How Great Product Leaders Operate to Drive Revenue

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The following transcript has been altered for readability.

Becky Flint: All right, we have the full house now. We can probably get started. We have everyone’s bio here. And before I get started, I want our panelists to have a brief intro. Quickly, myself, I’m Becky Flint, founder and CEO of Dragonboat.

I’m going to follow the order of this intro slide. Why don’t you all give a brief intro of yourself, and then we dive into the questions. It will be interactive. We have a general topic around how great product leaders operate to drive revenue and growth. We will have a couple of questions. We’re going to also take audience questions. Please use the Q&A so it’s easier to follow through. I’ll pick up some of the questions coming through as the conversation goes.

And as panelists, you know, feel free to jump in, answer questions, and join other topics as relevant. So we just make it very natural because you’re all experts. You’ve done so much of that. So without further ado, let’s do it. Dickson, would you like to start first?

Panelist Introductions

Dickson Chu: Sure. Dickson Chu. I’ve been in and around product for a while. Definitely, thank you for having me, honored to be here. I’ve known Becky for a long time, and I’ve been a big fan of Dragonboat.

I would say compared to the rest of the panel, I’m probably the old-timer here and probably a little out of date. I’ve done everything from running a fairly decent sized private organization at PayPal to running a couple of startups, including one that I started.

So my current experience is acting now on the small end of things with companies under 20 people. And so, I’m probably going to learn as much about these topics from the rest of the panel as you’ll get any kind of small nuggets of wisdom from me.

Vanessa Garber: I think I’m next. Thanks, Dickson. Hi, everybody. I’m Vanessa Garber. I’m currently heading up the mobile apps for Toyota and Lexus’s experience across several continents. We call it the global mobile app. If you say it 10 times fast, it sticks. Living and getting at Glomo, something like that.

But my background is actually the opposite. I started in startups, did a stint in product innovation and consulting, and have moved into a very large organization, very global organization, much more grounded in traditional manufacturing practices, right? Really the embodiment of where products came from, the Toyota way.

So it’s been a very interesting experience for me, going through that transition and getting a chance to collaborate with Becky a bit, which has been fabulous. I’ve also been involved with Women in Product for years. And on the side, I work as the president of a nonprofit dedicated to elevating women in leadership.

So I think I’ve kind of played in a lot of these different spaces and really observing today how manufacturing organizations are looking to take on this product mindset. So I’m excited to talk with these lovely folks and share a bit with everybody here.

Becky Flint: Thanks, Vanessa. Welcome. And the next on the slide is Robin. Welcome, Robin.

Robin Chiang: Hi there. Thanks for having me, Becky. I’m like Dickson Chu, actually older than I’ll put myself in your group. I’ve been around, been in the Bay Area, but mostly in different tech companies from very small startups to now very large at Google, always in a product management type function, working to support product or adjacent to product analytics, et cetera, and now product operations.

So been at PayPal, eBay, some fintech like Clover point-of-sale, crossed paths with many of you. And then most recently at Meta with the ads team and then a consumer function across all of Meta. And then the last two and a half years at Google, specifically in the ads area. So doing product operations at Google.

Excited about this topic. I’m a big fan of Dragonboat and all that you do for our community and excited to learn from my peers as well.

Becky Flint: Welcome, Robin. Thank you. And Carlos, thank you for joining us today.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: Of course. Thank you for having me. Hey, everyone. This is Carlos. I am the founder and CEO at Product School. Product School is the largest community for product professionals with over 2 million members. I started the company 10 years ago before product was cool.

So I’m very happy to see discussions around how product is actually driving revenue and not just what product management is. Throughout these years, we train thousands of aspiring and existing product managers. We’ve also trained very large organizations on how to do actual product transformation, including JP Morgan, Boston Consulting Group, Walmart, and many others.

Evolving Product Management

Becky Flint: Welcome. And thank you. And such a diverse group of panelists in various sizes of companies, and different roles. And regardless of being in product, being a founder, or involved in nonprofit operations and analytics, it’s all product management. The full scope and impact of product management, how wonderful it is. Finally, we come together.

So as most of you have been around for long enough time, I think this is a really relevant topic, which is how in your experience has product management changed or evolved in the last five years, especially around expectations, evaluations, and how things are done?

So we’re going to go in reverse order. Feel free to chime in any time you like on topics; we’ll make it very interactive.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: That means I go first. Great. The most fundamental change I’ve seen in product over the last five years is the rise of the Chief Product Officer as a function.

Today, over 50% of Fortune 100 companies have a Chief Product Officer. While this might seem obvious to those working in high-tech companies, where the product function has always been strategic, especially in tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York, or London, this is not obvious at all. There are now way more companies out there that are not high-tech, that are not in tech hubs, that already have a Chief Product Officer.

And this shift is huge because that means that product is not always coming last as part of the post-sales delivery, responsible for just building something that sales teams have sold already. Instead, product management is now accountable for building products that customers love and are willing to pay for. And I repeat that, and are willing to pay for, because now we are responsible and accountable for contributing to that revenue growth.

Long gone are the days where the highest-ranked product person in the organization was under a Chief Technology Officer or a Chief Marketing Officer.

Becky Flint: Very cool. I saw nodding heads. Do you want to add some comments?

Robin Chiang: I’ll chime in. I think something that Carlos said that really resonated with me is that over a couple of decades, anybody could call themselves a product manager, right? It was just kind of a name that you could throw out there. It was not even this formality of a real profession necessarily.

But really now, to be a bonafide product manager, there is a very vast toolbox that’s expected, and the expectations are much higher.

In terms of 20 years ago, it would be like, “oh, I’m just trying to drive the number of users that I’m getting in my product flow” or whatever. Now, you have to be a pretty sophisticated business leader, economic ninja, on how you bring such an organization together, even if it’s a small startup, to really understand the market, understand your competitors, understand the customer, understand what value you’re driving for customers.

