397: From product manager to CEO – with Matt Young

Insights on product strategy and customer research for product managers Today we are looking at product management work through the eyes of a CEO, exploring several topics together. The CEO joining us is Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice, the first product feedback and research tool for software companies. UserVoice is the tool I see most frequently used for collecting customer feedback and prioritizing customer needs to help product managers create more valuable products. Matt started his professional career as a software developer, and throughout his career he has been pushing for better ways to build software products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:41] As a CEO, what do you expect from your product VPs? I need product VPs to develop a product strategy and measure its effectiveness. They must formulate a product strategy that will help deliver on the company’s overall strategy. They need to have a way to demonstrate whether their hypotheses are meeting the mark. If the product strategy is intended to drive an increased NPS, how are they going to tie their activity to that result? [6:48] How do you communicate strategy to your organization? We do it often in actionable ways. When we get together as an executive team to update our strategy every six months, we role play every department and title to make sure those people know how to support the strategy and be confident what they’re doing contributes. We make sure the strategy is simple and understandable to everyone. On the executive team, it’s easy to throw around acronyms your industry uses, but someone who just came out of school with a design degree may not know all those things, and a brief explanation isn’t going to make them an expert. Every two weeks, we do a company all-hands and make sure all our slides re-emphasize strategy and metrics we’re using to track it. We celebrate when an individual team meaningfully contributes to our goal. It not only re-emphasizes understanding of what the mission is but also gets people on board with how to achieve the end result. CEOs sometimes falsely feel we bear the entire burden of the company, but it’s really all the people who work at the company who are accomplishing everything, and I want them to feel they’re the ones who did it. There are a lot of people who view the product team as sitting in an ivory tower. They seem to be making decisions without a lot of information and are perceived as ignoring some of the feedback they’re getting and running around with their own agenda that isn’t well researched. The misalignment may come from a communications problems or a failure to see eye-to-eye on the difficulty of other people’s jobs. There are a lot of examples of misalignment between product teams and the rest of the organization. [11:00] How do you improve communication about strategy with product teams? Every time we propose a project for our product management team, we list a couple of bullets at the top explaining how this initiative will support the company’s strategy. Whoever’s leading the product team keeps re-emphasizing those points to the product team. People pay attention to their immediate managers. When all the conversations in the organization are oriented around the same goals and using the same language, it starts to stick. Strategy has to be ever-present in people’s day to day. [12:36] As a CEO, how do you interact with the product functions in the organization? It’s challenging for me and for most CEOs to hand off control and trust the people leading engineering and product. Every Monday the heads of each department produce a report I ask them to spend no more than 20 minutes on. If they’re spending a lot of time assembling that information, they might be too disconnected from the people doing the w...