People Driven Products

When Luke Hefson, now Senior Product Manager, first joined the product team at GitHub he was curious, as most PMs are, about what users honest thoughts were on the product. So he tweeted a simple question asking GitHub users what, if anything, annoyed them about the product. 

Unexpectedly, received hundreds of responses, retweets, and follow ups from the open-source web dev community. Almost all of the responses and requests they received through were not necessarily groundbreaking, innovative ideas – but “papercuts,” or small areas of friction within the user experience that were causing users large annoyance. 

“These papercute are degrading to the overall experience, however typically difficult for companies to prioritize at a macro level,” explains Luke. This realization inspired the formation of GitHub’s dedicated “papercuts” team that focuses on maintaining an open, engaged feedback loop with customers and then working to prioritize and fix these annoying experiences.  

“Your customers don’t care about your business strategy, they care about being heard and getting answers to the problems they experience everyday,” Luke says, this is why it’s important to establish a strong, easily accessible feedback loop with your users and take action on what you learn. 

On this episode of People Driven Products, Luke deep dives into GitHub’s customer feedback loops and how his team synthesizes and prioritizes requests, specifically “papercuts,” in order to build a roadmap that balances short term wins with longer term innovation. He also shares advice on how to get executive approval on “papercut” projects that may not necessarily drive revenue, but will build customer loyalty. 

A lot of product teams like to say they are agile, but when it comes down to it most teams continue to be driven by sales, roadmaps, and the same “waterfall” strategy of the past. 

“Most teams are good at delivery but lacking in discovery,” says Marty Cagan, author of Inspired. Cagan notes that frequently product teams are just shipping products and features to launch and don’t give enough attention to the step that actually qualifies a team as agile.

Agility is “not about the religion or process of building a product,” Cagan advises, rather it’s about constantly testing assumptions, uncovering new problems, and learning from your customers. 

Conducting continuous discovery will allow your team to answer three key questions prior to building (risk, solutions, and end goals) and therefore help mitigate risk and ensure you are investing in products that your customers will love. 

On this episode of People Driven Products, Marty Cagan defines the true meaning of “agility” and how product teams can partner together to deliver valuable, innovative solutions to solve customer problems.

To succeed in a constantly evolving industry, Product Managers can’t afford to settle for the status quo and need to be constantly hungry for new answers to old questions. 

“Every great product manager is an entrepreneur,” Vlad Gasan, Principal Product Manager at OfferUp and author of The Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Product Manager, says in the episode. 

Vlad shares how his experiences as a business owner and “side hustler” have helped him learn how to quickly adapt to new and ever-changing product markets, a skill he says is critical for PMs. 

He encourages product managers to trail blaze innovative products by constantly re-evaluating current strategies or solutions as “questions remain the same but answers change over time” in fast-moving markets. 

In this episode of People Driven Products, Vlad discusses the top qualities he looks for when hiring product managers and how PMs can tap into their entrepreneurial spirit in order to unlock a unique product vision.

As a product manager, there is nothing more exciting than seeing the feature you built be greatly received and widely adopted by your users. But how do you ensure that your roadmap will be valuable to both existing and prospective customers? 

“If you only listen to your existing customers they will keep your roadmap buzzing for a while, but in the long run it may not help you grow or become madly successful,” cautions SK, VP of Product at Productboard. To unlock true growth, you need to be sure you are striking the perfect balance between building for both existing customers and prospective customers. 

He elaborates that in addition to existing and prospective customers, there are additional segments that fall underneath each and if you, for example, “focus too much on what the buyer wants that will be at the expense of the end-users and what delights them.”

SK gets specific on the strategies he has implemented to ensure his team is considering all customer segments, including OKRs around meeting with customers and color-coding to monitor the division of work related to each. Finding this equilibrium between all segments promotes well-rounded growth and innovation within the company. 

Listen to SK's episode of People Driven Product to learn what it means to actually be customer-centric and the tactical strategies his team uses to ensure they are building for all customer segments.

At fintech company Wise (formerly TransferWise), product managers — and all employees from designers to engineers — are empowered to speak directly with customers to advance the product.

But the company, which enables people to transfer money abroad at lower costs, also recognizes that you can’t have innovation without failure. 

“We are quite open to people failing because if you're not open to people failing, they're not going to take risks,” Clara Nobre, Wise’s Senior Product Manager, says in this episode. 

Wise understands “informed failure” — or failure that results when due diligence was done and a good process was followed, but a new feature or integration doesn’t work out as anticipated. 

