A Job That Never Ends

Suzanne: Tom Kuhr, here at Moment Feed in Santa Monica. How are you?

Tom: I'm great.

Suzanne: You're great. Excellent. I guess it's easy to be great when you're on the west side, sun, breeze.

Tom: Life is not too bad in the Silicon beach area.

Suzanne: You've been out this way a long time.

Tom: I've been here for 20 years.

Suzanne: Okay, I think that would constitute.

Tom: That's a long time.

Suzanne: Doesn't probably feel like a long time. It's only in those moments where you say, 20 years, has it been that long.

Tom: That makes me feel really old.

Suzanne: I don't mean to make you feel old, but I think it's fascinating because you've probably watched the LA tech scene kind of really germinate, blossom and grow, and you've been an active part of it. I mean, what was it like 15 years ago here in technology?

Tom: 15 years ago would be the dot com crash, I think, which was not a great era in technology in general. It was interesting. I was with Stamps dot com at the time, and it was great to see a company grow from five employees to 600 employees in about a year and a half, and then back down to 80. A rocket and then a steep ejection. The dot coms that were invented, or created back then, were of various levels of substance, and just because you had a dot com meant that you could get funding for it no matter what it was. We saw a sort of back to basics then, which I think is still pervasive up til the last couple years when I've seen a lot of mobile apps get funded that had no right getting funded. I think we may be back in a, not the same level of bubble, but a similar bubble where everyone wants to be part of something bigger.

Suzanne: I definitely did seem in the last few years that every time you turn around you hear people say this all the time, I'm starting a start-up. That's the favorite new expression. Do you think the LA tech scene has kind of found its maturity now, and that there is this natural weeding out of companies that might be funded but, as you say, have no business being funded. They turn up an office, and that office disappears.

Tom: I think we've seen a change in investment strategy. It's easier to get funded for an idea from non-institutional investors, friends, people, real estate, real estate people. I hear that a lot. Yeah, my friend's in real estate, and he's going to give us $50,000 to start this company. Or, crowd funding, crowd sourcing. There are alternatives there. If you want to find money, you can find money to start a company, but that doesn't make that a good company or a good idea. It doesn't mean that you're going to be able to execute against the idea even if it is a good idea. I think there are still a lot of companies around. I think venture capital has gotten a lot more conservative with what they'll invest in, which is fantastic over all. You still hear of idea that shouldn't be companies.

Suzanne: Well, this is an interesting topic about investment because especially a lot of first time founders, sometimes mistake that somebody can and will give them money with that they should accept that money. Part of it is am I accepting money too early, and the other part is is this the right kind of money? What have you seen happens when people take money from their friend in real estate to fund a product idea that has nothing to do with real estate and maybe not even anything to do with the expertise of the founders frankly?

Tom: I've seen people want to get involved in technology just because it seems like it’s something they should do rather than something that they're good at. They want to be involved in being part of high-tech. By investing in high-tech, they feel like they can be involved in it in some way. Some of them try and be operational after they invest, and that's always a disaster. I've never seen that actually work out well. If someone's investing to trust someone with their money, and not need a status report every day about it or where it's going or what's happening, then it becomes an okay investment. That is unknowable until you actually start talking about the terms of the deal and the expectations of the investor. Sometimes it's fine, and you've got an investor who knows that they don't know anything and knows that they should stay out of the way. When you have an investor who's investing in someone who also doesn't really know what they're doing, that's when things go really bad.

Suzanne: I've often wondered, I've had many deals in my lifetime where we've gone out to raise money, in hindsight at the wrong time. At the time you think, this is the right step that we need to do. I'm always grateful, thank goodness nobody gave me the money that I was looking for because we would have misspent it because we didn't know what we didn't know. What do you think is the right time to raise money if you're building a company from ground up? How would you advise somebody to take that approach?

Tom: What most companies that I've seen, and this goes for companies that get funded as well as companies that don't get funded from good and bad investors both. They don't do enough market research. They don't do enough consumer research. They don't do enough research into who their client is and whether the client really wants that product. Usually it's a founder who came up with a good idea. They ran it by their friends, and their friends all thought it was really great. They didn't do any research into the industry or the consumer or how it fits into someone's daily life. Without doing that, you have very little confidence at the end of the day as to whether or not you've achieved product market fit with your idea. Without building anything, you should be able to test a concept and someone's propensity to buy it or adopt it very early on in the process. That market research phase is, if it was done more often, people would save a lot more time and money, but it's also very difficult for people to understand that running an idea by their friends doesn't mean anything at the end of the day.