That’s so key because it has to be enduring revenue. You see that also. I think there are symptoms of that. You see the rise of analytics and all the data that really needs to support all of this, and that is a function of us wanting to understand the economics and that enduring value. A lot of what Carlos said really resonated.

Becky Flint: Anyone want to add? Vanessa?

Vanessa Garber: I was going to say, I mean, this is going to go into exactly what the good news is, we’re all kind of thinking along the same lines here. But this shift of being an expert first versus learning your way into the role, I think is a key difference that you’re really seeing, maybe even over the last decade. It used to be more invitational. You would be an expert in marketing or in customer service or in sales, and that door would open saying, “oh, you really understand our business, you really understand the customer need. Come help us shape the product from that lens”. 

And now you can get an MBA in product management. That was not available when I was looking. And for better or for worse, you’re coming at it from different lenses. And I think, too, we’re seeing a shift in the blend of talent, people who are finance first or analytics or business first versus more evolving from engineering, sales, customer service, or marketing. So I think that’s a key difference, too. And what we’re seeing about the appearance of the CPO, you can actually go and get an MBA for that. 

Dickson Chu: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting just to start with the question of what’s changed over the last five years? Well, first of all, the elephant in the room, COVID changed a lot of things, right? It kept a lot of people at home. It changed a lot of work practices and all that. 

And in a very interesting way, I think it speaks to the evolution of product management and how that’s changed because all of a sudden you are working remotely. Therefore, there’s a dependency on metrics and processes and technology to enable the virtual collaboration that’s necessary. One of the things that I think is really now stuck is that product management has become much more about being data-driven, right? Much more about using collaboration tools and working across both, you know, sort of in an interdisciplinary way as well as a real focus on what’s the end goal.

I see some of the participants are a few ex-PayPal people that may have been part of my organization and Becky will resonate with this. When I was building out the product group at PayPal a gazillion years ago, we had the great fortune of having Scott Cook on the eBay board. And I remember having many conversations with Scott. He would come in and talk to us about, you know, this was kind of roughly 20 years ago, this whole notion of product-led growth. I mean, Intuit has been sort of the OG of all that and pushed it and set a theme, which was not always the case, right? 

Because there are still many organizations and investors, VCs, private equity, that when they take over a company, they invest in it. It’s all around go-to-market and what’s the sales function and what’s the sales motion. But I think increasingly there’s a real recognition that product-led growth is actually important. And what does that mean? It means that what you deliver meets the expectations of the market. What you can do in terms of big and small things to the product functionality can actually move the needle on revenue and on adoption. And so you start to take a really kind of holistic – you have to take a holistic view. 

One of the things I used to always say when I was building the organization is, “if you want to be a product manager in my org, that’s great because, as far as I’m concerned, product managers are really general managers in training” because you have to go through and adopt the different disciplines of both the analytics, the technical components, the ability to collaborate across functions. I grew up in banking and Fintech, and when you think about Fintech, you can’t build a Fintech product without looking across all the different disciplines because decisions you make are not just technical. There are risk components, there are compliance components, there could be things that you can make decisions around or features that actually have finance and real economic components. So it’s the ability to be the general manager and look across the board. 

And Vanessa talked about being in manufacturing. When you think about it, consumer packaged goods, the old notion of product manager really was kind of a revenue driver, general manager of that product line, right? And I think tech has really adopted that, and I think that’s evolved. Carlos runs this fantastic organization. I think he would probably resonate with some of this stuff because that is the evolution where the product manager really has a seat at the table in terms of driving strategy and driving revenue.

Changes in Training and Organizations

Becky Flint: Yeah, I think this kind of takes us past through. Would you, in your experience going through trainings and working with product managers in your organizations, do you see some of the changes? And I have two questions. One question is to Vanessa. I think there’s a question from the audience on how do you work with organizations? 

And the other one is actually I would pass to Vanessa first, and the second one I go to you, Carlos. In your working, training organizations last decade almost, what changes do you see? Maybe Vanessa, you start first. 

Vanessa Garber: Sure. I see this question. I was trying to read it about, you know, scrappy startups. It’s a place to start, y’all. I think there’s, in terms of metrics, and this is kind of some of what I’m talking about that’s changed over time, is this expectation of results. And so some of it used to be just put features in the market so that we can get eyeballs, so that we can get engagement, and engagement was everything. 

And now we’re like, well, engagement doesn’t inherently drive revenue. Participation in eyeballs does not convert directly to dollars. And we see that as the shift away from the freemium model. But you have to have some empathy for your founders because they have gone through a long, arduous journey to describe the business viability of their product vision. 

And so as a startup, you’re starting from this place where the business strategy and the product strategy are very tightly aligned. They have certain numbers that they need to show in order to continue to earn money before you’re profitable. Over time, as you’ve got a product market fit, assuming you can get it and hold on, don’t let go, right, that will start to pull apart. And so there’s this question of, one, this need, and I think this is particularly true, I think this is some of what Dickson was sharing about this remote work environment, which is more so true in the Bay Area. I admit, I commute to Texas; I’m in California because that’s where Toyota is headquartered. And it’s a very different mental model of coming into the office. So you have to know your leaders and how they work as human beings. 

Look, we’re all humans. And sometimes founders can be real tricky. And if you come from a place of empathy for the position that they’re in and understand what they need to be successful, it might not be what you need to be successful to drive the product. I think you can find, first of all, a better state of mental model for yourself from a working place. But you can’t necessarily convince them to adopt a different mindset. The question is, do you really understand what they’re driving towards? How can you support them and continue to foster the kind of healthy growth of the product that you’re trying to do? It’s hard to do both but it’s possible. 

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: Yeah, as a founder, I have to agree. But at the same time, I agree with the fact that it’s important to not give up. And I always love to have people that push back on me, and can elevate my thinking and not just say yes by default, as a way of giving up. 

