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gustavowilh · 7 years

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Silly Things Smart Product Managers Do

Mobile product managers have some of the toughest jobs in an organization. Markets change so fast and there is often no rule book to guide us for the kinds of situations we encounter, resulting in mistakes made and valuable lessons learned along the way.

We were thrilled to host a panel of expert PMs at our Customer Love Summit, including Erika Englesby, Sr. Product Manager at Providence Health & Services; Josh Lipe, Head of Mobile Product Development at Smartsheet; Vasantha Kostojohn, Sr. Director of Product Management at Allrecipes; and Darren Austin, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft; to share silly things that smart product managers do.

In the video below, our panelists share their experiences as veteran product managers. As they reflect on some of the less-flattering moments in their career and what lessons they took away from the experience, our hope is that you can learn from their mistakes.

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If you’d rather read than listen, you can check out the full transcript below. Enjoy!

Transcription

Darren: Thanks everybody. All right thanks everybody it’s great to be here. We’re gonna have a little fun with the panel today. I thought I’d start this out with a little bit of a quote. There’s a famous basketball coach from UCLA whose name’s John Wooden and he’s quoted as saying, “If you’re not making mistakes then you probably aren’t really doing anything.” And I kind of thought that was relevant for our world as mobile product managers because there’s no roadmap to suggest what we’re supposed to do next, right? There’s no examples for all of the various scenarios we come into, right? I mean Apple updates iOS and then something that we have breaks, Android probably happens more frequently, we have to deal with that situation. So the best we can do is to do and we learn by doing and learn by making mistakes, we take them in stride and we laugh at them in hindsight and hopefully we don’t repeat the same things again.

But I think we’re at our best when we’re sharing experiences with one another and we’re learning from one another and that’s what we’re gonna do today. So this group of folks up here is gonna share with you some of the more or rather less flattering moments that we’ve had in our career. And we’re gonna kind of laugh out of it little bit, talk about them and we’re gonna engage the audience at the end for a question and answer so that we can actually hear from you and ideas that you have about things that you’ve experienced and insights that you might wanna hear from us.

So with, that I told Vee that I was gonna put her on the spot, she was gonna be the one that was gonna hit up first. And so I thought I’d started out by asking Vee, like tell us about a situation, a lesson you learned in a difficult way, that you took away an insight, that you could share with the team.

Vasantha: Okay, you all hear me? Not used to a mic. Okay. So I think one of the big lessons is there’s really no substitute for customer feedback. A few years ago we added into our app the ability to scan grocery items in the scenarios that had we imagined were as a user throw something away they could just sort of scan it and add it to their shopping list or they could search for things just by scanning. And what we found in real life is, well the things that people actually search for generally aren’t scannable, you know, chicken, fruit and the scenario of scanning right before you throw something away sounds really cool. But, you know, thumbing it out with your, you know, finger is actually a lot faster. And so it didn’t actually ever, you know, live up to the promise that we were hoping for. So a while later we ended up cutting it and not one user complained. Yeah.

Darren: Yeah that’s cool. Yeah, I think I’ve experienced that as well where we’ve launched product features and we thought, “Oh, this is exactly what people are gonna want.” Right? “Oh, of course, this is what they want.” And then you get it out there and it just sort of, you know, like nothing. You don’t hear anything positive, negative about it. And it shows up in the user data. I had an interesting experience where earlier in my career I was working for AOL Instant Messenger, right? AIM if anybody remembers the running man? Rest in peace, rest in peace.

We had this interesting phenomenon going on in AIM where we had a status message, right? Status message was, you know, I’m out of the office, I’m on vacation whatever. We started seeing people update these things like 20 times a day, right? And we’re thinking, “What in the hell are people updating status messages 20 times a day?” And we didn’t read what they were updating because that’s way too obvious. So but we were seeing this in the data and I kinda called BS on the data. I was like, “No way, like this is ridiculous, right? I don’t understand why people do this, I would never do this.” At the same time, there was this other company coming up called Twitter.

