 I was very recently product leader at Next Big Sound, which is a small startup that Pandora acquired about two years ago. I started four years ago at Next Big Sound. I was on kind of like UX and design, 95% of the time and 5% of the time I was doing product thinking, research, that sort of thing. And over those four years, you know, the amount of product work I was doing went up and up and up and up. And the design went down and down and down and down until all I was doing was product management work. I want to extend the sincere apology to anybody who was expecting David Hoffman to be here. If anybody's friend or colleague of David Hoffman, I'm not David Hoffman, we're close with David Hoffman at Next Big Sound. So while I was there, of course, especially in the last two years when I was doing a lot of product leadership, I was responsible for making sure that everybody, you know, who was working at Next Big Sound knew kind of like what they were working on and why they were working on it. Now, anybody's kind of like worked on team before, which I'm gonna assume is pretty much anybody here knows that getting people to work together kind of aimed in the same direction is really tough. It's not easy, you know, product, doing the product work, doing the design work, doing the dub work, it's tough enough, but doing people work so much harder and that's why I actually like got into and get excited about it because it's a huge challenge that's like fresh every day to help people kind of like worry orient themselves no matter what commit they're working on or what design project they're working on and make sure everybody's kind of like marching together as one towards some kind of objective, right? So I'm going to kind of like walk you through some tools and some habits that we had at Next Big Sound that kind of like helped us get to a good place for what we're working on in terms of our product team on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis and it all comes to creating context for the team. And as somebody who's like contributing in that way, they should be really invested in making sure that that unit of work that they're doing, they're doing it as well as they can but when you get in the weeds sometimes, you kind of forget about the greater context about like where the whole company is going, right? Or even like your smaller team and that's where product leadership comes in to help kind of like create that context and then like reinforce it too to make sure that people always have that kind of like in the back of their minds or that quick reference to it when they need to know so that work stays on kind of like a good course moving forward, not a lot of like swirl or like wasted time, any of that good stuff and so everybody feels good that what they're doing actually has like some kind of purpose that's serving some kind of objective for the team, all that kind of good stuff. Everybody, you can imagine like, one of these diagrams for like every single one person on your team where everybody has like their own little piece of work that they have and that context is kind of like that unit that surrounds everybody and gets everybody to work together. Now I'm using this context word pretty loosely right now so we're going to kind of like get into the meat of what that meant, at least in the next big sound. I think the important thing of course to keep in mind here is that there's no such thing as like a one size fits all silver bullet solution here so like any kind of product team challenge. Creating context is of course in itself like super contextual, right? It depends a lot on who your team is. At next big sound like we were a really achievement driven super kind, work hard kind of team but we also had a lot of problems with like conflict and actually like surfacing some kind of tensions and talking them through, right? So some of the tools that we had kind of like built around playing to those strengths and also trying to address those weaknesses. You might have a team of your own that maybe like gets along great, it has a lot of great ideas but maybe doesn't always like do a good job of getting down into the nitty gritty and actually shipping or you might have the opposite problem you might have a team that is super good at shipping but like doesn't really communicate at all well. They like to do their work but the connection between that work kind of like falls apart. Also like it's really contextual based on who you are ultimately as a product lead like doing that kind of work is really pretty personal and it throws into relief really starkly like what your strengths are typically and then what some of your weaknesses are. So you might be again somebody who does great at like jokes and positivity but maybe not be so great a conflict you might again be the opposite. Like these habits down to talk about in terms of context are really there to help bring all those things together and bridge all the work and all the characteristics of yourself and your team and get some good work done. You guys ready to get going? Cool, here we go. First I'll talk about kind of like the what. Some of these words can be if you Google them and try to get some kind of definition you'd probably get a thousand definitions like mission is a pretty loose word sometimes. Vision is a pretty loose word sometimes. Even a lot of people like abuse the word strategy goals can be in whatever they mean to different people. The point I'm trying to make at least what I want to share with you all tonight is just like what it meant for next big sound and maybe those ideas will be helpful for y'all. So I'll go through talk about what they meant for next big sound. Mission, so at next big sound the mission that we always had was making data useful. That was the kind of like guiding light for the next big sound team since the beginning of next big sound time which was 2009 I think. This is kind of like the wholly incantation that we might repeat at the beginning of like every weekly team meeting. We joked about it almost got to saying it together in unison but we thought that what's got a little too culty. But the important thing is is to have that kind of like fervent belief in some kind of like distant fantastic exciting objective and for us it was making data useful. Now as we kind of like matured and found a product market fit we got acquired by Pandora. The kind of like width that you could take from something like making data useful got narrower and narrower and narrower. And I think that might have been kind of an