What is a good product?
This is almost like the utopian question, right? A good product is something that a customer sees more value in than what you’re asking them to pay.
What was your path to product?
One of the great things about product management is that it’s not really a skill that you can learn theoretically, for example at an university. You can certainly pick up holistic skills, like how to learn and how to articulate yourself, but product management is about taking something existing and using that knowledge to create something that has value.
The pathways into product can therefore be varied. Product Managers can come from finance, from customer care, from academia or from operations.
I started my career in hypergrowth organizations and really became very responsive and adaptive to the needs of my companies at the time.
Only about halfway through my career, I decided that product was a function that I wanted to shape my career around. Before that, it was very much adapting to the needs of that time.
For example, I have been an operations manager that managed AdTech teams and drew up editorial calendars for magazines. Eventually, I realized that in every step of my career, I was solving problems. And the only way to be successful in those roles was defining the problem clearly enough in order to solve it properly.
Over the last 15-plus years, I learned that that’s what product is: understanding the problem you’re trying to solve and then solving it in the best way possible to provide value to the customer or consumer that you’re doing it for.
Why is the product function important for your organization?
Product has become really popular as a capital-letter product term in the last 10 to 15 years. What’s misleading about the term ‘product-led organizations’ is that it’s not the team that leads the company. It is the product. This has been the case for the last 30 years and is still relevant as we went into digital products across the world.
The product is the most important thing in your company. To build the product, you need lots of people to contribute to that. Therefore, the product function came into effect because of the importance of the product. So the value that the product gives to the consumer is the most important thing. It drives the success of your organization.
What is your single most important KPI?
I have had many conversations about this – the north star KPIs and so on. Theoretically, I would say customer lifetime value. But there are lots of companies that don’t have enough tenure or history to understand what the potential of their customer lifetime value is.
Therefore, we also need to adapt that vision to the constraints of your history and your company. For instance, at TIER, we started the year before COVID, therefore had a boom year when we launched. Then we had a COVID year and then we had a year that everyone thought wasn’t going to be a COVID year, but it still was. Now we’re coming back to a macroeconomic crisis (global wars, potential recessions) and therefore customer lifetime value is a very difficult metric to use.
What is the future of the product function?
I think that the functional capabilities of the product function - for instance, how to build things, how to move things forward, how to deliver value - will move into the CEO role or the general management. What we are learning is that the most important thing in an organization is that you know how to build the value that you’re delivering to your customer.
In addition, what we’ll see is a transition from sales and marketing-led CEOs to product-led CEOs. And we might even see that, in the next 10 to 15 years, the functional role of Chief Product Officer doesn’t exist anymore because those skills are in the general leadership of the organization.
“Product management is…”
… delivering value to customers.
