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Hustle

with Sharon Tom of BCG Digital Ventures
Nov 30, 2016
18
Back to Podcasts
18
Hustle | 100 PM
00:00
Hustle | 100 PM

Suzanne: Thank you, first of all, for taking the time to chat with us. Have you been on a podcast before?

Sharon: No, my very first podcast ever.

Suzanne: First podcast. So excited and honored to be part of that for you. Next you’ll be booking all over the place and be like Sharon’s never in the office. She got a little taste of doing the interviews and then that’s all she wants to do now.

Sharon: That would be pretty amazing.

Suzanne: Talk to me about L.A. Have you always been in L.A.?

Sharon: Gosh, born and raised in L.A. actually.

Suzanne: You are!

Sharon: Yes. I did-

Suzanne: You’re one of five people.

Sharon: Really? No way. I’m sure you’ve got to meet more here.

Suzanne: There’s so many transients. People come here. It’s a place people come to.

Sharon: No, born and raised here. I went to UCLA for undergrad and then afterwards I actually did a stint in Silicon Valley. Did a stint in Seattle and decided I just want to be in L.A. for the rest of my life. I’m happy here.

Suzanne: Because of the weather?

Sharon: The weather, the people, my family’s here. What’s not to love?

Suzanne: Tell us a little bit about the Valley. I think for people who haven’t been there or worked there, there’s just this what is actually Silicon Valley? Is it just one giant commercial park of tech companies? Does everyone know each other? Demystify Silicon Valley for us a little.

Sharon: Silicon Valley does feel like a big commercial park of technology companies, so I won’t deny that, but I think what’s really interesting is you have all these brilliant minds together in one city. It’s the most tech-forward city I’ve ever seen where people are always trying out the latest and greatest apps. It’s almost a bubble that they’re living in because you leave it and everyone else is doing very different things. What’s popular there, other people in the South haven’t even heard of, for example.

It is very different in the sense that they’re so ahead of the times when it comes to technology because they’re the ones creating it.

Suzanne: Do you think that it in some ways, no differently than we have remind ourselves in product, that we’re solving problems for people who aren’t in the room, that by virtue of being inside this company we already know too much about design, too much about technology to be making objective decisions about should the button be here or should we use this user interface element? Do you think that that magnifies just about product in general in Silicon Valley where it’s like the problems that are being solved are a result of that insular world view in some ways?

Sharon: There are definitely products that go direction, but I wouldn’t say that’s inclusive of everybody. There are companies that actually go and fly out and talk to users and potential customers from all over the place and there are others who think they know everything. We can see the differences in product management styles.

Suzanne: That’s true of everyplace. There’s going to be people who want to learn and people who already know everything.

Sharon: Exactly. There are people who think that.

Suzanne: How is the tech scene here in L.A. different?

Sharon: I think we’re very different in terms of the tech sub-sectors I see. Up there, it’s very software based sometimes with a hardware play like a Fitbit. Down here, you actually get more of the ecommerce media and analytic scene that is very different in terms of the contrast of the type of companies you see up there especially at the startup level.

Suzanne: Because you’re born and raised here, because you left and came back and said what’s not to love, how would you sell Silicon Beach versus Silicon Valley, if you were tasked with recruiting people to come to the L.A. tech scene?

Sharon: To me the biggest part about the L.A. tech scene is that there’s a lot less requirements in having to have an engineering background.

The second one is there’s a very different scene, as I had just mentioned, in terms of the kinds of tech companies we have. It’s going to be more about ecommerce, more about media, more about advertising versus in the Bay Area, you guys still have some of that but it’s going to be a lot more about pure software plays.

At the end of the day, what is it that you want to do? If it’s along the lines of media and ecommerce and I think L.A. is the perfect scene for a product manager who wants to focus in those areas.

Suzanne: That’s illustrated most clearly by the nature of the billboards. You get off the plane in San Francisco and every billboard is Salesforce, whatever product, product, product. You get off the plane at LAX and it’s like new HBO show premiering. You can really see at first blush what’s happening on the ground, but it is a little bit more diverse here, I think. I would agree with you.