And Twitter was…we were talking to Twitter and Twitter was like, “This is the new thing, we’re gonna do this thing and people are gonna love it and it everybody’s gonna get a text message anytime somebody, you know, makes a trip to the restroom.” And I’m thinking, “This is insane, there’s no way.” And then Twitter started growing and our team got back and we’re looking at the data and we’re saying, “This makes no sense.” We actually didn’t believe the data and so I called Twitter a fluke. We passed on a partnership opportunity with Twitter to host their back-end and if anybody remembers the whale-fail, we could have solved that but we ignored Twitter. And so that was my embarrassing moment in hindsight as I looked and I look back and I say, “Oh my God I had no idea the data is staring me in the face.” And I completely called Twitter a fluke and now we’ve got, you know, the president tweeting all the time.

Erika: So the biggest question is, do you use Twitter now?

Darren: Kind of. I kind of do I. Yeah, I do tend to. Okay, so true confessions, right? I have it set up to where it’ll post simultaneously to Twitter and LinkedIn and I don’t do Facebook for some reason, I think maybe that’s more personal. But yeah I’m using it a little bit.

Erika: It doesn’t make you like cringe every time?

Darren: Yeah. I kinda feel like I really screwed that one up because I was like, “Oh, man the data was right there.” I can’t believe it. Yeah. So lesson learned was, you know, trust the data. I don’t know if you guys ever run into a situation where you’ve had data staring you in the face and you just say, “I can’t imagine that anybody would wanna do this. It must be a fluke.”

Erika: I mean I think we’re…At Providence, we’re currently going through the opposite where we don’t have any data. So we’re part of an innovation team and we have built our product from a beta that sort of launched as a real full-fledged product but without any of the analytics that you truly want to understand what your users are doing. So we’re currently going through a period of understanding what do we wanna learn from our users and then going back in and actually adding that all those key pieces back in. And so right now we’re kind of, we have account managers that are selling to other hospital systems signer apps or white labeling to other hospital systems and they want all this data and they wanna understand it and so they’ve been going into Google Analytics and pulling out the pieces they think they want and we’re like, “No, do not look at it.” We don’t know if it’s right. So we’re actually releasing it on Friday. A new release hopefully that includes a lot more of the analytical data that we need to understand.

Darren: Nice.

Erika: So hopefully we’ll be able to make some better decisions because we’ve been kind of running blind for a while and it feels a little scary. So…

Darren: We did that too, I mean, when I first joined Microsoft to on the team a couple of years ago. When I first joined we didn’t have any analytics, I mean, we knew…I think we knew monthly active users but we had really low visibility into our retention and our churn information. And it was seat of the pants kind of decisions like, “Okay the best we can do is talk to customers and get a sense for what they’re telling us.” And even though we don’t have, you know, volumes of data that was sort of the best we can do and most of the time we guess right, I think there were a few times we guessed wrong. I think there was one time we run an alert, we wanted to promote collaboration. So we found out, “Oh yeah if people are collaborating with their notes, you know, retention will be better.” So he said, “Oh well, what if we gave an alert every time somebody updated a shared notebook?” Yeah, that’s what happened.

Erika: That sounds noisy.

Darren: Yeah it was real noisy. We ended up sort of… We tested it which sort of makes the end result even more embarrassing but we end up spamming our users for a period of time and then we had to roll that back and we’re like, “Oh yes, that’s actually gonna be kind of caddy.” We don’t want that. But we heard about it in loud voices. So, you know.

Josh: One of the screw ups embarrassed is, there’s too many that I can name here in the time we have, but it worked for a local carrier Magenta and was launching a new, I won’t name names. But it was launching a new device.

Audience: T-Mobile.

Josh: Fair. It was T-Mobile. Was launching a new device and there was a lot of new and a lot of old in this device. What I mean by that is the operating system was kind of a dinosaur at the time, I think Windows 6.5, and it did a lot but it didn’t do a lot really well. And we had a partner HTC that had this really awesome four-inch diagonal screen with, this is way back when [inaudible 00:08:39] dating myself, but Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. And so my colleagues and I looked at this device and we looked at what we had and we thought, “Well we could launch this device pretty plain and boring.” But what we wanted to do is try to turn that thing into an entertainment portal for our users and it hadn’t really been done before that way at T-Mobile.