To me, what I’ve seen, and this is a statistic that I read from McKinsey, 70% of digital transformations fail. That’s insane. If you think about the amount of millions that go into these organizations that try to drive change, and then that goes down to nothing. The number one reason why is actually lack of CEO support. So that means that if the CEO or the founder, the top people there do not believe in this as a strategic investment, it’s never going to work. It will be a cute initiative for learning and development, for someone to feel good about themselves, check a few boxes, but in reality, it doesn’t really move the needle. The two other reasons why data transformations tend to fail are lack of team adoption and then poor implementation of new technologies and processes. 

However, there are very good success stories among companies that have navigated these challenges effectively. We published this annual report called “The Future Of Product” where we survey and assess organizations that we’ve worked with and we’ve seen success with. And there are three common characteristics across the product teams. Number one is that the product teams are contributing to revenue growth, not just adding user value. And I reinforce that point because when the product team is considered a tech support or cost center, and just comes after sales, it’s just never going to be strategic. 

The second characteristic that we’ve seen is that the product teams are positioned at the intersection of tech and business, not just under tech. So when there is a chief product officer or basically someone that is at the C-suite level reporting directly to the CEO, then it’s when you have a shot at really influencing a strategy. If you are under CTO or you are under CMO, it’s never going to be a real strategic function. 

And the last one, and this is fairly recent, is how AI is impacting these trends because it’s true that the product teams are doing way more with fewer people. Maybe similar to what Dickson was mentioning before, as more companies went remote, as more companies were affected by different macroeconomic environments, they realized that they were able to do more with less, with or without AI. But clearly now with AI, when companies realize that they are able to do the same, if not more, they’re not going back to then overhiring people. If anything, they’re looking for more ways to make their teams smaller. I think it’s a real opportunity for product leaders to show how, hey, you are now at the table. Cool. How are you actually going to make us money?

The Role of Data Analytics

Becky Flint: How to make money, that’s a really important thing. I think earlier we talked about, and we can probably double click a little bit more, I think Robin, you are one of the first points in your group at PayPal actually to have a dedicated data for PMs. That was like way back then. I think there’s just so many things to learn. So how do you see that trend? I think data analytics is brought up and touched upon by many. So how do you see the trend in that space evolve?

Robin Chiang: That’s for me. And actually, I just want to tie back. I was smiling because when Dickson was talking about Scott Cook, that’s when we got started with experimentation, and that was all inspired by what Intuit was doing, very customer-driven design, experimentation, A-B testing, like having that humility and that humbleness as a PM of, “maybe my ideas aren’t great. Maybe I need to actually test that. Maybe I need to test many different designs and actually get that out there in a very iterative way”. So just to tie back to what Dickson was saying, I think that was a really important transformation and a lot of different companies had not yet done that back then. Now experimentation is like everybody needs to have it. And I guess that goes to your question, Becky. How do we see the advent of data analytics and experimentation and large data sets that we have available to us? 

I’m in a really kind of interesting sheltered place because I’m at Google now. And so we have the world’s richest data, but actually, we’re so judicious and careful about how we use it that it’s almost like I’ve come to the land of plenty, but we have to be even more careful, and obviously with privacy regulations, etc., that’s changed the whole landscape about how do we operate. 

One of the biggest trends I see in data analytics is obviously the use of AI is going to make a democratization of data even more accessible to everybody. It used to be that you really had to be this guru on how to do SQL queries and pull all these crazy things. And now that is actually really accessible just with AI. It’s amazing. Not that those data analytics chops won’t be necessary in the future, but I think it really democratizes data.

The other thing is with this rise of privacy and regulation, we have to be so much more thoughtful about how we’re using it. How are we anonymizing data and the practice of using that? It’s an interesting juxtaposition that we’re at this kind of crossroads of we have more data than we could ever desire, but yet we have to be very careful about how we get it, how it’s tracked, etc, etc. I think we’re in interesting crossroads here. 

And then obviously the rise of AI. So I would love to hear from my other colleagues about how they’re seeing this transformation. But I think it will be some choppy waters. We’re going to go through some iteration in the next probably 3-5 years, especially with this big advent of AI changing the landscape. But I assume that we’re going to come out of it a lot richer with our understanding, kind of building on Carlos’s point about doing more with less. You don’t necessarily have to. It used to take me an army of 20 analysts to do some of the things that we can do in a couple of days now. And that was just 5 years ago. So that’s a big change.

Becky Flint: Right. And I heard lots of changes and lots of questions. Some things do change. Some things don’t. But ultimately, product organizations, if you think about it, they really do need to evolve and adapt. And that’s probably one of the things that a couple of the stats that we may or may not know is that a product manager will directly influence between 12 to 26 people in the company. You work directly or indirectly, directly, like the first degree and second degree. So that means it’s a lot. Any of these 20-some people, the way they work would affect you. And just think about this, the magnitude of a CPO, what that means. How do you see organizations and leaders adapt to changing technology, changing the way they’re working, changing competition, changing how the company and team expect product leaders to perform? I’m going to go the other way around. So, Dickson, you want to start first? And anyone, please do feel free to jump in.

Dickson Chu: Well, I mean, picking up on a lot of the great words the rest of the panel have been talking about, I think part of that evolution or that need to change from a product leadership standpoint is taking on this notion of continuous discovery, right? I mean, part of being that product leader and trying to drive a product-led growth strategy says you have to be just inherently curious. You’re trying to look around the corner. What’s not immediately in front of you? And so there’s kind of a mindset change to begin with. 

And like all leaders, you have to model the behavior you want the rest of your organization to follow. I think that it’s being data-driven, being just inherently curious but also continually bringing a lot of the work you’re doing back to what’s the objective function. What are the key objectives of the organization in terms of growth and in terms of revenue? Think like a general manager. It becomes an incredibly difficult position. Instead of being sort of a functional expert, you’re now looking horizontally, and where you’re going to excel, and your organization will excel is, you know, learning. It’s interesting, we talk a lot about AI, and it’s an amazingly powerful set of technologies that now have evolved over the last 30 years. And now it seems like it’s in the common vernacular. It’s not like AI just appeared. I mean, one of my best friends did his Ph.D. in AI 25 years ago at MIT. He said, “yeah, that was our theoretical thing. Now it’s real”. 

