Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Here is a story I’ve heard many times:

“Yeah, he seemed like a great candidate; had a lot of success with Similar Product, had exactly the kind of experience we really needed on the team, We really thought he would be the guy who could take us to the next level, but he just… hasn’t been able to deliver / isn’t the right cultural fit / just doesn’t seem to work well with the team.”

And I can always predict the reason: the candidate used to work at Some Big Company.

Big Company people are not universally bad for startups. In fact, you’ll never grow your startup without them.  But lots of them are not the right hire for your startup.

At KISSmetrics, I recently hired someone from a Big Company, and just acquired a co-worker from a Big Company.  Both of them are great additions to the team, and already bringing a needed infusion of energy, experience, and different perspectives.

But that hasn’t always been my experience.  I’ve worked with Big Company additions to startups that actually made me dread coming to work in the mornings.  I’ve even hired a Big(ger) Company person that I had to end up firing.

So how do you get it right?  What are the tips for finding the right Big Company people for your startup?

Here are the 3 traits  I’ve found that the great hires have in common:

Action

Lots of potential hires have ideas.  Surprisingly few have actions — that is, they’ve researched you, they’ve tried your products, they’ve identified areas where you need to improve and done something about it.

As an applicant, you have limited visibility into a company and their priorities. But life in a startup is always full of uncertainty.  You need people who are comfortable saying, “based on the information I have, this is what I will do / have done”, not people who wait to act until someone tells them it’s okay to do so.

Fusion

Having launched a really successful product tells me one thing: that you launched that successful product, at that company, at that point in time.   It does not mean that you can necessarily repeat that feat with this product, at this company, and this point in time.

Great candidates can take bits of past successful processes and blend them with new realities and constraints.  They have the insight to understand the context of past successes (team size, technical savvy, budget, 400lb gorilla bargaining power, tools, target audience) and adapt their experience to where they are now.

Another way of saying this is, there are 2 kinds of domain experts: the ones who have had 20 years of varied experiences, and the ones who have had the same 2 years of experience, repeated 10 times.

…and possibly the most important,

Impatience

Things move 10x faster at a startup than at a Big Company.

Your Big Company candidate ought to be squirming with impatience in their current environment.  They want their ideas to be implemented faster.  They want to stop with the extensive analysis and start experimenting.  They crave doing things vs. talking about them and planning them for next year.

If they aren’t frustrated and impatient and being scolded for trying to shortcut process now, they’re going to have a horrible culture shock when they show up at your office.    They’ll want to re-create the predictability of their old environment, which usually results in an employee who hides beyond process or cuts off new information that may spur a changed decision.

An impatient candidate will still probably have some culture shock.  But they’ll react in the opposite way: the energy will invigorate them to work harder and welcome new information and use it to look for the ways they can best contribute.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Think back to when you were a kid and you got a dollar bill tucked into a birthday card.

You went to the store with a $1 to spend, picked out something that cost $1, headed to the register — and found out it actually cost $1.05 with tax.  It probably totally derailed you.  (My mom didn’t give me the extra nickel; she just explained that tax meant I really only had 90-something cents to spend.  Probably a valuable economics lesson to learn, though I’m sure I didn’t see it that way at the time.)

Your customers (hopefully) are not being derailed by lack of a nickel. But they are being hit by the thinking tax.

The thinking tax is what happens when your customers approach your product, ready to perform a task, and then realize that there’s a decision they need to make.  Or a question they need to answer.  Or a choice they need to figure out.  And that extra bit of un-budgeted-for work is what makes them stop and say, “I’ll come back to this later.”

It can be incredibly frustrating as a product manager to watch this happen, because the “thinking tax” is usually very low.  It’s usually something like:

• looking up which settings you used last time
• finding an example of how other people did it
• remembering to download something
• thinking about what each option means so you can pick the right one
• making a list of the little related tasks you need to do

…but that’s enough to make your customer hesitate.

So often, they’ve got a short window of time – maybe 10 minutes before their next conference call starts, or 5 minutes while they’re waiting in the school pick-up parking lot – and they’re ready to act.   If they were able to think, “I should do this”, they would just do it. But when that thought subtly shifts to “Now, what should I do?”, they worry a bit.

Dan and Chip Heath, the “Made to Stick” guys, write about some of the academics behind this: Tase the Haze.

Who wants to make a mistake just because they’re in a hurry, or have a headache, or are in a noisy cafe?  Nope, better to wait until they have some peace and quiet and time to think.

Let me repeat that last bit:  “better to wait until they have some peace and quiet and time to think”.

Yeah.  I have a kid and I work in a startup.  That time might be 17 years from now.

But you can avoid the thinking tax on your product.  Here’s how:

• show examples
• make recommendations
• choose intelligent defaults
• reassure customers about any choices/decisions that can be changed later (i.e. no ‘penalty’ for choosing wrong)

Yesterday, I gave an Action Class talk for AppSumo, and my contact, @michaeldwp, did a great job with this.  He sent emails that clearly listed what he needed from me, provided links to examples of previous talks, outlined a suggested structure for my talk, provided links to the software I’d need to download, provided a short link for Tweeting, reminded me to add him on Skype, and recommended that I sign on early to confirm that audio and video were working.

Would I have been able to figure this out on my own?  Sure.  But it would’ve been much more stressful, and the odds would’ve been much higher that something would go wrong.  There was a pretty long list of logistics to take care of, but they didn’t really feel like work, because I didn’t have to stop and think about every single item.

I didn’t have to stress that I was forgetting something, or take time to break down the big task into little manageable chunks.  That was done for me.  I was free to focus on what I came to do — prepare for and give a talk.

BTW, for those who couldn’t make it:

• “Get More Useful Feedback” Presentation
• “Get More Useful Feedback” Action Class (if you haven’t already, you’ll need to sign up for Action Class emails to view)

Popularity: 5% [?]