So we partnered with a number of media app companies so Blockbuster, Netflix was doing something else with Apple at the time they said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” We ultimately got them to be on the next device preloaded. But anyway so we had Windows 6.5, coupled with this brand new device which was really powerful and we did a lot of deals with different media companies, MobiTV and Blockbuster and we rolled our own Amazon mp3 app, the T-Mobile team did and we partner with Amazon to do that. So all those apps on this device with an older operating system that wasn’t getting any love from Redmond, kind of really just came together and we thought, “Okay we have this tight timeline, are gonna make it or not?” So we ended up, we launched the device. But it had one of the higher return rates in T-Mobile’s history so we under market pressure we delayed a few times and ultimately said we just had to go. That was a big failure I think in the many millions of dollars. But more importantly the customer trust in the sales teams and the retail and then, of course, our partnership deals.

Darren: I think that’s a common thing though, right? Like there’s always pressure to ship. You’re working on something for such a long time. I feel like that’s a universal thing where you’ve got so much invested in this. And yes, we know that there are problems, it’s not perfect but if we wait on perfection we’re never gonna get it right. That seems like a common thread. Is that something that…I feel like I’ve certainly experienced that multiple times.

Josh: Yeah. Market pressure, you know, there’s plans to go and you have to make hard calls near the end and you sometimes it’s a leap of faith, other times you try to be like, “All right, can we stub in the app?” This is before the [inaudible 00:10:41], we stub it in to where they fire the app up and then it downloads so you kind of safeguard that process a little bit and update the app as it’s launching and so that the user gets the new one, you know, but now that’s all moot. But yeah you have to make the calls to either pull stuff off or say we’re gonna launch and there’s gonna be some impact here and really let the users know.

Darren: Yeah I’d be curious to hear from you guys about how you balance that pressure too. You know, because there is a…it’s a fine line and there’s no cut and dry answer like, “Do we ship or do we delay and get it a little bit better?” How do you guys handle that type of thing and what’s your decision tree look like and what are some examples of when you had to make a tough call one way or the other?

Erika: So I think from my perspective what I tend to do is I lean on my team a lot. I think that they are the ones that are really in the code, in the QA process day-to-day and they really understand all the pitfalls that are hiding behind the scenes. I do remember a time, Darren knows the story, so I’d been working at Starbucks we had re-launched the iOS and Android apps with the new design and totally rewrote them from scratch with an in-house team and the launch went off pretty great. It was delayed a few times but ultimately we got there and it was a situation where leadership kept saying, “Oh but we’d love to have this in.” I said, “Great you can have it, it’s gonna be another month.”

And so we finally got there, got over the finish line and then a couple months later we were just doing like a routine bug-fix release. But it was one of those times where we’re like, “Okay we got to get it out.” because I can’t remember what it was for but we had to get this one fix in and so we kind of rushed it. And this was when the apps were very high profile at the time because they had just released, everything was going great. So I get a call very early in the morning and it’s Howard Schultz on the other end and he was at…

Darren: Not a good thing. Usually not a good thing.

Erika: No. The update had come out the night before. He was trying to use the pay functionality at his local [inaudible 00:12:50] Park store and scan his bar code and the app kept crashing. So what we had found out is that we had an upgrade crasher that hadn’t been tested, maybe had been tested but not fully.

Darren: Not on Howard’s phone.

Erika: Not on Howard’s phone. He was the best keyway. He really was, he always had that one phone with that one problem. That’s crazy. But anyway so I get the call and it’s literally like the store had just opened like the man never sleeps. And so I was like, “How did you even get my phone number?” Number one. I found out later it was another person on the senior leadership team, who will remain nameless. But we got the call that it was crashing on the pay screen. Can you imagine? Like this is before we had launched mobile pay.