Sharon: It’s just a different sector that has really flourished here. If you think about where Netflix and Hulu started, it was out here. Then you think about a recent successful exit, it was Dollar Shave Club. That’s all ecommerce.

Suzanne: Do you think that because of that reason you’ve seen more people happening into product roles here where I’m working in a media company and then I realize I’m actually a product person and then the company is trying to figure out in reverse what is product? We have to stand that up versus it seems like in Silicon Valley everyone really clearly understands product management as a discipline differently for sure. It’s a little bit more laid out, the path.

Sharon: That’s definitely a great question. I think that’s one of the challenges we have to solve as product managers in L.A. is that it means something a little bit different to every company. Yes, there are nuances within the Silicon Valley companies, but like you said, it more well understood.

Here, I’ve often seen that product managers are expected to function like a project manager half the time and then also do product management work. That’s a good example of some places that define it differently.

Other times we have to educate other departments within an organization to help them understand what value a product manager brings because it’s not as well understood here. It still feels like a fairly new role to a lot of companies here especially when we’re talking about ecommerce.

Suzanne: How would you define product management? If you had to explain it to somebody in your family... Do people know what you do, your friends and family?

Sharon: My parents still don’t understand what I do but I’m not sure they ever will. I did however have to explain product management to a group of MBAs at USC Marshall recently. The way I approach it is there’s two elements that make a product manager; there’s a strategic one and then there’s a tactical one. When I say strategic, it’s about coming up with a vision and holding the vision for your product. It’s about how do you make sure that your roadmap ties into that vision. A lot of it is really vision related.

Then you have the more tactical components where you have to write your requirements. You have to work with engineers on the execution of the product, you work with design, et cetera.

To me, a good product manager is able to function both at a very strategic and tactical level. On top of all that, a lot of people miss pointing out the communication skills. There’s a lot of soft skills that’s needed to be a successful product manager because you’re constantly the person who becomes the main point of contact and becomes the center of the way that business functions and how things get relayed to getting executed in the product.

Suzanne: You’re tearing a slide right out of my introduction to product management. Class number one that I teach is exactly that. The first misconception is people use the term product manager and project manager interchangeably, and understanding the separation of concerns and I would echo that exactly. Product management is strategic and there will be times where you have to act in the capacity of project manager.

I think that’s part of what’s hard for a lot of people. It’s difficult to shift from forward thinking future based planning to I’ve got to do these wireframes. Do you see people get stuck too much in one side or the other or has that been your experience ever?

Sharon: I’ve definitely see that at the more junior levels. It’s easy to get really caught up on that tactical side where you’re really focused on doing things and not taking a step back to really think about how the things that you’re working on actually tie back to that vision at the end of the day and to think through does this really make sense? Is this really a feature that we really, really need or is it just something that internal folks are rallying for? Are we really thinking through if this makes sense for strategy, if customers really, really need it at the end of the day?

I think for the more junior folks, it really helps to ground their thinking to always map back to what is it that we’re trying to accomplish at the end of the day as a company and really think through that tied together with the vision.

Another challenge that I’ve seen is when folks get to the top at the product level even, they tend to forget what it was like to have to execute and expectations start getting very demanding sometimes with timelines. You see very different challenges at very different levels.

Suzanne: It’s like grandpa being like, “I walked uphill to school both ways.” You’re like, “I can wireframes that in 20 minutes. You should be able to do that too.” Meanwhile you’re just three years away from the last time you actually had to open a prototyping software at all.

Sharon: You see that sometimes.

Suzanne: This brings up this connection to the vision of the product brings up the importance of road mapping. For some people, depending on where you are within the organization, you may very well be the person responsible for building out the road map and communicating it. If you are more junior, that might not be a piece that you touch. How do you negotiate that as a junior PM keeping that in mind, where are we going long-term? How do you hook into that if you’re not as connected to the road map as, say, the senior VP of product management?

Sharon: That’s a great question. In my perspective I think that even at the junior level, it’s their responsibility to make sure that the managers are properly communicating to them what the priorities are and why and how it’s shaping the vision or changing the vision or maintaining the vision even, and to just be proactive about getting those alignment meetings on the calendar with the senior VP, especially at bigger companies. I’ve never had anyone say no to me when I’ve asked for those things in the past.

