396: Product management experiences that prepare you to lead product – with Bella Renney

Lessons learned on a journey from schoolteacher to Head of Product

Most of the people that listen to this podcast have been in product management for several years. Many of them are in leadership roles, such as Product VPs, CPOs, and Heads of Innovation. But many others listen as well. Some are new in their product management careers, and others listen to this podcast because they are considering a career in product.

All of us have different paths to our roles, and I love hearing about people’s paths and what attracted them to product management, especially when the path is uncommon. In this episode, we are going to hear about Bella Renney’s path and what she learned along the way that helped her become Head of Product at Tray.io, her current role.

Bella is a former secondary schoolteacher with a bachelor’s degree in geography.  After teaching she moved to product roles. Now at Tray.io, she believes embedded integrations may be the relief product teams sorely need. She is leading product and engineering teams to develop a platform for embedded integrations that quickly connect various software applications.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:02] When did your interest in product work begin?

I was always interested in people, how they use tools, and the problems being solved by businesses. When I was in education, I thought about how we could educate better. How can we empower students, teachers, and parents? It was scary how little we were utilizing great technology to solve challenges in education. I wondered what we could do to use technology better to share resources among teachers and bring students into the 21st century with skills like innovative thinking. That’s where my interest in product and technology and solving problems came from. I wanted to use technology to solve the problems I saw every day in teaching, but I couldn’t do that in the role I was in as a secondary school teacher. I moved away from the classroom into product technology.

I want to empower others to make things better. Rather than just using technology for technology’s sake, how could the right tools in the hands of the right people empower them? The right software in the hands of someone in an organization can add transformative change to their own role, their team, and their business.

[7:53] How did your desire to make things better turn into your first product role?

As lots of product people do, I thought I could do it all myself. I wanted to start my own business. I tried a few different avenues, and it lasted for a bit of time and taught me grit and resilience. That was exciting, but I decided I wanted a bit more skin in the game. That led me to take a job as a contractor with a few folks I knew who were launching a product software company called TableCrowd. They were pivoting from being a services company to a platform for running events. We had a bunch of tools people used to run events, and we wanted those tools to talk to each other to provide a seamless experience for people running and attending the events. I did market and competitor research and figured out the basic requirements for the product.

I moved to financial software company Bloomberg for a while, helping them with product for philanthropic endeavors. Then I landed firmly in the European car tech industry at a car buying marketplace where I stayed for three years. After that I went to Tray.io, where I am now.

[12:38] What skills help you be successful in product work in a variety of domains?

It’s important to have a blend of frameworks in your toolkit. Ask good questions of the folks you’re working with, who are more expert than you in their domain. Ask curious, open questions to get insightful qualitative data from customers, potential customers, and stakeholders. From teaching 11-18-year-olds,