But use the tools. Now we have great platforms and tools that you can leverage, but it’s not a substitute for some of the soft skills that are also necessary in this evolution. The need to be able to communicate, the need to be able to persuade, the need to collaborate and work as a team. I mean, those are all the things that become additive to, yes, you need to have the functional skills and you need to have the technical skills to work with engineering. But now you also need to develop in your organization, in yourself as a leader, the inherent need to be collaborative and to be, ironically, to be a deep generalist.

Vanessa Garber: I really appreciate that, Dickson, because that dovetails exactly into what I had been thinking about in terms of what does this adaptation look like. Product started as this translator between engineering and the business being like, “what are they saying?” And trying to help make sure there was understanding, at least some understanding. But now it’s also about enrolling in that, establishing that vision, and making sure being that interconnected point between all aspects of the business. 

And what I’m seeing in one of the struggles I see teams with is either you’ve got a wealth of data, like at Google, you are overflowing with abundance, and it’s very easy to put both feet in business, right? To take one foot out of the technical and to go put. I see, in some places that kind of pendulum swings towards being metrics chasing and too focused on that. One of the things I’ve talked a lot with people is also establishing “do-no-harm” metrics, not just chase the good, but also what should we not touch or impact or harm along the way so that encouraging people to think more broadly because we all behave like any salesperson, like we all behave in which the ways we’re incentivized. Teams will go in the direction of the promotion or how we lead them. 

There’s this notion of, “hey, please use AI, please adopt these tools”. Like, okay, yes. And how are we adopting those things to continue to enhance the business, to enhance the product, to keep a genuine relationship, a positive relationship between the business and the customer and not just use a tool or a system for the sake of the tool or the system or the metric. 

And I think that’s the pitfall that teams and companies need to navigate, especially as some companies are maybe scrambling to catch up. And so maybe they don’t have that wealth of information. Maybe all they’ve got is the engagement data because that’s what they’ve been focused on for so long. How do you teach a whole new vocabulary, not just to the product team and the engineering team, but also to all of your business counterparts so that everyone is asking of the executive team the same set of questions and not just falling back on the language and the vocabulary we had a decade ago?

Robin Chiang:  I was just going to jump in there because something you said, Vanessa, always being leading analytics teams as well. I always, very grounded in the data, but also always a little concerned about when it’s used myopically. So this balance of using counterbalance metrics, like we’re going to drive X, Y, Z, but with quality, or continuing to keep a customer support bench of X or satisfaction of X, making sure I really see that in great PMs who understand the tension, which goes back to the economic ninja I’m going to keep harping on, but understanding the things that are in tension and then knowing what we’re optimizing for, but at what cost. 

And sometimes you go all eyes wide in, like, yes, we’re actually going to need to take a hit on some of the satisfaction, but we’re going in eyes wide open. And we’re going to do that because we have to optimize for revenue on this one product, whatever it might be. But at least then you’re going in eyes wide open, playing with all the cards on the table. So very big plus one, Vanessa.

Collaboration and Communication

Becky Flint: Yeah. I want to just also use this opportunity to answer the question coming from the audience as well. I think exactly what Robin and Vanessa, you brought on is this, right? Think about it. If we have all the data we optimize and we have one result. But the words cannot be like that, it’s not like that. We cannot have all the data, obviously, and we cannot optimize the same way. 

So that’s really one of the questions people ask, How does Dragonboat help the data decision? Because think about it, there’s not a single product that’s built by one product manager or one product team. How many people are on your product team? To the customer, it’s one product, but internally it’s many. So the balance of where are we going to invest, where is the opportunity, or where is the gap, we’re going to focus at this particular time, at what cost of the others? That’s what we call product portfolio management. 

They’re really taking into consideration of the customers, the segment, opportunity and your strategy, your resources. I don’t have these resources to do that now, even if I dream and find something else, right? So all these elements need to come together. And that’s why we build a product operating model because it’s not one PM making all the decisions. It’s not one set of data, it’s the only set of data. It’s not just today; it’s not just tomorrow. What about 3 years from now? If nobody looks at 3 years, we’re going to all be out of business, right? You have to bring all that into your decision on the data set you’re looking at, on how you’re going to balance the set of data counters and the time horizon and all that stuff, and all the other elements you have at your disposal. 

That’s why Dragonboat is built in a way because we build a tool to enable different functions, all the PMs to collaborate. So you have your best recommendation, then we have to put together, right? You can’t just bottoms down and say, “do this”. But you can’t just say, “I’m going to optimize my data”. That’s not going to be good either, right? So you have to put the two of them together. 

Now, obviously, Carlos, you’re the one who brought up the questions about AI and technology, some of the trends. So I want to pass that to you. Want to add any more insights on this topic?

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: Good for now. If there are any other questions, we can go ahead too.

Relationship With Other Product Roles

Becky Flint: Okay. We definitely talk a lot about how product organizations and the leaders adapt to changes, what some of the success they’re seeing, what are some of the struggles, and lots of great tidbits on that. I think there are some questions from the audience. 

Since we’re here talking about adapting, there are new roles being recognized more today. For example, CPOs are relatively new, right? I think Dickson was a CPO at PayPal for a while. That wasn’t called CPO. But now it is. And then there are also the previous older roles. One of the questions coming from the audience to say, how’s the relationship with the PMO, and strategy team? What is the advice to improve them? Anyone care to jump in and share some of your perspectives?

Vanessa Garber: Can I go? I just have a hot Robin real quick, and then I will pass it to you. I think the answer differs at every company. We have these notions, these titles, inherently describe the function in each organization. This is actually something, especially in my consult, I put my consulting hat on, and I would go from company to company to company. And the people would have the same titles, but wildly different jobs. Depending on which book your leadership team recently read or how functions organically evolved at the company over time, you will see different groups. 