Suzanne: You brought up the point about communication. I think this is a big piece of it too. A lot of the times you have all of these responsibilities but very little actual jurisdiction. There’s this piece of how can I somehow manage to convince everyone to like me and comply with my requests because I can’t actually mandate them on any level.

Sharon: That’s the hardest part about our job is that we are not the direct manager for a lot of people we are cross-functionally managing. What do we do about that? The way I’ve handled it in the past was really earn the respect of the team members I’m working with whether it be engineers, designers or fellow product managers, I need to get to know them first of all, really understand what their concerns are, how they want to contribute and be able to speak to that when we are talking through the different problems we’re trying to solve together.

I think it’s most important to treat each other like partners, no matter what the titles are and that has really helped me earn a lot of people’s respect in the past is because I want to collaborate with them as opposed to dictating which shouldn’t be done.

Suzanne: I thought it was just because they were all scared of you. Sharon’s coming. She’s going to make us get stuff done. You don’t look scary. That’s why I’m saying ... Are you a little scary though?

Sharon: I can be very intense but I’m never the type to throw a fit in front of everyone by any means. I’m very direct and straightforward. If you don’t like that style, then I guess it could be scary.

Suzanne: Were here at BCG Digital Ventures. I think it was back in episode 9, we chatted with Tyler Adams who’s part of the team. Listeners, if you haven’t heard that episode go back and check it out. I don’t want to talk extensively about BCG because we have talked about it but give us, I guess, the really quick sound bite as to what you do here. I’m interested in understanding how it’s different from other roles that you’ve held as a product manager.

Sharon: Let’s start with what BCG Digital Ventures does. We partner with corporate clients to help them come up with new digital solutions. Sometimes it means a new digital solution within the current organization and sometimes it means launching a brand new startup.

It’s been really amazing to be here and actually be part of launching two different startups. That’s been a very different experience than where I’ve worked in previous existing startups where my focus was more to help the launch and scale at different stages of the startup life.

Suzanne: Post introduction some point in the growth cycle. We’ve got traction, we’ve got users, we’ve got money and we need to make next leap.

Sharon: Yes, yes. I’ll backtrack one moment here is I think the biggest difference between my role here at BCG Digital Ventures and other existing startups is I’m actually helping ideate in some case, new solutions for existing companies. Then there are other cases where we’ve ideate and actually helped them build out new products with a brand new startup. We’re launching from ground zero versus in the past startups I’ve worked for, they’ve already validated a market for the users. I’m just helping them scale at that point.

In one particular example, at Flipagram, I was part of their business pivot as well. With BCG Digital we are literally coming up with new startup ideas and launching them together.

Suzanne: You’re in that let’s find problem solution fit. Let’s find product market fit modality.

Sharon: Yes. It’s way more nebulous here because we constantly have to validate that there’s a product market fit. That’s not an easy task to execute on at the end of the day.

Suzanne: I think nine out of ten companies or something fail to get to that point.

Sharon: How do we prevent that from happening and make sure that this becomes the future unicorn of the industry that we’re going after?

Suzanne: I was having this conversation. Of course we do this work and then at least for me, I find myself constantly catching myself in the mistakes that I know are mistakes. One of those mistakes is still going too far ahead, still having too many assumptions that you just don’t check along the way. You’re like, I see that this ...

If you think about the concept like a minimum viable product, you’re already starting a lot of the times at something that’s way more than a minimum viable product. Has that been your experience ever? How do I simplify this? I’ve already made it bigger than it should be for where we are in the validation process.

Sharon: Absolutely. Here at BCG Digital, we do work with a lot of corporations. They definitely really want to build up the vision statement and I don’t blame them, I get it. Of course it’d be great to have that, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

The first challenge we have is to help our corporate partners understand what a minimum viable product is and what that actually looks like as it leads to the vision. That’s the biggest obstacle to get through first and then it’s actually getting everyone else on board on locking down scope because there’s always new features that everyone wants, and we have to make sure we do a good job of managing that in a road mapping and helping people understand that MVP is not the end all. That is the very first step. You can have another launch in two weeks if it’s through an app. If it’s a website, you can launch it anytime. Just remember it’s a very iterative process and that’s something that I’ve definitely had to help a lot of people understand here is we can keep on going. This is going to get better and better over time. It’s all about the iteration.