So the biggest benefit of the app was the pay screen like scanning a bar-code and so quickly I like, rally the troops. We get into work, we figure out what the issue is, we worked like day and night for like 24 hours straight trying to get the release out and really make sure it’s tested this time which was key. And then I actually had to go to Howard’s office and prove to him that the upgrade bug was fixed. Like imagine a tail between your legs like, “Oh yeah, we fixed it, I promise this time.” Anyway, we got it fixed but it was crazy because on…Like talk about customer feedback, this was like before we had implemented this was before we had done a lot of like any customer feedback. Twitter was on fire. People were pissed. It was like just grab your credit card.

Darren: Twitter ended up being a thing, didn’t it?

Erika: It did. It did yeah. Big surprise.

Darren: Big surprise.

Erika: So if we had actually looked at Twitter the night before we’ve probably would have realized then that the crashing bug was in there. But anyway long story short we got it fixed but it was definitely one of those moments where it was like, “Can I just hide under a rock right now?” Because even though like I’m not the one queuing it, I’m not the one developing it, like you are the face of the product. And so it’s really important to like understand all those pieces and really get your hands dirty too. Because I guarantee you I am such a proponent of like forced-upgrade now. Like, put that in your code because then you can flip a switch and be like guess what users you have to go on this new version.

Darren: I like that insight, the forced-upgrade is what you took away from it, while I was sitting here thinking the lesson learned for me was like, “don’t give your number to Howard Schultz.” Right? Whatever you do. But I like that better, that’s actually useful.

Erika: So now like every time I come to a new company I’m like, “Do you have forced-upgrade?” If not we’re adding that first.

Darren: Nice.

Erika: So we’ve added it at Providence. It has saved us a couple of times where we’ve been like, “Oh shoot, we really have like a bug or a version we wanted to switch over our whole back-end and so everyone really did need to update.”

Darren: Is the forced-upgrade happening every single upgrade or you just flip the switch and say, “This is the forced-upgrade?”

Erika: No, there’s a server side you can…Yeah. Switch and then we have language in there that can turn on. It’s really, really useful and we’ve actually use the upgrade tools as well to sort of softly do that. And then we usually do a forced-upgrade after that.

Darren: Yeah, I think that’s good advice. We’ve had to do that before at a previous role in it helped. Yeah. For sure. One of the things that I think is interesting too is we’ve sort of all been around before mobile, B.M., bad acronym. So before mobile but now we’ve been living in this sort of mobile-centric world and it’s different, right? I mean mobile is fundamentally different than when we were building for web and desktop apps and everything. I’m curious to get perspective from you guys on what you learned from mobile, like what are the things now in a mobile-centric mobile first world that are different, what’s more important about our job as product managers, product designers in a mobile first world?

Josh: Move very very fast.

Darren: Yeah

Josh: Because that’s what customers are expecting. And so when I go into any sort of new role I assess, you know, how often are we pushing a new app out to market. And if that cadence is, you know, two months or three months that’s just way too long in my view.

Vasantha: Okay, I would add to that. With less screen realisty the sort of harder, you have to look at your priorities and get really crisp around that. There’s a quote that I’ve heard that I love. It goes, “Your strategies fall on the battlefield of you x.” And I think that’s especially true as it relates to mobile. Were you really kind of have to get really crisp about what’s important, what’s not important. You know, and how much of this tiny space is it worth, you know, for every given thing you’re trying to do?

Darren: I think we’ve probably all tried to fit the desktop experience into mobile screen at some point. Show of hands anybody do that and made that mistake? Right? Like, don’t do that if you’ve not done that. Don’t do that. That’s yes. Definitely, a new UI is required and more focus, right? Yeah.

Erika: I think for us it’s really important like when we first re-launch the Starbucks apps we had really done an iOS-centric design. And so we basically, and I see this happen everywhere is iOS gets slammed into Android, the user experience is very different, users use their phones very differently on the two platforms. And we heard from customers immediately like, “What are you doing?” And people started just dropping the app, to be honest, ou

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michaelmikkelson · 7 years

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Silly Things Smart Product Managers Do

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If you’d rather read than listen, you can check out the full transcript below. Enjoy!