But if you go to kind of like MBA school, what is strategy? What is product? What is project? I think it’s all about separating out and really understanding each of those roles. And if you see that, more often than not, you’ll see conflicts, like two organizations who say they’re responsible for X, whatever X is. That inherently creates some conflict or friction between the teams who are both trying to execute against the same prime directive. 

As leaders and as people who we’ve seen and we can see across the aisle to the different orgs, is to have conversations and try to help smooth that out for our teams. Because the other thing I see is I talk about there’s these two pillars, infrastructure and process. We think of, let’s say you’re going to go take a driving test, right? You’ve got your car, you had a little pamphlet, you did the writing test, and you show up, but there’s no roads and there’s no signage, right? You learned the process, but the infrastructure is different. And we are all infrastructure. We’re all parts of that working way. And then how we try to execute our jobs is the process. So I see a lot of over-rotation to try to solve through process what is really an infrastructure issue. 

And so when you try to go to different orgs and maybe as an individual contributor, this isn’t a problem you can solve on your own, but you can certainly raise awareness and say, “hey, who should be doing what?” And maybe you’ve got an opinion, but we’ve all got them. And the real question is how within our organization can we resolve conflict by asking our leadership to clarify, “okay, if we’re going to have a project group and we’re going to have a strategy group and we’re going to have all the characters in the cast, can everyone just have one clear job so that we can come together and do the part that we’re uniquely qualified for to execute against?” So it’s a big ask, but it’s certainly a way to kind of at least break it down in your mind to feel a little less like you’re going sideways. Because I don’t know that I answered the question like what is strategy? Because I’m going to have a different answer than Robin. Might be small.

Robin Chiang: I’d love to riff though on that. Like I think one of the observations that I’ve had over the years going to different companies, small companies, medium, and then extra, extra large, but functions like let’s just take product management at a smaller company, you’re doing it all. You’re doing product marketing. They might not have a product marketing function. They might not have that strategy and ops. They might not have Becky’s question earlier about PMO function. You’re doing it all. So that’s like a PM is going to get to do everything like general manager thrown in the deep end. 

And then you get to larger companies and every larger company that I keep going to, it just mind blows me that they have to split the role. There’s actually like eight teams here that actually you could point at and say, “oh, together you are a PM”. But because when you have such a large user base and you have so many products that you have to manage, it gets split into these micro titles. So a hundred percent on, don’t pay attention to the title. Look at what’s actually in the content of the job. You can be a product manager or product operations person and go to two different companies, and it means wildly different things. I’m sure that’s the case also with program management or data and analytics, but it’s really what’s under the covers. And I think that’s very astute on the infrastructure navigation.

The second thing that I wanted to comment about the difference of companies, it’s really interesting to also see different companies. I call it, where’s the sun? Is it an engineering-driven organization? Is it a sales? I went to a company that was a sales company for the first time I’d ever been. It was almost like PM was kind of at the beck and call of what sales wanted to do. Sales was driving the strategy and PM was there to execute the strategy and build cool products. But it was really largely driven by what the sales team wanted to get to the market with. 

Then you come to a different company, and it’s very engineering-driven.

So that’s another dynamic in terms of two different company dimensions for anyone out there that’s looking for jobs or navigating next companies. Those are really important things to, I think, observe about the company and what the infrastructure, to use Vanessa’s language, and how to navigate that will look.

Vanessa Garber: Carlos seemed really excited about this topic.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: This resonates with me so deeply because that’s what I do for a living. We’ve been evangelizing on this for a very long time because for the longest time, a lot of these companies would hire a new executive. New executive would go and hire a consulting firm, AKA McKinsey, BCG, would create a PowerPoint, tell them what to do, then leave. And then what? And sometimes what that PowerPoint says, it’s just a fantasy. It’s perfect on paper, but that doesn’t resist reality. So we were invited many times to go and train based on a strategy that someone else created. 

And that’s what inspired us to create a product consulting practice to kind of unify those two things and start from the very top. Our methodology, in a nutshell, is starting from the top, working with the CEO and other executives on, in some cases, defining product strategy or if the product strategy is defined, at least to ensure that people outside the product understand that strategy. Because sometimes this word around product strategy feels like a thing in the corner, but in my opinion, it should be deeply connected with company strategy. It’s the same pretty much. 

So once there is clear alignment on the product strategy, we go and assess the current org. And at that moment, we are not telling people how they have to label them, right? It doesn’t really matter if they are calling someone a product owner or a product manager or a product strategist, business analyst. Like, okay, just teach me, tell me what you are calling who and what they are doing. Like, what’s the actual competency model here? What are the balance scorecards? And how are people supposed to perform in order to move up and in order to define success? 

Some of these things might sound basic to some of us since that’s part of our DNA, right? Defining success criteria. But it’s not always common. Even within the same org, I’ve seen situations, within the same company, I’ve seen situations where orgs are different. And there are product managers here doing something different than product managers there. And then product strategists are like, oh my God. So literally spend time just getting people to talk to each other and have a shared vocabulary. And at the end of the day, they want to call it green alien. Let’s call it green alien. But like, what’s more important to me is that we align on the roles and responsibilities and how we define success. 

Once we have that clear alignment, then we start with an iteration. Ultimately, to me, a product org is a product in itself. And there’s no perfect solution forever. The understanding is that you are never done. You are going to do an iteration that’s probably the right fit for where you are today. And then at some point, you’re also going to do another iteration. And that’s okay. I cannot guarantee when the reorg is going to happen and if we shouldn’t call it a reorg because the word reorg also has some negative connotations. But assuming that a product org is a product in itself, then we start working with the teams to assess kind of where they are across 10 different dimensions. 

We have our own assessment program where we see, okay, for this team, how are they ranking in terms of strategy, in terms of discovery, in terms of AI, in terms of certain skills that are necessary to do their job successfully. And the intention is not to make everybody a superhero and rank 10 out of 10 in every single dimension. It’s to have a clear starting point and then decide with the executive team where are the dimensions that we want to push in order to accomplish certain goals. And based on that, then we measure again and iterate. 