Suzanne: It’s hard, certainly for engineers. Engineers don’t ever want to create the impression that they don’t know everything about everything. Their way of solving for that is making sure that every feature is there and every feature is perfect, which of course is in direct conflict with this mentality of no, we don’t need all of those things.

I think same for designers. There’s a certain level of pride associated with I can’t ship it looking like that. We don’t even know if we have the right customer segment let alone how they’re going to respond to this design. There’s a bit of a learning to be imperfect is part of the growing pains whether you’re a product manager or not.

Sharon: Absolutely. I remember in my first project here. It was in AutoGravity where Tyler was actually part of a couple months as well. It was tough for some of designers to think this is just an MVP. I don’t need to get the final state like you would at an agency. It took a couple months of adjusting to that thinking because it is so different, where your focus is really to get something out the door fast so you can get in front of users earlier and therefore be able to validate if there is a need for a specific feature and then eventually the overall MVP.

It just takes people time to let this sink in. Everyone agrees with it at the principle level, but at the execution level where you too have to, as the product manager, be the one to rally everyone together and get them to get more comfortable with this over time and eventually really, really be the ones to help champion it.

Suzanne: Especially when you think about things like how are we going to actually find users. We’re over here in this room arguing about whether or not we need feature A or feature B or both. Meanwhile, we don’t even know if we are going to be able to get anybody to come to the website or download the app or any of the channels that we’re thinking in our strategy are going to work. It’s again, put up a landing page, run an ad, see if you can even be effective there before you waste time. Celebrate that kind of simplicity but it’s hard.

Sharon: It’s hard especially coming from a corporate mindset. I get it. That’s where I started my tech career was at a major tech corporation too. At least I can get into their minds and understand what they’re possibly thinking and be able to speak to those concerns. This is where I keep saying that communication skills are so important with product managers because half the time we have to sell our ideas to people.

Suzanne: This is where the direct Sharon Tom excels because you just grab one of those clients by their necktie or their lapel pin blouse and you say, “Listen, this is an experiment and we’re going to do it lean and you’re going to ...” No, you’re that ... But you’re direct and you say this is how we have to do this. Trust me.

Sharon: That’s another great point is don’t be afraid to say no. I always tell product managers and aspiring product managers the same thing is you want to be the person who will be the defendant of users and to really think about what it is that people absolutely need at the end of the day. I think less is more a lot of times and it’s okay. When people start asking for too much, it’s okay to say no. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned along the way.

Suzanne: It’s actually almost better to have people ask for it because then you have some indication that you’ve created value but maybe not all the value. It’s easy to say, look, people are coming back to us over and over and over again and they’re looking for this extension which means we’ve given them something useable and they’re pointing us to how it can be more useable, more valuable to them rather than trying to account for every possible need in advance.

I think this just ties into a bigger societal thing. There’s so much ego in admitting that you don’t know something. I’ve really learned to ... I don’t know anything. Please tell me everything. That keeps you really, really connected to the right information.

Sharon: That’s another great topic is one of the biggest nuggets I give to people is just do not ever get overly invested into any particular idea because at the end of the day, you want to be able to part with it if it doesn’t resonate with your customers. It’s okay. Like you said, it’s okay not to know everything. That’s the point of our very agile and iterative processes where you keep learning along the way and you get to a point where you might even need to pivot and it’s okay.

Suzanne: You get there faster. I think that’s the thing. If you put out a little, the worst thing that happens is it’s not valuable enough, you can add something to it versus taking too much time, not getting any data, putting something out and then not being able to actually tell do they like it because of this or do they like it because of this. If you put in too many variables, it’s difficult to extrapolate what’s working and what’s not.

Sharon: Absolutely. This is where I believe that there’s a lot of value in mixing quantitative and qualitative analyses. For an existing company, they definitely have data or at least I really hope they have data implemented where they can go in and see what’s working and what’s not.