Transcription

Erika: So the biggest question is, do you use Twitter now?

Erika: It doesn’t make you like cringe every time?

Darren: Nice.

Erika: So hopefully we’ll be able to make some better decisions because we’ve been kind of running blind for a while and it feels a little scary. So…

Erika: That sounds noisy.

Audience: T-Mobile.

Darren: Not a good thing. Usually not a good thing.

Darren: Not on Howard’s phone.

Darren: Twitter ended up being a thing, didn’t it?

Erika: It did. It did yeah. Big surprise.

Darren: Big surprise.

Erika: So now like every time I come to a new company I’m like, “Do you have forced-upgrade?” If not we’re adding that first.

Darren: Nice.

Darren: Is the forced-upgrade happening every single upgrade or you just flip the switch and say, “This is the forced-upgrade?”

Josh: Move very very fast.

Darren: Yeah

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zyane · 7 years

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Seeking Equilibrium

Finding the still axis within rotating turmoil

I. Introspection

The examination of our own conscious thoughts and feelings are intrinsically good, opening doors to mindfulness, transformation and better decisions. Yet, it is also the root of my anxiety, a darkness I've learnt to accept and find stillness from within. Come to think of it, if I were to describe the unsettling landscape of this anxiety, I'd sum it in a word - trippy. A really bad trip. One you'd do everything within your means to get out of: drinking more water, alcohol, eat more, not eat, keep your eyes focus, whatever. Except that you don't know if this bad trip will ever end. How anxiety feels like (for me at least):

