using it, and actually seeing like, "Okay, they're using what I created from nothing." And that to me, is pretty interesting, and why I love what I do. People use what I build all day long.

Suzanne: What about recommended resources for our growing list of books, blogs, podcasts, anything that you think is worth checking out?

Mark: Yeah. I read the resources on the blog already. A lot of great ones on there. If you're already in the role, First Round is invaluable. If you're looking to use something in growth or a smaller team, Growth Hackers is awesome. I personally read Hacker News, which I didn't see on there. You have to filter through a lot of stuff, but if you aren't technical or aren't as technical as you want to be, it's a good opportunity to learn about new technologies and what's interesting and kind of changing there.

Suzanne: No problem. Last question for you, Mark. Is there a life or work philosophy that you use to kind of govern how you get through it all?

Mark: I do and I've told you this before. And it's super cheesy, but I really wish I came up with a better way to phrase it. But I love shipping and getting something out the door, getting feedback and building upon that. So I'd say, "Always be shipping," whether or not that's something you're working on in your personal life, or something that you're working on in a product role. Get it out the door. Get people's feedback. It's not as scary as you think.

Suzanne: All right. Mark Bertrand, Sprout Social. Thank you so much for being a part of our show.

Mark: Thank you. It was great.