Suzanne: Right. I always say, when we talk about validation in the concept of problem solution fit or product market fit, we're talking about real representatives of your customer segment, giving you real insight, not your parents telling you you're the most beautiful girl in the world, you can do anything you want. If that's the kind of validation that you're seeking, you should just sort of stick with that plan, not try to launch a business, probably feel a whole lot better.

Tom: People like to point to entrepreneurs that did have an idea, didn't do a lot of market validation and that idea was magically momentous, and they created a whole company out of it. That happens so rarely. If you ask that entrepreneur to do the same thing, come up with another idea for another company, 99% of the time it would fail. Repeating that process is almost impossible. One of the quotes that I really like to use is, “your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant.” If you said that to most founders, they would be very offended. Really it's irrelevant. It's what the market really wants that you're trying to find. That's the magic of product management is trying to find that product market fit and keep a company aligned with its clients or customers.

Suzanne: What is product management, anyway? We spoke a little bit about this. You talked about there's no formal education for product management. How did you get here? What is it in your mind when you talk about it?

Tom: I mentioned the fact that there is no formal curriculum or training for a product manager, and every product manager description that I've seen varies depending on the company, varies depending on the company's outlook, whether they're tech focused or client focused or services focused. Depends on the CEO of the company and how much he understands product development or not, or values the role of the product manager. If you take a look at consumer package goods companies, they have a very well-defined concept of a brand manager, someone who's in charge of the PNL of the brand. It's a mini-CEO. Some companies have adapted that same sort of thing for product manager where they're the product manager is the captain of their product. They're the captain of the ship. They're doing market forecasting, all the way down to feature triage, specification, things like that or at least being part of the process. Then some companies, it's an engineer who's taken the role of being more of the business liaison and telling sales what they just built. It's totally across the gamut of all of that. The path that I took was after graduating college with a marine biology degree, I got a job in sales.

Suzanne: Makes sense. Natural next step for a marine biology degree.

Tom: Natural progression. The company that I got a job in sales with was a software company, and I just fell in love with software. This is before the internet was the internet. Really saw a future when Windows 3 or whatever came out, whatever was graphical. All of a sudden it went from terminals to graphical interface. All of a sudden networked computers were small. We went from mini computers to I've got a personal computer with a graphical interface.

Suzanne: A 386.

Tom: People were actually going to start using this stuff. Then I just fell in love with it. I actually took a step back out of technology and found that it wasn't, while I was decent at sales, I wasn't in love with it. During my years with the software company, found marketing to be really exciting. I like the strategic part of marketing. I like being able to affect all of the sales of the company not just one at a time. I actually started working with a consumer package goods agency. I worked on packaged coffee and iced tea at supermarkets, travel services, fun things like that. Got a pretty well-rounded background in marketing to consumers through more traditional channels, not online channels. From there went to become a product brand manager for a software company. That was my next job progression. I wanted to get back into software. Seemed like a logical way for me to use my skills. That software company turned into an internet company. We transformed it from a install ... We had actually consumer products and business to business solutions. Almost threw all of that away to create consumer focused websites. That transition was amazing, and that was the start of the internet era.

Each step along the way I learned something that was a little bit different about what consumers, how consumers buy, how businesses buy, and what it takes to meet their expectations. I feel like product management is all about that translation of what's going to make a consumer or the end client’s life easier, better, faster, stronger, whatever it is, and how does our product match that. What's the advantage to them using this over other things. It's that product market fit. The simplest way to describe that it's an ongoing job that never ends. There's always advances. There's always competition. There's always trends. There's always new technologies to take advantage of. It's an ongoing process. That's a very long answer to your question.

Suzanne: No, it's a beautiful answer. It's so interesting about the journey that you say ... I don't think anybody who works in product management or who has been working in product management for a number of years has had a straight path in. I think that's the crux of what you're talking about.

Tom: That's absolutely true.

