 Hello, everybody in our product school audience and welcome to the show. My name is Chantel De Prey. I am a product marketing manager here at product school and I am super excited to have with us this evening Michael Mace, the VP of Market Strategy at User Testing. Michael, how are you? I'm just fine. Thanks. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. We're super excited. We've got some awesome questions in our agenda today and we're looking forward to getting to know you. I want to hand the mic right over to you right from the top and let you introduce yourself to all of our folks who are tuning in online. Sure. So, hi everybody. I do market strategy user testing, which means that I'm looking at the outside environment, the customers and competitors and industry analysts and trying to figure out what's going on and what we need to do about it. That's not my background though. I started off in life as a software developer, not a good one, not a very successful one, but I was a Mac developer way back when, so I'm kind of dating myself. Out of that, I got hired by Apple and I spent 10 years at Apple working within the product management organization. I worked on product planning. I also was running for a long time the overall market intelligence function. So all of the competitive analysis, customer research, all that sort of stuff. And one of the things that drew me to user testing was the stuff that I saw at Apple and other places I worked at where the ability of the research functions, the customer understanding functions, to keep up with the needs of the product functions, the product managers was really lacking. There were so many times when the product people had to operate on very fragmentary information or on no information at all and just make guesses. And the amount of business risk that that created, and I always felt like we could do something better in terms of letting people make more fact-based decisions and less guest-based decisions. And I think we're at the point now where we can do that. And that's one of the things that really excites me and it's one of the frontiers of product management that I'm most excited about today. Amazing. What an introduction. That is so cool. Apple back in the day, again, not trying to help you with dating yourself. Apple back in the day must have been so cool just in that energy space. It was. It was weird at the same time. So it was working with really bright people, tons of energy. And I really, a lot of the cultural practices and business practices that I've learned have been super valuable. At the same time, the company had way more money than it knew how to spend at the time. There were all sorts of bad habits. Like I thought it was normal for the company to send you to the most expensive hotels around the world when you were on a business trip. What a come down that was to work at a normal company and see what it's like. So I kind of missed some of those things. But in terms of engaging with customers and the excitement around it, that was super, super fun. And it's always something that I've looked to try to recreate elsewhere. Let's get that sort of passion going. I know we have an agenda, Michael, but I actually just have another question. Because now you're working on software products. You're testing as a software product. So what was that like transitioning from Apple, which is, I mean, fundamentally a hardware product over the software. Oh, great question. And actually, I'm going to even take your question a little bit further. So it wasn't just hardware versus software. It was B2C versus B2B, because user testing is a B2B company. Yes. So I had to make that transition. And the other thing that's spooky is Apple's not actually a hardware company. This is something people don't understand. But this is true of Apple and Tesla and some other places like that. Apple is a systems company. The thing that makes them special is they don't just do hardware. They do hardware and software together and coordinate those things together really nicely to do a solution. Super hard to do. Very few other companies really understand how to do it. And that's kind of their superpower, is how they combine all that stuff together. So the transition from system company that plans in 18 to 24 month increments and that's consumer facing to software company that plans in like three day increments and is B2B furthermore. Yeah, it was totally different, different language, different sets of business practices, different assumptions. And even today I still run into weird stuff where like the way a B2B company talks about itself is a different voice on the marketing side. A consumer company wants to be as plain and as straightforward as it can be because you're trying to relate to consumers. A B2B company actually needs to speak in a voice that's a little bit erudite and sophisticated because they're investing their corporate portfolio. And so you need to be able to use lots of words like architecture and stuff like that, whereas that would turn off a consumer. So it's a whole different set of habits that you have to learn. It's really, really weird. Crazy. But I am assuming that you're managing well since you're in the VP position. They haven't fired me yet, yeah. Fantastic. I'm betting that they're not planning on it anytime soon. Hopefully not. Let's jump into these questions we have prepared, Michael. So what are the biggest challenges facing the product managers you work with at user testing and how are these product managers dealing with those challenges? Yep, you know, it varies depending on the specific situations of the company, obviously, in the