 Hello everyone. My name is Carlos. I'm the founder and CEO of Product School and today I'm here with a very special guest. Her name is Joanna Wolberton. She is the Executive Vice President of Product at Sandisk. Hello. Hello. Before joining the show, can't wait to learn more about your own personal story that brought you to Product, but also know a bit more about how you think about Product and what you think is next for everyone in the industry. Perfect. So let's get things started. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself? It feels like an interview, but I just want to dive into the product world. Like, what is an EMP of product and how do we make it happen? Yeah. I think it's one of the most interesting things about this sort of field of product management to me is that there isn't, you know, a well-worn path to this place and my career definitely is a reflection of that. I got my degree from university in political science and Russian studies. And as my mom likes to remind me, I was qualified to do nothing. You should have been a doctor. Why didn't you be a doctor? Anyway, here we are. So I fell into an interesting corner of software product development localization because I had a sort of language affinity. What it gave me the opportunity to do was really get this fascinating view into how software was developed. It never occurred to me and getting in the guts and running builds and understanding UI. And I was like, oh, this is cool and got really lucky because it was the first dot com boom and I lived in the Bay Area and I started helping marketing departments build the first sort of rudimentary websites. And one of those websites sort of morphed itself into a product and they suggested that I might want to be the product manager. And I was like, sure, I was in a place where I was like, sure, yes, sounds great. And as soon as I started doing that job, it was like, oh, this, this is amazing. I really, really like started to super thrive in that job. And then, you know, almost immediately the dot com bust happened. And there were a whole bunch of people who had actually been product managers longer than 18 months who were out on the job market. But I got lucky. And one of the guys who worked on my engineering team when I was a product manager was at Salesforce and called me and asked if I wanted to do localization again, which I definitely did not want to do. But it got me in the door and from there, interestingly, there was a glitch in the case management system. And I used to get product bugs routed to me and I was so terrified that I was going to screw up and do the wrong thing that I just started reproducing them and figuring out how to fix them. And then I would go to developers and ask them to check it in for me. And, and finally, they make sure to please stop harassing our engineers will give you a team. So when you when you got those first jobs, who did product managers report to? I reported to the CMO in my first job. And then as soon as I and then once I got into Salesforce and, you know, the sort of chaos of that early product development explosion that was happening everywhere and into more of a sort of professionalism, there was a head of product and engineering. Interesting. Another thing that I think it's, it's cute for me to kind of question, like you don't come from an engineering background, a traditional computer science. How many non-engineers were there in the product team, you know, back in the day? Yeah, not a lot. But I think, you know, we talked about this before, but I think it's one of the biggest misconceptions about what it takes to be a great product manager is that you have some kind of deep, deep technical expertise. And what I hooked into very early was about wanting to make customers happy. And like, that's the fire in my gut is like, I want to delight customers. I want to give them a thing that they love using. And, you know, with curiosity and relationship building, you know, it was, it was never, ever an issue for me, even in my multiple years of working, you know, on technical platform things that, you know, I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag. And I think that's a good inspiration for the next generation of product leaders to know that you don't have to be this standard, you know, whatever someone, your parents call you, you have to study. And then the more people get to leadership positions that don't come from traditional backgrounds, the more they can encourage others to make it happen. So what is it that, you know, how do you supplement that would say the lack of technical skills in order to prove and continue proving that, you know, you can lead products from end to end? Yeah, I mean, I think so much of it is about how you build relationships with the people on your team and then across an organization. I think fundamentally this job for as much as we often, because the output is software, we think of it as a technical job, but it's actually, it's just such a relentless people job. And you don't, you don't get to tell it what to do. All you can do is sort of try to, you know, tell a really good story and try to get everyone to come with you. And, you know, that took me a while, I think, to realize that I was my early, I was like, in all the bugs and I was trying to understand what was happening. You know, I learned more and more over the years. I learned more and more about how to talk to developers when I knew they were like being straight with me and when, you know, maybe not so much and sort of how to have those conversations and talk about outcomes. And then, and then I think it's, it wins on the board, right? Say you're going to do a thing, do the thing, tell everyone you did the thing. And sooner rather than later, people start giving you more things to do. Definitely. And now we see that product is not part of marketing or part of technology. It's, it's on function and you as an entity of product, you lead that agenda. So can you give us an idea of like, you know, how does product work at Zendesk? Well, it's a really interesting set up at Zendesk through acquisition and sort of some organic growth. We have product development teams in 11 countries, 12. There we are in Canada. So from Krakow to Singapore, we are doing product development almost 24 hours a day. And, you know, trying to figure out how we coordinate across all of the time zones, how we collaborate across all of the time zones has been one of the most interesting parts of my now two year journey so far at Zendesk. And what's