Suzanne: Maybe later, maybe as these conversations unfold, maybe as more programs like the one I teach at General Assembly, and there are other great programs. As there is more attempt to, not formalize the education, but at least color in: Hey, if you're going to want to be in product, it looks a little bit like this and little bit like this and a little bit like this. There may be a future day where there is a clearer path, but most of us it's accidental tourism. We found tech, and we fell in love with it. Then, we couldn't get out of it. You just sort of take up a role, which sort of leads me to the question of do you think that most companies know that they need a product manager, or they don't know that they need a product manager?

Tom: I think it really depends on the size of the company. In some companies at an early stage, you don't need a formal product manager, but someone's taking on the product management responsibility, whether it's a CEO or the CTO or someone in marketing. Someone is saying our customers need this. Whether it's translated to a job position or not, is dependent on company size, budget, funding, etc, but the responsibility is being handled. As far as creating the definition of a product manager, I think the organization pragmatic marketing did a very, has done a very good job over the years in talking about product management and its importance. It seems that the product management profession, if it's a profession, has two major flaws. The first flaw is if you're good at product management, your company is going to do well. You're going to make a lot of money, and therein lies the decision of whether you stay in product management or move to another department to run another department. Or, you just move farther up the chain, so you're not actually doing the product management part of your job anymore.

Suzanne: Interesting, so it sounds like you're suggesting that a product manager who succeeds, which we define as being good at the job, faces an inevitable crossroads of do I keep on being a great product manager and therefore have to jump around to different places to try different things, or do I outgrow my own role because now I have an opportunity to be part of the C suite or ...

Tom: It's mostly the outgrowing your own role. To find good product managers is almost impossible because the time frame in which you are a good product manager is very short. If you're a good product manager you get promoted really quickly to more and more responsibility because it's clear that you can handle the most important part of the role, which is interdepartmental communications. If you can do that really well, you're going to be viewed as an asset by that company and be put in a more prominent place, running department where you're managing people. It could be a higher level product management role, VP, but your responsibility is very quickly not project management anymore. It's managing product managers. It's always hard to find someone who's got three to four years of product management experience who doesn't want to be or isn't capable of being a director, or they're going to be a product manager for a long time because they're not quite getting what product management means.

Suzanne: What makes a good product manager, in your opinion?

Tom: First thing is great communication skills. Being able to talk to people in the way that they like to be spoken to. It's that empathy of I understand what your problem is. I'm going to speak to your problem and be able to persuade you to do what I need you to do because I really understand what your problem is. Doing that with clients, doing that with teams internally, working back and forth between the two, you are the translator. You're saying, the client wants this, Mr. Development, I'm going to outline it like this, so you understand it because clearly if you talk to the client directly he wouldn't get it. Because you've tried it before. That's the intermediary job. Similarly, oh we have this problem. We can't build it like this. How do we represent that to the client? What kind of work-arounds can we achieve here to do something more quickly or more cost effectively. The client's asking, we're hearing what the client wants is something much bigger than what we're geared to build. I guess it's communication and translation at the same time. Communicating upward and downward in the organization is equally challenging.

Suzanne: You brought up the term mini-CEO. I've heard other people talk about it as you're the CEO without any of the power, and so the challenge in that particular instance, as you know, can be I've got to defend the customer. I've got to defend what I believe is right, and I have to do it to the person who started the company who might not really want to hear what they don't want to hear. Because you know people tend to shut that out. Absolutely a challenge.

Tom: Yes, very much so. If you're a CEO and able to get things done without any power, the inclination is to put you in a place with power, so you can actually get more done. You become a very good CEO in that aspect because no one likes to be told what to do. They like to understand what they should do on their own, generally. If you're good at persuading someone to do something that they didn't necessarily know that they wanted to do, you become a good leader. That's a general leadership skill, motivating people to do things internally rather than tell them what to do. That persuasion, that convincing someone of the right thing is super critical.

Suzanne: How do we fill this, now you've my mind all alight of this product manager void that always being sort of created and recreated because great people come in, excel, and disappear. What's the solution for creating a healthy stream of product managers in this LA market that desperately needs product managers? The tech community is bustling here.