way it's organized and stuff like that. And I'd say one big distinction is between legacy companies and brand new companies. Brand new companies, they're generally operating under a whole bunch of new assumptions about how you organize things and business practices, the role of product management, what you expect a product manager to do. So we talked to some companies that are way advanced on product management and they're working on issues like, well, do we need to have separate business product managers versus technical product managers? Is it possible for one human being to do both of those roles? If not, how do we divide between them and how do we do this stuff? And there's all sorts of super advanced conversations we have with those guys. Then we talk with a bunch of people in legacy companies who are still trying to establish the role of product management, you know, and like, no, I am not a program manager. My role is not to take orders from you on what the features should be. My role is to figure out customer needs. Let's work out the fundamentals of why that's necessary and how does that play with Agile, you know, and you say you're doing Agile, but you're not really doing Agile and can we talk about what you really need to do? And very often those product managers, they are the change agents within the company trying to explain back, you know, these business practices because they need the company to behave differently for them to be successful. And so there's really this bifurcation of the ones who are in the new style companies who are running way ahead and the others who are trying to drive a transformation. And how do I champion that transformation? When I'm a lot of times I'm telling my boss they need to do something that they don't know how to do. And I know that's the sort of topics you guys hit on a lot. So we're seeing that all the time because we've got a product that fits into the workflow for the product managers. It's one of the assets for them. But in order to really be able to take advantage of us, it depends on how the overall decision making is working within the company. So sorry, that's a big convoluted answer to your question. But basically it's what we're seeing with is two different sets of problems based on whether it's a legacy company or a new company. That's amazing. I want to jump up to one of the questions I've prepared, Michael, because I think that spins nicely into legacy companies. You know, what advice would you give to those legacy companies who might be setting up product teams for the very first time? Yeah, so it's a couple of things. It's number one, they need to recognize that this is not a function that you can just paste onto your existing structure. And it's not, by the way, an existing group that you can just repurpose. You know, and I've heard, like I've had these people who are like director or VP level product management people saying, oh yeah, when they brought in the institution and the product management a year ago. And what they did was they took all of the project managers and they renamed them product managers. And they said, you go, have fun. You know, and it's you have to empower them to drive thinking within the company. You therefore have to be willing to respond to what they're working on. And you need to hold them responsible for the right set of things, you know, the outcome metrics and stuff like that, as opposed to holding them responsible for how much do they follow orders, or just make them schedule keepers, you know, which is a way of just turning a product manager into a program manager, which really isn't fair to them. And so it's understanding how you need to change your overall organization to take advantage of this institution of product management. Because it's really a change of the entire company. It's not just a change of that particular role. Does that make sense? Totally, totally, totally. We're seeing that on our side, you know, we talk a lot about product-led growth. And a lot of the companies that we're partnering with are speaking about product-led growth. And when we talk about it, like looking at it, I don't know, from 2014, 2016 era, those were tactics. And now when we talk about product-led growth, that's a total company mindset and it informs how you're gonna build your sales teams, how you're gonna build your marketing teams, crossing collaboration is stronger than ever. So, yeah, totally. Yep, you know, to me, when I hear product-led growth, I think most people think when they first hear it is, they emphasize the word product. Oh, okay, so this is something, product. To me, the key word in there is led, like leadership, which implies followership and cooperation and a lot of other cultural things around it. And people tend to neglect the led part. They tend to just focus on the product part, the what as opposed to the how. Yeah, completely, which is, I'm sure something that, a trap that we all fall into, despite our best intentions. Amazing. Michael, do you have any special advice for product managers who are trying to establish their roles at legacy companies where PM is a relatively new title? Yeah, yep. So I talked with a lot of people about that. And in addition to what we just talked about, about making clear, here's what the role is, here's how we're all gonna work together. And that's hard, because that's managing up in a lot of cases, but you gotta, if you're gonna accept the job, it's kind of like right from the start, you need to make clear how it's gonna operate. And it's hard, because you can't be a jerk about it. You can't just give more orders, you have to persuade. I think there's a lot of