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions.  An FAQ is a document where your customers go when they have a specific question that they want answered.

IAQ stands for Infrequently Asked Questions.  An IAQ is a document where you know the specific questions that your customers should be asking and you  present them along with the answers.

(Neither of these are to be confused with an SSQ — the Self-Serving Questions document, where companies “ask” and answer questions like ‘Why is Company X a leader in the Y industry?’ or ‘How has Company X maintained a 90% customer satisfaction score for so long?’ that no customer has ever asked.)

So, what are the signs that you need an IAQ?

• Customers say things like “I don’t even know where to start”
• Customers ask, “How are other people using this product?”
• When you give a demo, the response is “Wow! I didn’t even realize I could do that!”
• “Power users” rate your product as off-the-charts awesome, but ‘everyone else’ rates it significantly lower
• Login frequency/usage is very high for the first week or two, then trails off significantly

All of these signs suggest that most of your customers aren’t getting the full value out of your product because they don’t realize what they can do with it.

They’re not looking for answers — they don’t even know what questions they should be asking.  This is the point of the IAQ — to bridge the gap between “how your customer is currently using your product” and “the product manager’s vision of how a customer should ideally be using the product.”   It’s the equivalent of a helpful friend leaning over your shoulder and saying, “did you realize you could do X?”

What should go into my IAQ?

• How to solve specific problems — emphasis on the problem, not the feature which solves it
• Supported use cases that the customer may not have even thought to ask about
• What problems other customers are solving with your product

With KISSinsights, I mixed the Infrequently Asked Questions in with the more traditional Frequently Asked Questions. Here’s a little detail about some of those questions:

“Can I control who sees the surveys?” NOT a question I’d been asked a lot.  But in talking to customers, I realized that they hadn’t really grasped that they could trigger surveys to only be shown to specific types of visitor.  I got the “I didn’t realize I could do that!” response.   Once I added the question, I got a lot of related questions.  Once that possibility was in customers’ minds, they were excited and had other ideas on how to use it.  But I had to plant that seed first, for most folks.

“Will I be able to tell who’s taking my survey?” was similar.  Most of our customers are familiar with traditional SurveyMonkey-type surveys, where you need to explicitly ask for an email address.  So I needed to plant the seed that they’d be able to pass that information behind-the-scenes.

“Can I show the survey in non-English languages?” Most web services from US companies are English-only, so potential customers don’t even ask.  By calling out that question, we’ve gotten a pretty large number of non-English-speaking customers — and that’s with zero advertising or marketing to those audiences.

“How are other people using KISSinsights?” This is the jackpot question.  It’s here on the page, and I send it out in emails at least once a week.  This list — and it’s just a simple list of ideas — is one of the best convincers I’ve worked with.  (By which I mean, anecdotally, of the people who email me to ask about KISSinsights, the percentage who upgrade after seeing this list is ridiculously high.)

If you had 5 full minutes of your customers’ time — an unlikely gift, I know — what would you want them to know about they could solve their problems using your product?

Popularity: 4% [?]

One of the reasons adding “process” goes so badly in organizations is that the process is defined by one type of person — the communicator/extrovert/generalist — but inflicted upon everyone.

I’m not opposed to structure.  Repeatable processes are necessary to get from a tiny scrappy company to a successful one.  But they need to keep in mind that some of the smartest people you work with don’t think like you at all.

Not everyone is good at “real-time”

Some people can listen and think and summarize and talk at the same time.   (Given recent studies on multitasking, probably more of us think we’re good at this but actually aren’t.)

For others, it’s like being asked to listen to a Beatles song and write down the lyrics to a Rolling Stones song at the same time.   It’s stressful and you will almost certainly mix up bits of the two.   It’s a smart employee who recognizes they can’t do both and focuses on understanding first and offering solutions later.  Unfortunately, they’re often perceived as too shy, too passive, or “never having any good ideas.”

The stop, go away, come back method helps alleviate this.  So does sending out an agenda/information before a meeting, or making a point of following up via email afterwards to catch any asynchronous insights.

Everyone has a continuum of most-to-least effective communication methods (and they are different)

IM and face-to-face are my favorite mediums. Other people prefer phone calls, sketches, or writing up emails.  This is all fine as long as you alternate mediums.

When your corporate culture is strongly biased towards conference calls but half the team communicates better via writing, it’s bad for morale (people who aren’t good at phone calls know it, and know they’re going to have a hard time getting their ideas across) and it’s bad for efficiency.

I hated the focus on conference calls when I worked with an offshore team — interactions via IM were faster and there was more understanding going on.  Between bad Skype connections and both sides thinking the other team had heavy accents, I always felt like I spent more time saying “What?” than “Great idea!”

If all you have is a hammer…

Want to know why engineers are always offering technical solutions to a problem?  Because you hired them for being awesome with a hammer.

“Soft skill” methods are not innate.  No one is born knowing how to rapid brainstorm, ask the 5 Whys, interview a customer, do competitive analysis on competitor products, or formulate questions to ‘ask the data’.   How can you expect your engineers/designers to contribute using methods that they’ve never learned?

It’s not hard to take a few minutes to walk through various approaches (faced with this problem, here’s one method I’d use and why I’d choose it, and here’s how I’d start…) but apparently it’s easier to just mutter under your breath about how “they” “just don’t get it”.  Easier, but not recommended.

If you’re not sure how well your new process is working, you could wait to find out when you conduct a project postmortem.  Or you could try asking (using that person’s preferred communication method.) Were you able to understand the problem completely?  Did you feel like you were able to make others understand your concerns/ideas?  Is there a way that would make it easier for you to contribute?

Now that would be Thinking Different.

Popularity: 18% [?]