opportunity to try to like make that a little more specific because although this is like super great mission kind of like if you are an early stage startup and you're looking for product market fit like there are three really powerful words like making you're actually doing something data we're specifically working with data we're not working with so much qualitative information and then useful there's a promise there that it's going to benefit some kind of a user. But by the time that we were part of Pandora I think maybe a mission around like making data useful for musicians might have been a little bit more meaningful or making data useful for band managers. Again like what this needs to be is like really contextual based on kind of like where you're at, where your team's at, where your product's at, all the good stuff. But at the end of the day like some kind of mission should be something that like every team member knows by heart to repeat it over and over again and is inspiring and exciting and like has some kind of promise that people want to work on. Cool, next up strategy. So we've got this mission, we've got some kind of objective that we're going after. I'm gonna get there. The guiding light we had was always kind of climbing the data pyramid. Now this is kind of like a mental model that was helpful for the whole team to kind of like have in mind. And really great for like reference say around like quarterly project planning that sort of thing. I'll show you what this means because of course there's nothing that you haven't seen it. So two next big sound, first layer of the pyramid is a data asset, right? So for eight years, nine years, how many ever years we were collecting all of the like social data, all of the streaming data and all the event data that we could for any band or artist that we could get our hands on. This year we got somewhere over 500,000 artists, probably more. There are a lot of musicians out there as it turns out and updating social data on a daily basis, it turns out there's a lot of data down there and simply like bringing it together, having it in one place and making sure that's clean, that's quality and you can depend on it. That's an enormous task in and of itself and anything you want to build on top of it doesn't mean anything really. It all falls apart unless you have this kind of data layer at the bottom that's secure. So this is something we could always come back to like when we were talking about like either what we were going to do or how well something had worked or how something had kind of gone off the rails, right? We've got this mental model in terms of our strategy that we can kind of like think about reference together as one team, some kind of context for what we're working on helps kind of like work together, communicate, understand what we're doing. On top of the data, we have the information layer. So like if I have account for Kanye West's Twitter followers updates every day, do some very, very simple math and I can tell you the change right day to day. Do some more simple math and I can do a percent change day to day, right? Again, you can't do that kind of stuff unless you have a data layer but that kind of information built on top of the data more useful for users. And then finally, the golden objective that we always were trying to reach for was something called insights internally. Think of that as something like if I have a percentage change for Kanye West every day and one day that percentage change goes up, now I have something kind of like go at, I can look at what kind of events happened around that date and I might be able to have some kind of insight like, hey Kanye, when you played that show in Chicago and you lost your damn mind and you walked off stage crying or whatever, that was actually really good for your Twitter followers. So, I mean, you can't do that too many times but hey, maybe there's something to learn there Kanye. The important thing here, right, is that we have this kind of like image, a path, something that kind of like built toward something in steps that help the team kind of come back to something in terms of strategy. The data pyramid has always been kind of a core vision since before my time at the company. So I don't know if there's anything that kind of like proceeded that but definitely when I started Nexbick Sound was still an independent company and I was brought on actually when the team was trying to move into a different vertical entirely. There's actually a Nexbick book for about a year. We also were trying really hard to sell to brands for a while, right? A lot of things I did in the first year was put together these like 10 page reports about, you know, Pepsi and like here are 10 artists you might wanna work with for X, Y, Z reason. Like we were still trying to find product market fit before the Pandora acquisition. So definitely like every three to six months would be some kind of new thing we're trying to try to keep the lights on to keep the money coming in. Within those goals and we'd have like discreet projects. You know, and a project would be something that had a clear beginning and a clear ending. And if we were so committed as to take on a project we would always finish it and less like something we had some like dramatic new information that told us we need to move on and not take care of it, right? So two big like projects right that we had in 2017 were working on a data center migration. The other one was all the way at the top which was actually created like email alerts for artists. If you like, again, like subscribe to Kanye you would get an email that just says, hey, Kanye had a big spike in Twitter. Here are some events that are around it. You go check it out. Pretty simple concept. Of course, the work is not nearly as simple but it's incredibly useful. Instead of having to like go into a product and like pull the information you just get it pushed to the user. You know, it's automatic. You don't have to know to look for something. It just kind of shows up. So like that's to me like what could be more useful than just something that tells me what I want to look for, right? Tell me I'm going to look at it. Finally, we always had metrics. Metrics are tough, especially for a team that isn't making money anymore. When we got bought by Pandora, our service was kind of like offered to the big labels as kind of like a fig leaf, I guess. You know, two, three years ago, Pandora and he's going to street didn't really like get along that well. And our acquisition was actually a big