marshaling evidence that can be very, very helpful for you. And so I'm gonna be a little biased on this because I'm working at a company that does some of this. So my examples are gonna tend to come from stuff that I see, but based on what I've seen, to give you an example, you'll get people who use our product, user testing to get feedback from customers and understand what they're saying. And then, okay, great, I can make a better informed decision in real time so I can get the feedback super fast. That's great, thank you very much. And then they say, okay, I'm gonna make better informed decisions. They often neglect taking the stuff that they've gathered and sharing it with others in order to persuade them on why they should follow. You know, so video of a customer saying, oh, I hate that idea that your senior VP had, right? Because here's what'll happen to a product manager. You're working away on something and the senior VP comes in and says, well, you know, I had this brainstorm yesterday when I was taking a shower and it's that we should do this and it's an entirely different thing. And you think to yourself, I can't tell them what a bad idea that is because they'll fire me, they're a senior VP. How do I get them off of this without me having to make it a me versus them type of thing? And, you know, hey, what you're getting from us is a bunch of videos of customers saying what they think. Put, you know, run that VP's idea past people. Within 24 hours, you can have those videos, clip them into some nice little clips of people throwing up on this stuff. And then you send it to the senior VP and you say, hey, I loved your idea. I thought it was so great, but you know, we tried it out on customers. I'm so sorry. Look at how they reacted. And then you're not rejecting that VP. The customers are. And it's an entirely different conversation. And, you know, that one's a more extreme example. It's not like you're in conflict with VP's every day, but how often are you trying to align teams? How often do you get engineers who are questioning your authority and your judgment and saying, well, I want to do it this way or they're arguing with each other over the color of a button. And the clips of customers talking about things are an asset to persuade people as to why you're doing the right thing. And so many times I'll see people who take the learnings out of this stuff, but don't share the evidence. And so use the evidence as an asset to drive people's decision making and alignment with what you need them to do. And that can be super helpful. And that doesn't just apply to our stuff. Same thing for the numbers and everything else. Share the work and it'll actually be far more persuasive to people and it'll help you get your stuff done with less conflict. Amazing. I would add to that. Again, coming from my own bias and I often do these on these fireside chats, you know, put in a subtle plug for product marketers out there who I think are the best friends of product managers out there. And often us product marketers, we say, oh, you know, we're gonna own the voice of the customer. And I think that when you're talking about finding that evidence to back up decisions, either a go decision or a no-go decision, product marketers can be some of your best allies in that for sure. Well, and to build on that, how often do you see product managers who think, oh, I should bring in the product marketer at the end? You know, oh, great, we're almost done. Time to plan the launch. Let's bring in the product marketer. If you bring them in earlier, they can be an ally in getting you the support that you need. Furthermore, they can talk your project up in the marketing team and get some budget lined up ahead of time. So it's all about networking to your allies early, getting them all aligned, sharing the stuff back and forth with them, which, hey, maybe you can get them to run some of the user tests for you so you don't have to do as much work. You know, and then you have them co-opted. You know, all this stuff comes together really nicely. I'm gonna take a question kind of out of left field just based on what we're saying there. You know, we're talking about product marketers, product managers, program managers, all these different titles are in your experience, and especially your days working in the product sphere. Are you seeing more and more different product-linked roles and titles emerging? So like, growth product manager, data product manager, things like this. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, we are seeing a subdivision of the role names within product management. And again, that's in those newer companies that have been started from scratch. Basically, companies that grew up with the idea of Agile that were formed in the world of Agile, and so they're used to all the business processes that go along with that, including product management. And so we actually survey companies, we do a yearly survey of companies asking a bunch of issues. And one of the things we ask is, do you have unified product management roles or do you have separate different sorts of product management roles with different titles? About half the companies responding say they have now different product management roles. Now, that samples a little biased toward tech companies because they're heavy in our customer base. But nevertheless, a lot of companies are doing these different PM roles. And then the specific titles vary a lot. So it'll be business versus technical product management. Another one we hear a lot is inbound versus outbound product management. That's another one. Growth product management, I haven't heard