Secondly, they can get additional color behind some of the issues by doing something as simple as user testing. There’s plenty of tools out there like Validately and UserTesting.com for those things. I like to merge the two especially when it comes to a very early stage startup where we’re literally building from the ground up and don’t have business yet.

I actually combined doing surveys and quick preference AB testing with the remote user testing as well or sometimes even in-person interviews to really understand what resonates with people at scale and then really understanding the color behind why.

Suzanne: Let’s go back a little bit to your experience. One of the things that I think is really fascinating is that certainly in your current role as you’ve described, you’re doing a lot of the pre-product market fit exploration. Finding product market fit is ... I always talk about it in video gaming terms. It’s like unlocking the special achievement. You find product market fit and now you essentially get to go to the secret level which is company building rather than toiling.

You’ve also, as you’ve described, been part of companies that were well beyond product market fit. They had growth, whether early growth or late growth and you ushered them, to borrow the term from Go  effrey Moore, into crossing the chasm, moving perhaps from an early adopter customer segment into how do we evolve to get more customers.

One of things I don’t think that’s talked about as much is that means finding product market fit again. If you find it for that first group and then you want to go after a bigger and broader reach, then you have to one, evolve the product while not alienating the people who do think it’s valuable and then you also have to figure out if you’ve found an audience again that will sustain it. Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences in doing that, what you’ve seen from the frontlines of those roles?

Sharon: Flipagram is a good example of a company that had to do product market validation fit two times. Some of you might be familiar with it. It might also be known as the New Year’s Eve app. That’s how it got started was we had a lot of celebrities using it for their year-end recap. It was also seen on Instagram a lot, , where you can make a Flipagram on the app and then be able to share it out to Instagram.

It eventually evolved because we saw how popular it was as a photo creation tool. We realized we needed a way to retain users so it’s not like they’re just coming back for a few times especially just for the year-end recap. How do we do that?

We saw that when it comes to being able to bring people back all the time, social networks are the way to go especially if you’re talking about sharing your personal content, your personal updates. The company pivoted from being just a utility tool to being a social network as well.

In doing that, we had to make sure whatever changes we made in our product did not alienate past users who want it purely just for utility purposes as opposed to being social as well. We always asked ourselves that question with every feature that we launched afterwards when we made that pivot to being a social network.

Suzanne: Does introducing this feature push out the people that are just coming to use it as a utility?

Sharon: Exactly.

Suzanne: Was there a moment, is there a moment generally speaking where supporting both becomes ... This is I think the cycle of early adopter, early majority, late majority is exactly that. It’s inevitably the early adopters leave because they’re on to the next thing, whatever it is. The goal I think in crossing the chasm to a bigger market is holding on to those early adopters as long as you can, and this is going to sound a little callus, until you no longer need them. Maybe it’s going to be mutually beneficially. It’s just like calling it quits with a partner. We just both agree it’s time versus people feeling like the product is no longer for them.

Sharon: I would say that at the core, Flipagram still holds true to the initial adopters who used it to create photo videos with music of their preference. Now, I think what it also does in the current state is that it attracts people who want that social element as well. The way the app’s been designed is to make sure that we never really alienate those adopters because it still serves the purpose they need. The only additional obstacle now is they need it again.

Suzanne: Tell us about your journey into product management. You said you were at UCLA, you studied business at USC. Were you studying product or you accidentally happened into it?

Sharon: Gosh! I wish there was at product management school for folks in undergrad and graduate programs but it seems like it’s only available for people who really seek it outside of traditional institutions.

Suzanne: That’s exactly right, probably for the bureaucratic slowness that you see when you talk about the difference between Enterprise adopting Agile or startups is ... Imagine an institution like UCLA going we’re going to stand up an entire department and degree program around this. We need to get there now because this is a job people want.

Sharon: Or even just the specialization in MBA programs. That’s something schools should really think about.

Suzanne: If they’re listening, take a cue here. Back to you.

Sharon: Back to how I got into product management. I would consider myself the accidental PM. I studied e-com at UCLA then did finance for Intel in Silicon Valley for four years and then decided I love the analytical skills I get to exercise every day, but I want to do more. I want to be more creative as well and I want to build things at the end of the day as opposed to being a support group.