The company culture tolerates and expects “thoughtful mistakes” and then encourages employees to “take this learning and move forward,” explains Clara, who joined Wise in 2019. 

The company is growing quickly and Clara’s team has almost tripled in size since she started.

On this episode of People Driven Products, Clara discusses the role that quantitative vs. qualitative research plays when determining how to prioritize product features. She talks through Wise’s integration with QuickBooks, and reveals what she looks for when interviewing candidates for her team. 

Adam Johnston is not a car guy.

Yet, two-and-a-half years ago he took on the job of Director of Product and Design at Shift, an ecommerce platform for buying and selling used cars. Adam was drawn to the position and company because of its vision — making car buying and owning a simple and trustworthy process for everybody. 

It’s that customer-focused philosophy that Adam carries with him in every meeting he attends. 

A few people had product management job titles at Shift when Adam began but all had been field promoted into the positions. So when he joined the company, the question was: how do you take an organization that has never really had a strong product management perspective and create space for a true product management process?

For Adam, building relationships, which ties back to that customer-focused philosophy, is central. From getting on Zoom calls with customers to customer surveys, Adam says getting that customer feedback is crucial to understanding the “why” and ensuring Shift’s marketing works. 

Building on relationships, Adam says learning about human-centered design has been an asset in his toolbox. Leading with empathy, learning why customers want what they want or why his team has certain goals, leads to more effectiveness and productivity. 

In this episode of People Drive Products, Adam dives into where customer behavioral shifts come from, emphasizing mobile first, trends in the market post-COVID-19 and more.

As a Senior Product Manager at music and podcast discovery platform Pandora, Ananya always keeps the end-user in mind as she delivers on her passion for building user-centric search experiences, driving value both for target customers and internal leadership teams. 

After working as a product management intern, Ananya was sure of her career path. Now, she's helping to create successful, people-driven products at Pandora. Her latest product launch was Pandora Voice — a personalized voice assistant that allows users to simply ask for certain types of music. (Plus, she won a 2020 Webby Award for this!) 

While the road to launch Pandora Voice wasn't easy, Ananya makes it look like she almost has it down to a science. 

"There was a lot of momentum behind bringing [Pandora Voice] to market, but taking it from slides to an actual user-facing product was a long journey," she says on the podcast. 

Ananya started by working backward: what would the press release look like for this product? If people were writing about it, how is it different from similar products? What would incentivize people to want to use this product? 

From there, she set up strict go and no-go criteria for each phase of the product launch. Instead of basing everything around arbitrary go-live dates, setting up strict criteria ensures both your own team and senior leadership that you're going to be launching a quality product. 

From anticipating use cases to watching real users interact with your product, Ananya has a lot of advice to give to fellow product managers. 

Learn more in this episode of People Driven Products, where Ananya breaks down the essential steps to launch a product people truly love, how to become a PM skilled in "ruthless prioritization", and how to best overcome missteps. 

As the VP of Products at cloud content management platform Box, Alok Ojha leads security and enterprise product portfolios, driving Box's product strategy, long-term roadmap and vision. 

Alok has extensive experience launching products in the enterprise software industry — he's worked at leading enterprise SaaS companies like Proofpoint and RSA, as well as startups, such as CloudPassage and Syncplicity. 

Typical cybersecurity companies tend to lack focus on the experience of the end-user — Alok even admits he was part of the problem. That insight led him to seek out new opportunities, which is when he found Box. 

With the company’s genuine focus on end-user experience, it was a little like love at first sight. Alok says working at Box kicked off an empowering journey to "build security the way it should be.”

In this episode of People Driven Products, Alok breaks down his step-by-step method for launching a new product, how to identify product-market fit, and how he launched Box’s fastest growing product.

As a Senior Director of Product Management at job site Indeed, Nissim Lehyani is helping the company adapt to shifting job seeker needs for about 250 million people who visit the platform every month.  

For Nissim, product management is about reducing friction and enabling a better path that gets people to a desired outcome. 

Product managers need to weigh decisions based on delivering the maximum amount of value to the largest group of people as quickly as possible, he says on this episode of People Driven Products. Those variables include: the amount of value delivered, the number of people who will benefit, and the time it will take to ship. 

In the interview, Nissim describes how he thinks about adding platform improvements at Indeed, like the addition of a virtual interview feature to help with job search during social distancing. 

He discusses what it takes to get good user feedback (he’s a fan of open-ended questions) and why you have to talk to users directly and not just make assumptions based on behavior patterns.