as much, but I kind of understand the spirit of what that's talking about. It's kind of like, oh, okay, that's growing out of growth hacking. I kind of get that, that sort of stuff. So it's becoming more and more diverse. The other thing is the actual name product manager is sometimes used at some places and sometimes not used at other places. So for instance, at Apple, we actually, I don't know if they still do this, but when I was there, we called it product marketing, but product marketing was actually the role of the product manager. And so if you don't think that's confusing, it was really, really weird. But that was just Apple's legacy and how it had grown up and it kind of evolved this role and then repurposed it into these other things. So we'll see those cases as well where there's a completely different job title, but it means this other thing. I do a lot of translation in my job. That's amazing. I mean, the good news there is for anybody who's looking to get into product management, it seems like there's gonna be kind of a flavor for everybody, eventually. Yeah. Yep, I think very much. And really the more importance that the product manager takes on, the more difficult it is to have a single person doing all those different things. Inevitably, you'll see people who will either get, they'll either get sucked into the day-to-day interacting with the team, being the product owner, that piece of it, which can just completely consume your life and needs to. But on the other hand, then there's no time for doing the longer term like customer problem discovery, right? We're supposed to be doing discovery continuously. Well, if you're spending every day in one-on-ones with the engineering team, you don't have time to go out and do that discovery stuff. And there are superstars who can do both, but when you're dealing with regular human beings, it's sometimes much better to let them, let them specialize a little bit, but then you have to figure out the interface between them. And I'm sure that's the sort of stuff you guys worked through. Okay, now you got these two roles. How do they trade off between each other? How do you avoid warfare between them and all that sort of stuff? And yep, yeah. And startups too, like what we're seeing is some of our clients are coming to us who might be on the startup or scale up. Size range of things are going, okay, I know I need to hire a product team, but I've heard about like this specialized product manager versus a general product manager, who's gonna give me the best ROI, right? Who do I hire? Again, going back to setting up product teams for the first time or establishing product as a function, that's a tricky choice to make. And it's definitely becoming more convoluted. Oh yeah, and we see in a lot of small companies there are people switching back and forth between hats. Today they're in this role, tomorrow they're in this other role. Yep. Yeah, which is great. I mean, as long as the place isn't on fire. Oh yeah, it makes it fun. And hey, if you sign up for a startup, it's because you wanna do that sort of thing. You know, that's your thing. Absolutely, absolutely. So going back to these individual product managers, what do you see the most successful product managers doing? I think it's, they're recognizing that their role is more about leadership than controlling, if that makes any sense. You know, product managers tend to be detail-oriented people because they wanna get all the details, right? And the devil's in the detail and that's really, really important. But there comes a time when you just can't, you can't control all the details. And so what you need to be doing is making sure that everybody's aligned such that 80% of the time they're gonna be doing the right things. And the ones that I've seen who are most effective, they're wonderful multitaskers. They can switch between lots of different contexts, just like that. But they also understand that ultimately, their job is to facilitate others doing their jobs right as opposed to telling them what to do and giving them the context that's needed in order to keep them focused and coach them toward what needs to happen. And man, my favorite product managers that I've dealt with are almost like team coaches where they've gotten this tight group of people together and they're focused on, okay guys, let's all stay together on this. Let's remember what the North Star is about what we're trying to pursue. And they do that so effectively that people are 80% aligned all the time and then they don't have to do as much problem solving of individual issues because people are naturally tending to align. The most effective PMs are like that where they're owning the intellectual direction and the thinking about it as much as trying to make the actual individual decisions. That's easy to say, but it's super hard to do. No, for sure. And in that, I mean, I don't know what your experience is with this, but I always find that I'm able to think more strategically and get my head out of the weeds after a vacation. Yeah, yep. And that's tough, right? Because the job is so demanding. Who has time to take a freaking vacation? And yet you have to find ways to keep yourself fresh. That's a great career management one for PMs, I think. How do you hit that balance of keeping yourself fresh and still being in a job that is totally all consuming? Yep, yep. I think, you know, as we see recessions potentially on the horizon and the question that's turned over, I said the R word, but as we see interesting economic events, macroeconomic events on the horizon, a question that lots of companies are asking is, you know, how do I