Picture yourself floating within A cage walled with vibrating threads Blurring the motions of reality. A looking glass Warping everything on the other end. Closing in, expanding outwards, In a slow, grotesque breathing motion. Upon closer inspection, These seemingly alive, twisted fibres Are made up of words. Dark thoughts, doubts, mental self-flagellation Constantly mutating, growing Like a tumour. Take a closer look; I dare you. And feel yourself shrivel up like how smoke gets into your eyes. Upon instinct, You'd try to pry your way out of this monstrosity. But this mental prison wasn't built in a day. This darkness feeds itself Layers built upon layers. Pulling you further away from the world Into a deafening void Where screams are silent. And dense, 'electromagnetic' waves Vibrate molecules in your body With increasing heaviness Along with bouts of uncontrollable jitters. It sounds like my mind's encapsulated in a microwave oven. It isn't pleasant, but it wouldn't kill if you manage to find that elusive stillness within all that turbulence and noise. For the last few years, I guess I've learned to take most situations with a pinch of salt. Overreacting and making sense of circumstances that's clearly out of my control leads to more existential nausea. But this perpetual questioning doesn't seem ever to go away. Too many "what ifs" and self-fulfilling prophecies. But acknowledging this irrational fear of practically everything does offer some perks - I guess it's conditioning to think more clearly, taking extra measures to avoid failure and treasure everything a little more. II. Retrospection Confucius is right. Acquiring wisdom from experience is most bitter. I've learnt many harsh, and perhaps invaluable, lessons from each and every encounter. I remember, once during a moment of heightened senses, I was made an offer I almost couldn't refuse - my soul for my deepest desire. Which is? Love? I thought so. But nope, after minutes (which felt like hours) worth of deep introspection, I discovered that what I truly craved, was knowledge. Dr Faustus? No, not of elitist or forbidden nature, but probably to feed a constant lack of and incompetence. Hallucination or not, my ever-present, subconscious ability to overthink stopped me at that. But be careful of what you wished for. I never stopped wondering if it's this thirst for experiences and perspectives that ushered in these crippling torments. Each in different forms, offering different lessons and changing something in me. First // A promise of eternal love, a beautiful bloom that withered with drips of poison and disintegrated through betrayal. This was the relationship that changed every belief I ever held, leaving hints and premonitions of others that have yet to come my way. The crushing blow where 'forever' was abruptly shorten to 6.5 years taught the lesson of impermanence. The only thing that was enduring was the everlasting pain. But ironically, losing the relationship I grew up with, opened doors to new experiences: the love for solo travel and shedding that chrysalis of introversion. Second // Misplaced feelings stemming from guilt and social pressure. Malicious, this was. I've never experienced this dosage of ugliness in my life and was definitely an appalling eye-opener. A year wasted dragging each other along, with nothing but deceit. Just a whole lot of doubts, lies, misunderstandings and toxic peer pressure. Communication here was two cans and a string with zero cooperation. Oh, and the art of deciphering passive-aggressive social media captions and 'likes'. Nothing learnt, just that some people are better off left at hello and you wished that you've never agreed on that damn cake date. Third // Falling for the least expected one that was never meant to be. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' I was never a firm believer of that until I've experienced it myself. Far from the prettiest and not forgetting to mention, possessed unrivalled anger issues. Hella rude and punctuate every sentence with profanities. But what was so attractive was her willingness to learn, to pick up new interests, had no qualms leaping into unexplored territories, giving no shits and acted like she owns the world. Along with my wanderlust-prone heart, I pictured a lifetime of adventures with this one, leaving no peaks unconquered and no paths untrodden. Quite an exhilarating fantasy. Those 6 months taught that contrary to my own beliefs, I could actually fall for someone's soul and openness. Forth // Admiration, acceptance and ideals VS underlying apathy and perpetual contradiction. A complex, multifaceted gem, surprising me in every unexpected moment. Beauty came in so many forms that were almost impossible to count. Once, a Reiki friend told me that to manifest your ideal partner, list out all the qualities you seek in them by writing them down, and the universe would reciprocate by channelling those energies towards you. Though I've never penned a physical note for that, I did make a mental one. I knew exactly what I seek - someone who appreciates and exudes genuineness, honesty, kindness, empathy, respect and selflessness. Someone I can spend my life having deep, insightful discussions, maybe read a book with at every cafe, co-write books with and just fill each others' minds up until it's time for our souls to leave our degrading vessels. A slow, fulfilling life. A mature love without inflicting hurt. So, this one came forth extremely authentic, with most of these desirable qualities, but also the most baggage I've ever seen in a person. But that's just life, it happens, everyone is healing from something, and no one really attains emotional nirvana. Not when you're having a quarter life crisis, with deadlines to meet and bills to pay. So I thought that this may work, I just need to be patient with no expectations. "What's the point in that?", says practically everyone else. But what can I do? I'm never the sort who'd be able to walk away with a ‘what if’ (alright, I’m clearly contracting my stand on the sunk cost fallacy over here), so I just need to let it run its full course. Let be. III. Prospection As much as I'd desire a surreal, all head spinning and lovely sorta romance, I've come to terms with certain things. Passion is meant for Hollywood, and all that 'Qualities and Truth about Love' are great for listicles. A good read, but all in theory. Nothing matters more than finding extraordinary from ordinary. There is more wealth from the immaterial than material, which stems from sharing and fostering new ideas with each other. Happiness comes from contentment and appreciation of inward gains from virtue itself. Self-doubt and contradiction deviate us from our goals, leading us further into the dense forest of numbing negativity. If I’d need to name a fundamental trait I’d seek, it’d be selflessness, in actions and words. After all, life is full of opportunities. Plans never seem to keep up with changes. But that doesn't mean we ought to get by blindly. Although every situation was different from the last, I believed that I’ve dealt with each with consistency and growing patience. The universe can keep on throwing challenges to steer me off course; and if I can’t avoid them entirely, I ain’t gonna get stuck in that dreadful sunk cost fallacy. If you did whatever that was best for the moment, that’s good enough. You’re still inhaling 7-8 litres of air per minute. Nothing more, nothing less. But whatever you do, never stop giving solace to those in need or cast a shadow of doubt over the future. Slowly, but surely, everything will get better.

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