Suzanne: You were the classic peering over the fence and seeing the product managers and going they look like they’re having way more fun. How do I touch that?

Sharon: Yes, exactly. They were the ones making things happen. It was something I was really curious about. With the Silicon Valley influence, I thought it was for people with engineering backgrounds only. Then business school came along. I definitely got proven wrong and really glad that it happened.

I fell into a product management internship at Amazon actually and decided this is a space I really want to be in. This is what I’m going to go after and it’s going to be my focus for recruiting when the time comes in my second year. It also helped me learn that I just really wanted to take a break from the corporate environment. That’s how I fell into the startup scene in L.A. Tech.

Suzanne: It’s interesting, you said about having the revelation that an engineering background isn’t a prerequisite. I think this is another thing you see, big companies like Google almost always advertise for technical product manager. It’s baked into the role. It’s not a requirement. Can you talk a little bit about what it looks like to be a product manager who doesn’t come from a computer sciences background?

Sharon: I think it says a lot for companies who do require it because it’s very backend heavy and it does make sense for them. I don’t blame them for it, but there are so many other companies that don’t require it. To me, what it means to be a product manager without a CS degree is really to be the person that we talked about earlier who can drive the strategic initiatives and be able to execute on the tactical duties.

A strong product manager can really merge the two thinking together and be able to work with both while also being that person who can bring different organizations together. That’s how I would evaluate someone when I’m interviewing them at least. Can they be that product manager?

Suzanne: I think the other thing is, because we have a lot of listeners that are prospective career changers. It is to encourage it and say all of the experiences you’ve accumulated up until this moment where you want to make this conscious pivot into product management are valuable. The only thing that might be missing is your ability to package it through a lens where someone can see that. Having disparate experiences doesn’t make you not a qualified candidate. It’s just the first step is look at those experiences and say how did these apply in product? What can I take from this job I did five years ago when I was a marketing coordinator or when I worked in sales in my first job out of college or whatever? Where are those threads applicable? Tell that story through your own skillset, so to speak.

Sharon: Let’s go back to college where I got into my first sales job.

Suzanne: You actually had a job in ...

Sharon: I actually did.

Suzanne: I was really rubbing a nerve there. How did she know that?

Sharon: I had to sell alumni memberships at a public school. Definitely not an easy task. What I did to succeed in that job was to make sure I understood what people’s needs were. Every individual’s were a little bit different. I had to tease apart what value this membership would provide to different people. For folks who were going into graduate programs, especially people majoring in the different sciences, they really valued the lifetime membership to different libraries within the UC system. I would make sure I would understand that, speak to that.

Another thing is for others who are just graduating and moving into jobs, they’re probably more concerned about the discounts they can get for graduation activities. I would focus on that in those cases. Not is it only about understanding people’s needs but also identifying the trends. That I think is super important to being a product manager because it’s getting out there and talking to people and understanding what they need and being able to synthesize what the different needs are.

Suzanne: It sounds like you were informally or perhaps formally building out your own personas, not even connected in a way about this is an actual discipline, this is an actual product management process.

Sharon: Exactly. I had no idea at the time. I was 20.

Suzanne: You were just trying to make commission basically. How do I get the most ... I don’t know if it was commission or ... How do I get the most sales done here?

Sharon: Still being honest and offering value to people. I would never want to sell people for the sake of selling stuff. That was one experience. In finance, that’s getting into the nitty gritty of numbers. I had to basically synthesize lots of numbers into graphs and tables that were digestible to people that I could present and speak to and get people to understand very quickly. These were VPs and GMs that I had to advise at the time.

Being able to communicate and knowing how to synthesize very high volumes of data into something that people can understand in just a matter of a minute was a very important skillset I didn’t realize I was developing at the time. Analytics come back in product management too, so again that skillset came back to help me in more than one way, both in terms of the communication aspect and the hard skill.

Suzanne: I think we’re talking here about great if you have an engineering background, especially if the company requires it. Great if you don’t. What else do you have that’s usable? Are there, in your opinion, certain hard skills that you have to have, even if they’re just fledgling or are you of the school, I’ll take soft skills over hard skills because I can teach you the hard skills in the environment?