interesting is that it sort of necessitates a balance between some strong top down directives and then a lot of trust in the bottoms up that's happening in the regions, right? I'm not sitting next to the product team in Singapore and sort of understanding their day to day. And I have to give them a strong sense of where we're going from a North Star point of view from a big picture high level. These are the most important things for the next half for the next year for the next 18 months and then trust that that when they have to make decisions day to day without me or even one of my directs in their time zone that they're they had the information they need to do it. That's so fascinating to me because when I we still use Zendesk but when I first used the product so many years ago, it was pretty much a head that head desk now it's scaled to an entire platform to cover so many different use cases and then you mentioned that you part of that was through acquisitions. So when you when you acquire as mother organization that brings their own culture and ways of working together now you have this huge org that has to play the same the same music. How did you go about building a culture that stays? Yeah, it's it's hard work. It takes a lot of intention, right? I think I arrived and all of these different people and all of these are in places were working on very specific things and there was very, very little thought to how they would all come together in a single experience. They were sold separately. They were used separately and it became clear. That for a really great agent experience when you want to be helping your customers going to four or five different products and trying to figure out yourself how to string them together was inefficient. So we had to get the whole organization thinking about how what they're doing contributes to a whole and I kind of thought if I just started saying it over and over again that was sufficient and it turns out it takes a lot a lot more effort and it took you know a lot of setting some centralized big vision big bet stuff. It took some really strong program management staff to help us sort of connect dots and then it took me sort of every time I saw it making sure you know I was celebrating those kinds of wins and really getting you know showing everyone sort of how that can work. We've had this year has been terrible. Let's make no mistake for everyone but it's been an interesting leveling of the playing fields and the amount of cross team collaboration that has happened has has really pleasantly surprised me. I'm incredibly proud of my team. How does your day today look like? I'm very curious because you know in startup worlds everyone is a VP of product but when you are that size of a company being an EVP it's a whole different game especially with the complexity that you just mentioned with different time sounds different products. So let's say you wake up in the morning or like you know what is your plan for the week? How do you make sure that you know nothing fall or the most important things don't fall through the crack? Well, I have a fantastic staff of people who help. Shawna remember, hey Shawna remember this thing but in all see my days is almost 100% meetings and it's about 50% meetings kind of inside of my product organization and then the rest is sort of taking product out into the world making sure we're aligned with the leadership and product marketing making sure we're aligned with our go-to-market partners in sales with success having you know deep conversations with with customers I'm involved in quite a few executive sponsored relationships and then also I'm often called in if there's some kind of escalation. We have you know sort of the regular cadence of the executive staff meetings then there's some you know meetings to get worked on sometimes but it's a lot a lot of meetings. I have a really strongly that time spent with people on my team is is great. So I have one-on-ones with my team. I have one-on-ones with their directs on a regular basis and I have quite a few sort of double down kind of two layers three layers down one-on-ones on a regular basis especially when you know we're not seeing each other in the hallway. I want to make sure everyone on my team feels like they have what they need to get their job done and and are having a good time. I'm very curious because we get a lot of people that are either fighting to break into product or they're already working on product and they start asking about the career path. We talk a lot about how to break into product but then what like nobody told us what the options really are and and I can totally see a people manager path as you describe which is literally spending a lot of time with others in meetings but what about people who just love building getting their hands dirty and being kind of in the front line with engineers and designers. How can they grow? Yeah, I mean I think the the first thing is to join a company that has a culture of strong individual contributor pms and and understand you know is there a parallel career ladder that they've written down. This is really important to me. I was an accidental manager. I was you know I was in charge of three scrum teams. I was having a great time and I had a boss who pulled me into a conference room and said okay these two guys they report to you now go and that was my management training and I luckily found out that I loved it. I absolutely got such a thrill out of the success of those two guys that it was I felt better about what they did than anything I had ever done. So I love management. I know that not everyone should be a management manager. I know that being a manager and a product leader is an entirely different job than being a product manager. So if you love product managing don't don't follow in my footsteps. I don't get to product management anymore. It's really sad. I miss it. I keep threatening to get a whiteboard behind me and I'll like a whiteboard and then I know it's okay. It's funny because from the outside being a product manager that's a matter of title like we're getting close to sound so cool and everyone is like oh my god I want to do it because I think the misconception sometimes is that you are in this room calling the shows having these big ideas but it's so the opposite. You know and there are so many people cranking like oh my god we're going to get myself into. Yeah I like to say that this is ostensibly like if you did an objective inventory it's one of the worst jobs ever right. I mean I think