It’s literally treating this as a product problem and connecting that strategy that sometimes sounds something like only for executives to the actual programs that are required for the teams to also influence that strategy with real results.

Operationalizing Strategy

Becky Flint: Right. Something very interesting, what I’m hearing from you is also personal experience that a lot is that if you think about product management, program management, project management, business strategy, they’re skills. Like they’re just skills. In some roles, you use the majority of the skills. In some other roles, you use less of the skills. So which product manager does not have project management skills? You’re not going to survive. If you don’t have data analysis skills, you don’t have a strategist. You need the skills. 

So in the faster growing organization, we know sometimes you have these mission teams, right? Even like, hey, we’re going to, let’s say, hey, we get a competitive threat. We have AI coming. Like, what is our answer? You put a team over there, guess what? Like you had said, okay, what is everyone’s role? You bring people with the skills, and you define the role in that little mini product organization for that period of time. And then reorg. So I really like Carlos, you said, like, you know, it’s a living, it’s a product itself. You adjust it, you operate differently as well on that. 

I want to add a couple of things. Like people ask questions here, right? Is to say, obviously we need to define product strategy to align with business strategy. It doesn’t mean individual PMs, you don’t need strategic thinking. Like you have the scope for you to be strategic. What is strategic? Strategic is like, we want to get there. And how do we get there? So that whole thing is a strategic process. As a PM said, if I want to drive retention, I have to figure out how to do that. There’s a broader strategy, right? 

So I think that’s like a question from the audience to say, hey, how do you address this? Lots of goals, different metrics, and all that stuff. How do you tie to the broader strategy? And then how do you solve your areas that can contribute to the broader strategy at the same time, not kind of counter others that also try to solve a slightly different problem. But I would love to also open this up to, we talk about strategy, we talk about metrics, we talk about different things people can do. And I want to hear from you. What’s your thought on that? Dickson, you want to start first?

Dickson Chu: Yeah. In a way, one of the things that I found effective, and I know Becky, you and I have had this chat about my current use of Dragonboat. And I said, hey, maybe I’m using it in the wrong way because I approached it from the top down. I said, look, let’s start with what are the OKRs for the organization, which I’m a big fan of as a framework. So say, because they become the expression of the business strategy and what are the objective functions, right? So start from the top down, identify what are the objectives and then the key results, and then cascade it down all the way to, at some point, epics tied to stories, tied to JIRA tickets. And so you have a linkage from top to bottom. And so people working at different levels are saying, okay, yeah, I worked on my project. I checked the ticket in. But you can see it then cascade back up to say, okay, now it contributes to the key result and the objective that we as a management team agreed to. And so in a way, it provides a unifying function that brings the whole work together, right? 

The engineer who is working on a particular project or a particular ticket can see that here’s how it links to an impact because it’s one thing to just talk about, oh, you need to be strategic. Well, what does that actually mean, right? It’s another thing that, well, you need to think strategically and you’re going to drive revenue. Well, I’m not really sure that this thing I’m working on today, how’s it linked to driving revenue and then driving strategy? 

Well, I find that something like using a platform like Dragonboat that creates that visibility, starting with structuring it around the objectives and key results of the organization provides a framework that sort of links people together. And so I don’t know if that directly answers your question, but it certainly is a set of techniques that contribute to this conversation around what does product management mean.

Robin Chiang: Something I was going to add or ask the panelists if they have different opinions about this, but one thing that we hadn’t talked about but is so core to this job is coordination and communication. And it’s such a heavy lift in this role. So the more that you can use tools and technology to make sure that communication is as seamless as possible, then it helps you enable a really agile environment. And I think back to Lean Startup and what Scott Cook was doing way back when, but it’s really more imperative now than ever because you need to be able to take your organization and change on a dime. 

And the only way to do that is if you have that neural network of all these different teams that understand interdependencies, understand how their piece of the puzzle connects to another infrastructure team over there. And Dragonboat does a lot of that. So these are the hacks that allow and enable, I think the earlier part of our conversation about how we’ve transformed product management so vastly is because we’ve got all those really cool resources and tools to do our jobs so much more effectively, but it’s really imperative. 

Vanessa Garber: I think, Robin, being able to turn on a dime assumes a certain liveness to not just knowing people. You know, I have, at least in product, been blessed being an extreme extrovert. Talking to other people has never been a problem for me. And I recognize that for more introverted folks, as product management may seem, that part of product management may be a lot more daunting. I’ll just share that when I joined Toyota, I met 1,400 people in my first 4 months. And I have continued to meet, not quite at that rate, but it’s a huge organization. You know, my first company, I was employee 36. 

So when you’re talking about moving on a dime, if you’re in a startup environment, and really you’ve got like the data team, you’ve got the design team, right? Getting that group of leaders aligned to then pivot together is a different level of effort and a different type of conversation than, you know, I’m in Toyota, North America. Like there were a set of things within the vehicles that we are responsible for, but the chief engineers are located in Japan and they are the product owners for the lineup. So when I’m trying to make a decision for the mobile app, which is cross-car line, or when we’re trying to make a decision from a multimedia head unit perspective, it might not be relevant in China. It might not be relevant in Australia. It might not support the laws in the EU. And so the question is, you’re trying to make a global notion. That boat that you’re trying to turn, you have to really be able to understand deeply this organization. I was told, “don’t worry, in about 10 years, you’ll get it”. It’s a different timescale that you’re working on and trying to build those relationships in a very high “Nemawashi”, high consensus-building culture. So it really depends on the kind of organization you’re at and trying to create that movement. 

You do need to have relationships, and they don’t have, you don’t have to be your best friend or your bosom buddy, but you do need respect. You do need to be conversational in their area of expertise and to recognize that so that when you’re asking them, “can you please change your entire working way that you’ve done for the last 50 years for this highly globally matrixed team” that they’ll even pick up the phone, right? There’s much smaller bites that you’re trying to take. 