Sharon: I’m definitely in the latter school of thought. Hard skills are easier to pick up than soft skills. If someone’s a really poor communicator, they have a longer way to go than someone who needs to understand how to work with numbers and how to write user stories. That’s much easier for most of us to teach and easier for people to ramp up.

Suzanne: Perhaps that’s a natural segue way to a little segment we like to call get the job, learn the job, love the job. What’s your title here first of all?

Sharon: I’m a Lead Product Manager at BCG Digital Ventures.

Suzanne: You’ve got a little boss in you. We were talking before about if you’re in the top.

Sharon: I’m right in the middle that’s why I came empathize with both sides of thinking in strategic and tactical things.

Suzanne: There may be a time in the not-so distance future where you’ll be like wireframes? I don’t do wireframes. I’m here with the roadmap. I’m imagining the not-

Sharon: I’ll always help with wireframes. I’ll always white board wireframes.

Suzanne: You’ll never forget where you came from. It’s good to know your roots. As a senior person, what advice would you offer to somebody who is either looking to ladder up, to become more senior in their current role or somebody who’s just trying to get in the door in product management?

Sharon: You’re going to laugh for both of those aspects. I want to see hustle.

Suzanne: Hustle.

Sharon: That’s one of the things I look for is is this person going to be very self-sufficient and really take the initiative to figure things out on their own? That’s how I got into product management. It’s not that school taught me how to be a product manager. I’m always experimenting with things. I built my own ecommerce website while I was still in business school just to get a taste of what it was like to have to design and work with engineers and figure out the business side of an ecommerce.

I’m just looking for that person who’s really willing to go out there and talk to people, go research to figure out what it is that they want to learn at the end of the day. If it’s to become a product manager, go learn how to talk the talk and walk the walk. That’s the only way you’re going to get in.

Suzanne: This comes up over and over again on the show, this concept of side projects. You have people, especially at General Assembly. We have students that graduate. There are certain students that I know are going to leave the program and I know they’re going to land in a role because they have hustle just as you describe.

Then there’s I think people who leave and they could go and get a role but they want it to come to them somehow or they’re not prepared to continue to work on it in the background. I think that is part of it is you’re not getting that role that you want, fine. Keep looking for it, but what are you doing in the meantime with the extra time that you do have to say I might not have trained for this formally or I might not have two or three or four years on paper experience, but here’s a product that I built and put into market. Here’s an ecommerce website that I did on the side just for the fun of it, the Sharon Tom route.

Sharon: The harsh reality is that there’s a lot of people who want to be product managers these day. How do you make yourself stand out? It’s really showing that you can learn a lot of these practices and principles on your own. Sure, I don’t expect you to be a master at anything, but just showing me that you actually took the initiative to figure out what it means to be a product manager and learning from those skillsets means a lot to me.

Suzanne: What about hard lessons learned on the job? Are there any that you can share with us? I’m talking about things that you’re doing it, you’re organically evolving into this product manager role and there was a mistake that you made that you thought now I’ll never make that again or one that you’ve seen come up over and over again in other people that are moving up?

Sharon: Two things that really come to my mind is I wish I had said no more earlier in my career. It’s back to that point I made earlier, it’s okay to say no to things. When you do so, help others understand what the trade-offs are and why you’re saying no. It’s that education that’s really important. Don’t ever make someone feel like they’re stupid because you thought it was a bad idea. That should never be the communication that happens that help people understand why you say no in a very objective way.

The second thing is, filling in the gaps. It never really struck me as product managers are the ones who need to fill in the gaps, but over the years I’ve observed the most successful product managers I’ve seen, even in the higher positions, are the ones who can fill in those gaps. If one organization is weak, they’re able to help them navigate through and help them re-strategize, for example.

Suzanne: That necessitates the understanding, first and foremost, of where the product manager sits. We’ve talked about a lot on the show and on the website is that I describe it as the pressure cooker between business technology and design. That radius of responsibility can grow if you’re in a small organization where there’s less people on either side, but it sounds like you’re also saying whether there’s a lot of people or not, your radius of responsibility may need to grow just as a means of creating a more effective or seamless transition from the UX understanding to the dev handoff or from the launch to the marketing team and the strategy for roll out.