retain my people? And I think setting up organizations so that if somebody is out for a day, nothing burns, nothing catches on fire, is the best like way to start retaining people because then people know that if they have to take time off, they feel assured, right? That, okay, the whole thing isn't gonna collapse because I need to take two days off. Yep, yep. The ability to get stuff done and the ability to have some sort of, at least a slight amount of balance in your life, those two things count, for getting really good employees, those things actually count more than an incremental certain amount of money. A lot of money will overcome the bad stuff, but you know, if it's a choice between two jobs that are relatively close and even if one pays a little bit lower, if somebody's well-empowered and if they have a good life balance, a lot of the best employees want, they understand that they want to get that. And that can be a great way in these sorts of situations to retain the right sorts of people. Totally. So at user testing, can you tell me a little bit about your team functions in that are they in the office, are they hybrid teams, are they fully remote teams? So user testing, we already had done a bunch of remote hiring before the pandemic happened. And so as it happened, especially in our engineering team, we'd been getting people like around the world, we had people in Scotland, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. And so when the pandemic hit, we already were used to using Zoom a lot. And so it kind of for us, we were very, very lucky. It was a relatively natural transition. So we're now spread out all over the place. I mean, we've got offices in San Francisco, we've got stuff in Europe, we've got stuff on the East coast of the US. We're not that big a company, we're about 900, but we have more, many more people outside of our home office location than we do in the home office location. And a lot of people are just scattered around. I'm in San Jose, which is for people who don't know, it's an hour south of San Francisco, if there's no traffic and it's two hours or more, if there is traffic, I haven't been up to our office in San Francisco in the last six weeks. You know, I'm just doing it this way. And that is normal for our company. We don't even notice sometimes. And it creates the usual challenges you'd expect. Like we got a bunch of employees who've never seen any other user testing employee in person. And it's weird and it's hard to build team and it's hard to coordinate things. But the flexibility to work from home at least part-time is what most people want now. If you're in a company that, I have a really strong opinion about this because we've been doing a lot of research on it. If you are in a company that believes that it's gonna be able to get everybody to come back to the office full-time and it's not one where they have to be like a hospital. Yes, everybody has to be working in the hospital full-time. But if you're in a company where it's possible to work from home and you're really thinking that you're gonna force everybody into the office every single day, you're going to cut your available employee base by about two thirds. That's what's gonna happen. Yeah, because most people, if given the choice between two jobs, one of them will let them work from home part-time and the other has them in the office full-time. They will definitely choose the one that gives them the flexibility to be at home part-time. Because they, it's getting rid of the freaking commute. I mean, forget about everything else. Even if it's not as long a commute as mine, you're saving an hour a day. How valuable is an hour of your time that you're not sitting in a freaking car listening to sports talk radio or whatever the equivalent is? I mean, maybe use that time better. Maybe you're listening to podcasts or something like that. But still, it's just a better way to work when you can be flexible about the location. Absolutely. Well, my God, I was homeschooled actually, K to 12 as a kid. So I also feel like I was uniquely prepared for the pandemic and for remote work. And I can tell you that I am a super efficient person when I'm working from home and got my dog and my team beside me. So yeah, we love it over here probably. We absolutely love remote work. You know, if you're not, if you don't trust your employees when they're not, because a lot of times it's trust, like managers feel like to be a good manager, I have to have the employees in the office. So one thing you can do is force them to all be in the office because you don't trust them or here's the thought, hire people who are trustworthy, you know, where you can trust them to work from home part-time. And there are a lot of people out there because they will make like, I have to be responsible because I'm getting a special privilege to work from home. Hire those people and then everybody's happy. And it's also easier to manage them. So I'm with you. I'm really passionate about this. Yeah, me too. And you know what? Maybe we'll come back, we'll meet in a year or so and maybe things will be different, but I have a feeling this is a bandwagon that's here to stay. I think it's a permanent change. Yeah, really is. Awesome. We are at time. So I wanna thank you so much, Michael for joining us here live today. My pleasure, this is super fun. Glad to do it any time. Wonderful, we will definitely take you up on that. And to everybody who is tuning in live online, thanks so much for joining us. And we look back to hearing you and seeing you and looking at your chat comments in our next fireside chat. Thanks so much everyone. Thanks Michael.