With Dragonboat, for how we’ve thought about it, you know, there’s this small group, we’re trying it out and we’re showing, we’re just giving these little mooseboosh tidbits to people about like, “hey, it could be like this for you. It could be this easy for you”. And then we start a dialogue, and that dialogue may take more time than you’d prefer, but the invitation has to be there. You have this wildly successful automaker, for example, saying, why should we change? We’re doing such a great job. Look how nice, how well the RAV4 is doing this year. If anyone here recently, you’re welcome, it’s a great car. But I think you really have to be mindful of that relationship building in a lot of traditional organizations is still very necessary in addition to kind of this drip campaign of positive opportunity, which is what, you know, kind of the mental model that I’m using right now.

Becky Flint: Very cool, very cool. Want to add any more, anyone? As you’re speaking, I was thinking about something where going back to data, I think a lot of times that people think about data, it’s like, oh, retention and adoption, customer data. If you think about ROI, there’s return. So all the things we’ll talk about is return. What about the investment? 

Then Vanessa’s talking about a lot of data points that people may not think about it. It doesn’t apply to this country. It will be a problem in the other country. These are limitations. These are the things you have to do. If in the perfect world, maybe you don’t, you just create a uniform product, you know, but that’s not the world we operate in. There’s a lot of internal investment, production, other data we need to understand, the compliance and other reasons. 

So, you know, again, going back to say, if we have a strategy, guess what? Cannot be done this way because this country does not support it. You’re going to have to change your strategy because now you have more data points and having these teams have an input, understand that. So what you don’t want to do is I did everything, I’m going to push to life, which we know what happened, right? And guess what? You can’t do it. And then you have to go back to the drawing board. Imagine how much time and resources you’ve lost because you didn’t understand what is possible. So with that, I want to go to the question is on, how, you know, when you work with the product organization, and we kind of touched upon a little bit on various points is that, when you go from company to company, I think Robin, you kind of brought off sort of the song, right? How do you see, what is your suggestions to PMs and product leaders to understand the difference in operations when I go from one to the other ones so that they can survive and thrive in different environments because not all the same, some are great for certain types. Any thoughts and insights on that? Let me see. Who would be the, maybe we’ll just go, Robin, since you’re, wait, Robin. Vanessa, you were the last person to answer. Maybe we should go around.

Navigating Differences Across Organizations

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: Yes, happy to take that. Look, to me, I think life can be easier, and sometimes I think based on the size of a company, it feels like we need to overcomplicate things and we use the word strategy as a weapon to be thrown around. And then we have all of these consultants in between and all of these people using jargon and ultimately it feels like there are 10 strategies. While ultimately things can be much easier. Like, yes, strategy doesn’t need to be that long. It can be one page. 

At the end of the day, it’s a way of deciding who we want to be when we grow up and how we’re going to measure success. Let’s keep it like that. We break it down into the how. Obviously, there are specific ways on how to get there. And that’s fine. It’s up to each of the teams to try. Assuming that none of those tries will work, fine. I’m assuming that I won’t always have all the data. And even if I have all the data, so what? Like, sometimes it will probably be too late, right? So there’s a certain level of risk that each company or each group is willing to take. I understand that if you are working on a highly regulated environment, maybe there’s less risk versus if you’re working in a startup, you can go crazy. 

But at the end of the day, to me, what’s important is that everybody, or specifically the product team, they have access and they understand the strategy. And that the strategy is easy enough for people to know where we’re going and how we’re measuring success. And if we can break it down into specific initiatives, so even an individual contributor can know, okay, this is the set of initiatives I’m working with. Each initiative is associated with a specific key result or however we want to call that, depending on the framework that we’re using. And then every once in a while, it can be every week, every two weeks, every month, but there is certain recurrency.

So we can see how we’re tracking against those objectives that we define. Then we can do something about it. Maybe the answer, Vanessa, is like, the Toyota RAV4 is doing great. Maybe the answer is, keep it like that. If it’s not doing great, then we can discuss what to do about it, right? We can use a feature, we can try a different initiative, we can adjust the goal. 

But I think that normalizing the conversation around strategy, allowing the team to understand the levels of complexity and having the opportunity to try certain things and then check every once in a while, not every year or every six months, that’s a really good way to get started into product strategy and a product mindset.

Becky Flint: Very cool, I think would be, Robin was the next. Now I lost track on the other. Feel free to jump in.

Robing Chiang: There’s a question that’s latest and it kind of ties back to what Carlos was talking about. How do you empower a team to drive revenue? But thinking about metrics, they’re layered, right? So understanding what the drivers are behind your, I’m going to call it North Star metrics. So if you’re a North Star metric behind revenue, the quote-unquote strategy, understanding what the levers are is really important because what you might want to cascade down in your OKRs and your KPIs, as Dickson was talking about, might actually be levers that then drive revenue, right? 

And understanding how those wheels work together. So it’s not that you necessarily give a straight revenue goal to a product team. They need to understand what those drivers are underneath it and whether that be a combination in concert of satisfaction and usability or whatever it might be. I think that’s really the key is understanding that complicated or having, I would say, having a hypothesis around what your levers are and then testing that hypothesis and always being mindful that your hypothesis could be wrong. So that kind of takes into account the thing that we were talking about earlier about not being myopic about any one metric but being very eyes wide open and agile about how you should think about your metrics even as products, a product-driven mindset towards your metrics. How do you make sure that you’re revisiting them and that you’re agile about them as well? Hopefully that’s helpful. 

Becky Flint: The input and output and relationship of the metrics is really a good way to think about it. Super insightful. Want to add, Vanessa?

Vanessa Garber: I’m just trying to think. I feel like a lot of these points we’ve kind of already touched on. I think when we’re… It’s this myopic focus. This is like my soapbox outside of this panel is how to divest yourself of overly focusing on things. 