Tom: For as long as I've been here, that's been one of my challenges is trying to find product managers. It's really a problem. Just going out and recruiting from other companies is always a solution, but you never really know if that person's been effective or not at the company that they were just working at. One of the real challenges of product management is it's not just hard skills; it's soft skills. You couldn't hire a salesperson who didn't want to be on the phone. You can't hire a product manager who's not a good communicator. You can't really tell until you start working with that person how good or not they are.

There's a lot of difficulty, but it's also almost untrainable. If you're not naturally an outgoing person, you're probably not going to be a good sales person. Similarly, if you're not naturally a good communicator, you're probably not going to be a good product manager. Now that's not true all the time because again some companies consider product managers to be the best communicating developer, for instance. It's all relative. In a company where product management is an important role where it is really a representation of the mini-CEO of a product, that communication skill is critical. You just can't function in a company like that without good communication skills.

Suzanne: You mentioned a little earlier, you know, product manager, three, four years experience. Would you ever hire somebody with no experience?

Tom: I have hired people with no product management experience because they have shown me that they're good communicators. They've shown me that they have good vision as well as they are detail oriented, and generally they have some sort of industry or vertical or departmental specialization that they have some background that makes them good to train into a product management position. It's going to take them a while to become a product manager. It takes a while to learn how to write a good specification. It takes a while to learn how to wire frame a process out. It's possible, but you have to have enough product management staff to be able to bring in junior product manager or product specialist to get them up to speed and give them not product ownership but specific projects within that product ownership.

Suzanne: I think that challenge that you flag about starting from the beginning and then having to learn to me seems like it's amplified by the fact that everybody does things a little bit differently. There's no USB cable of product management. You could be being nurtured along very well as a brand new product manager in a certain environment. This is how we do PRD, and this is how we do wire frames, and this is our scrum process if we're running an agile software delivery method. Then you could move over to another organization, and then everything is different.

Tom: Correct.

Suzanne: How do you deal with that? I mean, how have you dealt with that? You're somebody who has worked with a lot of different companies in your career. How have you dealt with having to acclimate and re-acclimate to be successful in your role and at the same time navigate decisions that other people have made that maybe you wouldn't have made?

Tom: It's easier when you have an overview of multiple companies to understand that they actually behave differently. You could take a list of potential functions and go, all right this company, the project management team doesn't do this, doesn't do this, but they do do this, and do a checklist format kind of thing. I've found that in a lot of companies, product management is defined as everything that our CTO or development team isn't actually good at. It takes up the slack of project management sometimes, scrum management sometimes, technical product definition sometimes, or product architecture even. Then sometimes it's very much a business function where it's not actually specified in a product. There's product UX design team that does all product specification, so it's really really quite hard.

The only way is to ask a lot of questions during the interview process, during the first few weeks on the job. Who handles the following things? Again you could find the standard product marketing framework from ... There are plenty of publications out there that outline all the possible things product management can do and figure out where you're going to make the biggest impact. That's generally where it starts. If you're going to ... There's 20 things you could do, where are the top three most important for that particular job, that particular company. When you're a product manager, you're a jack of all trades in a lot of ways. You have to be flexible. You have to be able to fill in the gaps because that's what the company needs at that point especially with a younger company.

Suzanne: I see a lot of students in particular who come into product management because their current role or background is in specifically in UX or specifically in development, and they want more. Do you think that, I guess really the question is, as a product manager do you have to be okay not touching a lot of the work. Because I wonder a lot of the time, will you miss UX. You think you want more, but coming into more, as you've kind of described, it means it might be more financial spreadsheet reviews. It might be more marketing work. It'll definitely be more than the specificity of any one domain, and equally it will most likely mean less of the thing that you used to do. Do you think people miss it when they get into it because it is so diverse, the things you touch?

Tom: I think if you're staying within the same company, you have a pretty good idea of what that position is going to be before you aspire to be in it. If you're not moving companies it becomes a lot easier to say yes I do want that because it's in a box. You know what that box looks like. Whether or not you miss UX design, you will have influence on it, and you probably see that you have an influence on it. Maybe you want that job because they get to make the final decision instead of you. It could be a good thing. But, switching companies, and say I'm going to move from UX to product management at a different company is really hard to predict. You don't know how much influence you have over UX for example.