part of like trying to make amends. And this was always a topic of some discussion. And we clutched together one metric because we all felt very strongly that having at least just one metric was table stakes, right? Something that we could all focus on, all think about and all try to like get all of our projects and any of our goals and any of our strategy and the mission really should drive like some kind of increase in insight consumed. For us, we had an imperfect thing here with this kind of system, but I think it was still very useful. I grew up put together page views plus API calls plus emails opened, you know, like we want to have some kind of metric that always indicated that our users were engaging with our data in some way. So like email sent, who cares? You know, you can send 100,000 emails, nobody opens them, it doesn't matter, right? So we had, you know, it wasn't weighted or anything and maybe it like undercounts page views and overcounts API we definitely had these discussions to try to like fine tune things but makes it more complicated. It's a big thing, right? To try to like get a core metric for a business together and we ultimately had this one. Look at it every day, look at it every week for the whole team, look at it all the time to make sure that it's going the right way. I think two years ago, like it was the goal for the year was to like double insights consumed, and that was kind of like the railing cry we had for 2016. That was what the whole team came around, got excited about, and then when we debate like okay, if that is our share of goal, then to move this metric, what kind of project should we do? It's again like creating all this context, all these like layers of information that everybody knows and here's an over and over again that helps people have like really effective communication so they can like work together, know what their work is doing, all that good stuff. You know, daily we have stand-ups. Stand-ups are not like a new idea anymore. I remember when they worked to me and I was like, this is great. I've been at one or two other places that weren't doing stand-ups and I couldn't believe it. It's really difficult. It's always amazing to kind of see the journey from the initial resistance to having to stand up and talk every day to the breakthrough when suddenly everybody just like starts talking about all their problems all of a sudden and then in a couple weeks suddenly things are humming along a lot better. It's almost like talking a little bit every day is useful. So I'm a big advocate, stand-ups, quick as possible, short and sweet, mostly focused around like blockers of dependency like that's really what a stand-up should be about. Weekly we always had a full team meeting every Friday morning, 10 o'clock, called the bagels, always had bagels. Alex, the CEO would always start every meeting by saying, sup guys, welcome to another week in making data useful, like I said, the incantation that we repeat over and over again. And then we would review the goals for the year and just repeat them, playing back to everybody. And then we'd get project updates from all the project leads to see how things were going. Every Friday, week after week after week after week touching base with the whole team all at once in a Friday morning. Whether it's Monday morning, whether it's Tuesday night, you know, whenever I can't imagine a team not having some kind of like all hands on deck meeting on a week basis, especially if you're a smaller team. I have to imagine that gets exceptionally difficult when you get much larger. I know that Pandora had full hand meetings like once a month, you know, you hit that limit of like 80 people, it's probably very difficult to actually make that feel like everybody coming together and communicating with one another. So, you know, this is good advice for a smaller company I think, but the first things we always did in those meetings was talk about some of this contextual stuff, right? Like that was the core of the meeting, the first thing that got said. We might get into like industry news or talking about Kanye and how he lost his mind and have some fun or watch a video, like whatever, but the context was always what was important. By weekly, we did, you know, sprints, you know, two week sprints, and again, this would be like usually Wednesday morning, we would look at the metrics, see how the metrics have moved in the past two weeks if we'd shipped anything, see if there was a bump, was the bump as much as we expected? Was it higher, was it lower? Why have a discussion about it? We've talked about what the different projects had accomplished in the past week. We talked about what people planned and doing for the next two weeks for those projects. And something that I always did, you know, somebody's like leading those meetings was anytime somebody talked about something they worked on, tie it back to, you know, those goals for you or tie it back to making data useful, you know, like even if it's a little cludgy sometimes, like pointing out that every little bit of work that somebody shipped has something to do with what we're working on, like reinforcing that over and over again, super helpful, super helpful. Quarterly we did project planning, so we would sit down and look at the past quarter, see how the projects had gone, had we moved the metrics, so we were feeling good and talk about what we wanted to do for the next quarter. Right, this would be a exercise that the whole team participated in, the whole team would kind of suggest projects that we might do, the whole team would discuss which projects they thought we should do, advocate for them, and we wouldn't decide, you know, through consensus or anything, but everybody had their share in a really like transparent process, right? And again, the way to argue for what projects you want to do for that quarter, do you think the team should do? Horses going back to that context and saying, this helps us meet our goals, this helps us climb the data pyramid, this helps us get to our mission. And like finally annually, we would reset those goals, right, so as I kind of said, like last year we had a goal that's based on the metrics, you know, this year the goals were based around the data pyramid, we might do something different. Like two years ago, it was make next big sound simpler and smarter, so anything we did had to be justified in terms of making things simple or smarter, which was probably a little too loosey-goosey to be totally honest, because those words aren't very specific.