And I put in the chat this book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”. I’m not sure if everyone’s read it, but I have a little quote here from it, which is, I think this is from Chapter 2. This is very early on: “Unlike standalone decision or goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge. Strategy is about how an organization will move forward”. I like the way it’s described here because we often, a goal, right, it’s a metric. And so if your strategy is a metric, that’s not a strategy. Thumbs up. Yeah. And so I think even the word gets confusing to people and you got to stick to this, understand that it’s against a high-stakes challenge. You got to have some stake in the game, right? Something’s got to go on. And so if it’s just trying to say, well, we should make more money, like everyone would like to make more money. That’s not a strategy. It’s an outcome. 

I think there’s these different pieces of, even when you hear sometimes when OKRs are set that are more about achieving X number, which I’ve seen as people don’t have a lot of muscle-building OKRs, you see this from some leadership to maybe challenge that and say, well, what is, you know, to borrow something from Julie Zhuo at Facebook, the real human problem we are trying to solve here. And where is that intersection between the business need, which is either more customers or more like, what is that? What are the different levers we’re trying to pull? And then make sure you’ve got all these pillars lined up because it’s not just about having the metric. It’s not just about having action to do what and have that be clearly articulated. Because if team A is going one way and team B is going the other way, maybe they’re both bets to try to get to the same outcome, but maybe not.

And so everyone’s got to be really grounded in where we’re trying to go. The analogy I use here is if anyone’s actually read “Alice in Wonderland”, there’s a moment where Alice is going down the path and it’s the first time she runs into The Cheshire Cat and The Cheshire Cat says, “well, where are you going?” And Alice says, “oh, I don’t know”. And The Cheshire Cat is like, “good news. Either way will get you there”. And so it’s this question of where are you trying to end up? Where’s the company trying to end up? And then that’s where you’ve got all these tests is to say, if we’re going down this path A and you realize it’s not going to get you there, you need to have some backup options because not every idea, every hypothesis is the right idea. And you have to have humility and that willingness to be like, that one stunk or did we do it the right way?

Becky Flint: This is very well said.

Vanessa Garber: I’ve got lots of little stories, Becky. This is my whole vibe.

Final Considerations

Becky Flint: I wish we had another hour to go, but we’re coming up to the hour. I want to just, maybe everyone has a parting thought. We talked a lot about strategy, metrics, success, and data, and obviously, and also get it done. How do we operationalize it? So I would love to hear from you maybe around the table on what is your parting thought to an organization who wants to be effective, who wants to be impactful? How should the product leaders take away from them to be more impactful from your learning? Who would like to go first? Or I would, if you want to, Dickson, you go. We go from the very beginning of the order.

Dickson Chu: Sure. It’s a great question. I was just reading some of the Q&A. I haven’t seen Marty Cagan’s name come up in a while, but someone puts that out there as an interesting perspective about PMs being highly paid glorified project managers. I don’t believe that would be Marty’s point of view on that.

I would say to bring a full circle in this conversation about PMs being GMs in training, data-driven, paying attention to process as well as outcomes. I would say that to me, effectiveness into the future is for PMs to really embrace the notion of transparency, right? Show what you’re doing, communicate what you’re doing. And that’s where something like a tool like Dragonboat is super effective because at least it pulls it all together. 

And I think something like Vanessa was saying, start small and go and show people, “Hey, by the way, you can have this; you can see from top to bottom what’s going on, where your money is going,” if you’re talking to the sponsor of your product “here’s where the money is going it; it goes to these resources and here are the outcomes, here’s the timeline, and if we want to make trade-offs, here are the trade-offs we make” and project the sense of transparency that’s linked to the key objectives that the organization is after. And that you are not only aligned with it but in some ways you’re leading the way. Just make sure the work that’s being done is tied to the objectives of the organization. So transparency, I think it’s super important.

Vanessa Garber: Thanks, Dickson. I’m going to go back to something I said before, job clarity. I break it down into each function has a series of artifacts that they create and activities they’re responsible for. And whether you’re the leader of a team or just on a team, you can create team agreements. You can create clarity amongst the people you’re collaborating with so that you spend less time arguing about who does what, so that you can have the mental capacity and space to think strategically, so that you can go forward for an objective together. I think fundamentally, having that clarity and creating clarity sets the foundation to do all the other wonderful things you’re trying to achieve.

Robin Chiang: My parting thought is this was a lot. I know that anyone on here might feel overwhelmed by all that we threw or discussed. Sometimes it can be very overwhelming. But think about that humbleness that we talked about earlier, like no PM is going to be perfect. That’s why it’s very iterative. And having those skills are what’s going to keep momentum going and keep that iteration going and that curiosity and thrive to learn. But the more that you can be transparent to Dickson’s point and communicate what’s going on and bring those collaborators or cross-functional partners in, the more you’ll check your blind spots. 

I think getting that bad news earlier and finding out where maybe you have a gap, where maybe there’s a flaw in the assumption or a flaw in the product, whatever it might be, sooner rather than later is always the key. And that’s what I think we’re always just striving to be better. So using tools like Dragonboat, a lot of cross-collaboration and coordination will get you out of the muck faster. So that’s kind of one of my parting thoughts. It makes us more resilient.

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia: So in my case, a lot has been shared around what to do. So I’m going to share something about what not to do. Hopefully, there are some product leaders or future product leaders here listening. Do not hire McKinsey or a traditional strategy consulting firm to do your strategy. It just doesn’t work. It is a lazy way to outsource the problem, but it will backfire at some point.

The same way trying to implement an outdated framework, like agile framework or things like that, are inspired in the last century. It’s a pretty project management focused mindset. 

We’ve been hired many times to fix other types of similar type of mistakes. The best thing I would encourage you to do, not just think, but to do is to try to really get alignment and create your own product strategy and ensure that your team understands what product strategy is when you are not in the room.

Becky Flint: All right. What a wonderful panel. There’s so much insights, so many takeaways, and we’re going to borrow so many of them. I wish we had more time, and maybe next time. 

Thanks, everyone. And thank you, Vanessa, Carlos, Robin, Dickson. That’s your order on my screen. I really appreciate your insight. Thank you, everyone. Until next time!