Suzanne: Do you see people who made that move clinging to, where you see this kind of regression of they stepped into the bigger capacity of product management, but then they tend to stay where they work most comfortable whether that's in development or in design?

Tom: If they do that they fail very quickly. If they say they're hungry to bring on more responsibility and then don't take on that responsibility, they don't last long at all because they revert back to their specialized behavior. The people generally who say that they're hungry, generally are hungry. They really want to do more, and even if it's scary they'll do more. That's something product managers need to do is things that are unknown and unproven. A product manager's willing to step in and take responsibility for things that they don't know about. It takes a different personality than someone who wants a consistent, predictable job outcome because it's not consistent or predictable. It's your job is based on the market, and the market itself is undefinable because it's a moving target.

If you don't love unpredictability, product management is not the job for you, most of the time. In a big company it can become very, I guess, predictable in a way where you have your certain pattern of behavior over time, but for a young company that's absolutely not the case. You're an adventurer. You're an explorer. You're trying to ... You're dissatisfied with the status quo, and you want to make things better, whether that's making the product better or making the organization communicate better, or making customers happier. There's always a drive to succeed in one of those aspects, or drive to make it better at least. Success is fleeting as well. Improving something is what product managers do.

Suzanne: Have you ever messed up real bad, whether earlier in your career, whether last week, something where you thought, man I've been doing this a long time, and I didn't see that coming. Or, I forgot to follow the process that I always follow because I got caught up.

Tom: I've definitely made mistakes. Because product development cycles are relatively long, and they touch so many people, it's hard to have a mistake that lingers for any particular length of time without someone finding it or getting it corrected. The mistakes that you can make are pretty small in the overall scheme of things, so missing deadlines where you set back department's timeline a week or two or something like that, or missing a launch date would be bad because of something that you didn't communicate well. Send emails to the wrong people because I wasn't paying attention to the to line, then people got information who were offsite who shouldn't have gotten that information. Yes, there's definitely office mistakes that can happen. I haven't seen ... Generally because software companies, the company is the product, especially in the early stages, everyone's paying attention. You're not going to ... Anything you did intentionally or unintentionally will be found very quickly, generally with very little overall impact. You might annoy your boss. You might annoy your coworkers, but the company itself, the trend is going to not suffer because of it.

Suzanne: Let that be a lesson to everybody who's worried, you can't mess up that bad, so give it a try. Be brave.

Tom: Be brave, yeah. Companies now recognize that making mistakes is part of the process. You're going to make bad decisions on whether or not some clients like something or not, or like it in the way that you think that they'll like it. Going into every feature knowing that hey we could have to revise this feature in two weeks comes with pluses and minuses, but if you're willing to continue to adapt because you know that based on your research that you're doing the right thing, at some point you'll find that answer. It may take two or three revs longer than you wanted it to, but if you're committed to it because you have the data to back it up, you'll make it happen. I don't see that as being risky. I just seeing that as being unknown. Unless you're willing to take on the task of matching the unknown, it's again not the right job.

Suzanne: It's a worthwhile sentiment to reflect on, which is there are people who are perfectionists, and I don't think product is a role that would fit you very well if you like everything to be perfect because it's so rarely perfect.

Tom: You would be frustrated all the time. All the time. Anyone's who's good with the 80-20 rules or 90-10 rules is good, right, because there's only so much information you can get before you start something, and there's only so much information you're going to get at the end of the cycle. There's only so much product perfection you're going to see if you're iterating rapidly. You have to comfortable with it's almost great and be happy with it's almost great.

Suzanne: One of the things that I’ve heard as we've been going through this adventure that is 100 PM, is, and I didn't expect this, right? I expected that there were a lot of people out there who wanted to learn more about the world of product that would be interested in hearing these kind of conversations. I didn't expect that so many product people themselves felt isolated or kind of without community. Maybe not without community, but this sense of it would be nice to know what other people are doing because you can feel a little bit alone in your own world, and there is, I go back to what we've been talking about, no universal definition. It's kind of the equivalent of always looking over and going I wonder how they're doing it. Am I doing it right? Are they doing it right? Has that ever been your experience where you just felt like you'd like to kind of see what other people are doing? I mean, you've done this a long time.