Sharon: Even between product and marketing, for example, I’ve seen organizations where marketing was taking a hit for ... I’ve seen in organizations where the marketing organization was weaker than where it needed to be. I saw the head of product filling in that gap.

I think at even just the junior level if, let’s say QA’s not getting done, you can definitely help fill in that gap. These are very common problems. It may not be marketing specific. Fill in any other organization for that matter, but you get the point here is as a good product manager we’re the center of everything that’s happening in a lot of tech companies. We need to be able to help out where we can because we do have that influence.

Suzanne: What about the thing that you love the most. You describe that your experience at Amazon was the one that solidified for you. You told me earlier, you said Amazon did two things: it solidified your love for product management and communicated to you with certainty that you didn’t want to work in enterprise.

Sharon: Yes, true story there.

Suzanne: What is it about product management that you fell in love with either back then in Seattle or just as an ongoing theme? Why do you do this job?

Sharon: It keeps me on my toes. I am definitely the type that gets bored very easily. With product management, things are always changing you. You constantly have to keep up to stay fresh with all the latest and greatest trends, both business level and even when it comes to design at the more tactical level. To me, there’s just so much going on that I’m constantly learning and I can keep building on my knowledge.

The other thing that I really love is just building products that make people happy. I love being a part of something that makes people smile at the end of the day whether it’s just making their lives easier or it just brings the light.

Suzanne: Awesome. I don’t know if you’re a podcast listener. Hopefully you listen to the 100 PM podcast.

Sharon: I do, I do.

Suzanne: Resources, do you have any product management or not product management resources that you think are great for somebody listening in; blogs, books, anything that would be helpful in the journey?

Sharon: I’m sure you’ve heard this many times. I think Lean Startup is a good place to start and understand how a lot of product managers think. When it comes more to the nitty gritty, I would definitely suggest taking a look of Cranky PM and MindTheProduct. They are both PM blogs as well. To understand more design, I actually really like UserTesting.com’s newsletters. Just go ahead and subscribe through their website.

Lastly, Google. There’s just a topic I’m curious about and none of these resources are necessarily covering it, some may be covering it, go learn just by reading and then of course just talking to other people who are out there working in these jobs

Suzanne: Which brings up another point. You didn’t expressly mention this but when we talk about qualities that make great PMs, I think it’s that thirst for knowledge that’s critical. In some ways it’s an old discipline and in some ways it’s a new discipline. Our understanding of the discipline is changing rapidly because more people are doing it, more companies are cropping up, more companies are embracing a product process so it’s evolving. Now is the time not to just say I know this field but actually to say no, I happened into it and I’m still learning it every day as I go. We’re all still learning it every day as we go.

Sharon: Very true, even within BCG Digital. I know I have to adjust my style with every project because it’s going to be different. To be an effective product manager, you do have to learn to adjust to different people and adjust your working style to it too.

Suzanne: You are a case in point of one of the other things that I certainly say a lot to students which is no product manager role is ever going to be the same. You can learn all of these skills and build up all of these qualities within yourself and that’s a prerequisite for getting into this field, but just when you think you know how it works, you’ll change to another job and they’ll do things completely differently.

Sharon: Exactly. That happens all the time from company to company, from project to project here. That’s what I mean by this keeps me on my toes at all times because it’s ever-changing. That’s why I think hustle is so important because it’s about that thirst and the ability to just go out there and learn things and figure it out for your own.

Suzanne: What about a personal mantra or quote, some sort of inspirational poster that you live by, whether real or just in your own mind, something that tells us about how you like to live your life or what you bring to your role as a product management professional?

Sharon: I would say that make sure you’re part of a team that you love above all else. I know a lot of product managers do think I want to build the next greatest thing, but if you don’t enjoy working with the people around you, it can be very miserable. Definitely don’t underestimate the value of the people you work with every day.

Suzanne: Love your team.

Sharon: Yes, love your team.

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