if if everything goes perfectly and you have an amazing launch and customers love the thing you did you're up on stage thanking the multitudes your engineers and your program team and your marketing team and you're going to mark and the whole world gets thanked and if it absolutely flops you're up on that stage all alone and all you can do sits entirely my fault. I'm sorry I think I think I figured out what happened and I will make sure we don't have that happen again so it is I tell people like you have to find the fire in your gut about why you want to sort of walk through this particular fire you know the joke I have with a lot of my peers is that if there was something else we were good at we probably would have done it but like we can't imagine ourselves doing anything else. I completely agree with you I think there is something inside about just just learning and pushing and trying and you know the breaking things a little bit but not too much but at the same time I think recognizing that when things go well it's not about you and when things don't go so well you definitely have to take responsibility in a way it is very similar to what the CEO or other executives need to do. Yeah absolutely and I think you know in this role I when I'm being generous I like to say that I'm the product manager of the product management organization so sort of understanding what I want the outcomes to be and how do we get there from where we are what are the processes the org structure all of those kinds of things and I think as a CEO you're sort of that for the company. And how do you so I'm very also very curious about learning in general like you mentioned how you accidentally broke into product someone gave you the title then you accidentally became a manager and but you've been growing and leading large teams so how can someone like really learn on the go or not on the go but make sure that you can acquire the necessary skills to continue being at that level and not become a bottleneck for everybody. Yeah I mean I'm very much an experiential learner but the few places the places I really invested from an educational point of view were not so much in the mechanics because I think sort of the mechanics are vaguely the same but different enough everywhere that usually someone you get to a place and you learn their way of doing it and you go. I think one of the most important skills that so often overlooked for product managers is communication written communication the ability to build a great presentation and tell your story and to do that in a way where you have confidence and you can absolutely be ready for whatever sort of comes at you. I think you know what I've seen over and over again in organizations is that pms. Maybe who don't even deliver as like there might be some there's two pms one is heads down delivering great features over and over and over again and one is like fine you know they're sort of they'll be in delivery but they are amazing at telling their story in front of an audience and this person wins so I think it's important to I love the when they're both best but I think you know the business sort of will always reward and gravitate the people who can talk about the work that they're doing and frame it in terms of how it impacts the business. I agree with you I we have two types of students for the most part one are engineers who don't want to code anymore and they're one of the business folks who want to be closer to the action. Yeah, I don't know how to code they don't have zero intention in learning so but I've seen so many amazing engineers who are much better than what they can imagine and they just need to kind of treat themselves as a product and put themselves out there and just need to push them like come on you know what you're talking about like you are amazing that it's just hard for someone to to find out unless you tell them and I've seen the opposite as well. Yeah, and it's a muscle right. I mean I remember like it was yesterday my first sprint review and the executive staff were sitting in the audience and I knew that if I misspoke or said something that was disagreeable I was it was going to hurt and and you know I was nauseous my mouth got dry and you know it was just with repetition and then you know every time there was an opportunity to get up and talk for as terrified as I was or as uncertain as I was about my ability to do that just saying yes and doing it over and over and over. I did my first year when I started doing executive briefings I did 53 of them in a year and by the like the first one I was sitting at my desk sweating trying to put slides together like I was just going to go and by the last one I think I was like two seconds before the EBC I was in the lobby like oh yeah you're walking in like we got this let's go so it really is just doing it. Definitely like I agree more I know that traditionally obviously in product is a lot of times we have to say no just to prioritize and and I totally get and respect that part but I think it's another part of just putting yourself in an uncomfortable position. There's no replacement for that no and and there's a tremendous amount I mean I think we were all it's drilled into us to say no and to to to we have to say no if everything's important nothing's important but there's a tremendous power in saying yes and being able I mean we know so much and we are connected so well in organizations and I think there's a tremendous amount of benefit to us and to our companies when we take the time to you know give other people access to that network that we've created sort of just in the course of doing our jobs. Right so let's talk about diversity and in general how you go about building teams we know that it's not just about it you need us anymore we know that the diverse teams that built for everyone usually win but you specifically you have any any playbook or way of building your own team. Yeah I mean I think you know it's it's really important to have an alignment with your recruiting organization and to be really clear with your recruiting organization about you know the kinds of slates that you want in your candidates. I think one of my favorite things to do is to take people who have not been pms before and bring them into junior roles. I think there is a tremendous amount of talent out there that maybe doesn't even know that they would be great at this and I always have my eye out engineering managers have become very suspect of me when I ask about their engineers like how's that how are they doing and