Tom: I think earlier in my career, for sure, just to get a sanity check, just to have peers that I could commiserate with about how crazy or chaotic or wild things were going. It's always really good to have people you can bounce ideas off of or just talk about certain problems you might be experiencing. It is hard because product managers, just as, I don't want to say more than most other roles or departments, feel overwhelmed all the time. You don't have time to go socialize with people, with your peers a lot. You're generally, if you're socializing, you're socializing with people you're trying to convince to get stuff done because you don't actually have power over them. Your time out of work is invested in smoothing, greasing the wheels you're trying to turn during the day. It's hard to make that time to get out and meet other people.

I think now the community actually has, the west side here at least, we have enough meet-ups and enough social events where you're going to run into other product managers. They're not product manager only events, but they're certainly populated by a whole group of different people from developers to QA to product to project. That has really changed over the last 15 years for sure. Because there were so many companies, so many start ups, and the funding, institutional funding, has really grown up around here. We're starting to see a lot more behaviors that look like Silicon Valley, which is still in a different league to us as far as product management goes. It's definitely much better than it used to.

Suzanne: You know, voracious learning, I guess is the word that kind of comes to my mind. I think that this is a role that is evolving all the time, and it's a role where its own understanding is evolving. Are there any books, thought leaders, blogs, places where you have turned recently or turned in your career that you think this is essential, essential reading, essential listening. Don't come into my office and ask for a job if you're not familiar with ...

Tom: I think everyone, even though it's old at this point, everyone should read Crossing the Chasm. That's the Bible of start-ups for me. It tells you how to frame a new problem using a very good easy structure. It tells you why that's important, using real examples of real companies, which you may or may not be familiar with at this point. I think its recent edition's been updated. That's a great book. I think there's some books by Allan Cooper about designing things for customers, for clients, are really good. I can't remember the name of his best work. I'll think of it. I like actually reading stuff by Daniel Pink, who is all about ...

Suzanne: Is that Human to Sell?

Tom: He's really cognitive learning, very insightful. He's a professor, but it's about how people think, how people take in information, how they react to information. It's a little more theoretical than, who's the guy I'm thinking of that did Outliers.

Suzanne: Gladwell.

Tom: Right. It's along the lines but a lot more educational about the mechanics that go along with why people do what they do. Just behavioral information, it's great. That's something that again isn't technology. It's not communication. It's understanding people at the end of the day, how you can present things to people that will, even if it's the same thing, if you present it in a different way, their reaction to it will be much different. It's little subtle things like that that make a big difference. As far as basic product management, I don't have any one book that summarizes that. There's no one position that summarizes that.

Suzanne: Yeah, it's learn everything you can about business, design, and technology. That's the take-away advice at the high level.

Tom: If you're just trying to get to product management, pragmatic marketing's a good resource. They have lots of articles about product management in general.

Suzanne: Last question for you, Tom, and really appreciate your time here today. If you were to offer a recent graduate of the GA product management course or somebody who was looking to make that step in. You've spoken about the importance of communication and confidence, but would there be one specific thing that you would say to somebody who wants to get a foot in the door of product management and doesn't know how?

Tom: If they have the opportunity to move within their company, the best thing to do is go talk to the person who would be hiring for those positions and understand from them what they're looking for. You've got a direct contact, take them out to lunch, take them out for a cup of coffee, and do a job interview, a reverse job interview. What is a person need to succeed in this position? Then, go figure out how to get that experience or to get that knowledge or insight. One thing that I've seen that's been very effective is trying to understand a company during an interview process or pre-interview and highlight some problems that they have. Why is their website not working? Why is their messaging not working? Why are their sales materials not working? If it's a consumer product company, what's wrong with the product? What could they do differently? Come up with, don't poke holes, but with suggestions on how they personally could improve what that company's doing.

It may or may not be on the company's radar, but you're saying hey I'm paying attention. I'm really interested in this company because I've spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. And, three that could be a major impact to whatever they're doing. Obviously if you can tie any sort of user engagement or monetization with that, like you generate more revenue if you do x, x, and x, that's huge. That all of a sudden separate you from everyone who's just sending in a job application into I'm problem solving for you. That's what we're looking for in product management are problem solvers. People who can identify something then go fix it.

Suzanne: Great. Thank you so much.