you think they might be getting bored of doing that coding thing over there because I think you know when you've been doing this as long as I have you sort of get a sense so I think it's about intention. I think it's about it's a virtuous circle right when you have women who are in your leadership of the company in leadership in product and engineering you just it's like a magnet more women show up to apply more women stick around more women grow and then I think you know we have to start thinking beyond right if there is tremendous talent in across race and culture and you know again working with your recruiting teams building up partnerships we have a fantastic partnership. I just did speed mentoring with a whole core from black girls code. There is so much young talent out there and you just we just have to expose ourselves to it. There is no pipeline problem. There's just a hiring problem. I agree. I always tell you a lot of our students do to ask internally first of all because there are a lot of companies that really want to give the opportunity to someone even if they don't have the official title. Yep. And also I think in terms of diversity it's such a for me I think it starts from the roots. I just don't believe in a situation of like oh my god we have too many whatever we just need to suddenly start hiding a different type of profile. I think it starts from like really building that culture and showing that this is not just for show this is because it's better for the company. This is better for your clients and ultimately better for the world. Yeah. And I think if you make your organization a great place to work for everyone you are going to get a whole bunch of different people that might not have come to be in with right. I mean I think cultures that are relentless and like crazy mean or yelling right. If you're a mom with a new kid like you don't want to deal with that and you're going to go somewhere else right inflexibility. Like I can't take time off in the afternoon. I've got a culture where everyone has to be online all the time. You know you've got a whole bunch of people who maybe are taking care of parents or and so I think there's a like a rising the tide for all of the boats that comes when you really think about the people who work for you as people and instead of his resources and and create that kind of culture in your organization. It's like I said it's in it attracts all kinds of great people. So you are leading a portfolio of products. How do you go about really building what's next because it's not just one single roadmap. I can imagine you have like so many different things going on at the same time. So getting content is not the same as we used to be five people in the same room like hey what do you think cool. Let's do it. Yeah. We recently created a new process and it kicks off actually this afternoon. It's my one of my meetings this afternoon. We do a sort of high level team by team roadmap refresh where we look out three quarters and you know next quarter we got a pretty good idea that these are definitely the things we're going to deliver the second one. You're like yeah pretty much that third one's like who knows what will happen by then and we every quarter do an update. So rather than sort of starting the year and saying this is what we're going to do for the year and then despite whatever happens we just keep marching really trying to get more agile and then I do that review with everyone all around the world will be done with those by the end of next week and then every month and I don't know how like it's not particularly scalable but I love it too much to stop. We do a scrum team by scrum team sprint review where not it's not really a sprint but it's the spirit of it like this is what we were going to do on that big plan for this month. Here's what we thought we were going to do. Here's what we got done and here's a demo and it keeps me connected to all the teams. It allows a whole bunch of you know me and my staff to understand what's happening. Not just you know in their own orgs but across and and spot stuff that might be getting weird and it really helps us sort of keep a pulse check on all the stuff that's going on. And I'm glad you brought this up because I know that according to agile principles there are certain things that you know you shouldn't do but the reality is things happen and and sometimes you just need to be extra involved in something and that doesn't mean being a macro manager is just that you want to make sure that you know people get it and especially in such a large team. Yeah I mean like I think I talked about earlier right I mean as especially as you come up and and overseeing more and more you have all of this great sort of you know fiber that you've laid all over the organization and and when you're constantly sort of going in and looking at all of these things like the connections it's hard for someone down in the bottom of the organization to understand especially you know they're in Singapore someone's in Krakow but when you see both of those things and go oh my gosh you guys are building something really similar maybe you should talk and you could build a service and and we could have one of these instead of two it's it's one of the fun parts of my role and like I said you know when we're twice this high as it's hard to imagine I'll still be doing monthly subscription reviews but I hope I can manage yes my last question for you is how are you thinking about the future what do you think are the biggest opportunities for for people who are involved in building digital products. I mean there's we're in an amazing time of you know growth and there are so many companies growing so fast who need product people to come and help them you know CEO founders can only run product for so long before weird stuff starts happening and I think you know every everything from startups to megacorps are looking for people who can come in and and sort of figure out how things work there and get to building so I'm super excited about the role and the future of who's becoming product managers. I think you know this idea really does seem to be taking root that that it's not a job that has you know entrance requirements or you know I think we're well past this. I have to be an MBA to be a product manager and and sort of opening of gates for all kinds of people to come into this role. I am very bullish on the future product management and product managers. Me too well thank you for your time it's been a pleasure of course likewise.