Product Management Webinar: Product Strategy

Janna Bastow: Hi folks. Welcome everybody. Before we kick off into the guts of the matter, a little bit about ProdPad before we get started, now, this was originally a tool built by myself and my co-founder, Simon. Simon and I were both product managers. We needed tools to do our own jobs. And you know what, nothing like this really existed. So we needed something to keep track of experiments.

We wanted to runways we were gonna hit our business objectives how we were gonna solve our customers’ problems and basically keep tabs in all the ideas and feedback and stuff that made up our backlog. So building ProdPad gave us control and organization and transparency, and it wasn’t long before we started sharing it with other product people around us.

And so today it’s used by thousands of teams around the. Now, as you might imagine for a product like this, it’s free to try. You can jump in and start using it. And we even have a sandbox mode where it has example product management data. So you can see how things like lean roadmaps and OKRs and experiment and ideas and feedback all fits together in a product management space.

And our team is made up of product people. So, start a trial would love to have you jump in, try it out, let us know. We’re constantly posting new updates to it. And this is based on the feedback from everyone who who uses it. So yeah, absolutely. I can say Jason. I suppose this to host some panelists.

He says he loves sandbox mode. People just use it to get a sense of what a good now, next, later roadmap looks like, or to try to make sense of different artifacts so it’s completely free to use, Jump in and start using it. So with that, I want to introduce our guest, our very special guest.

This is Lucy Spence. And Lucy is a dear friend of mine. I’ve known her from the very early days of mind, the product when it was a little product tank and little product camp. And Lucy came along and has done some blindingly good talks over the years on a number of different stages that we’ve been proud to host her on.

Lucy started her career and in UX at Love Film. Does anybody remember Love Film before entering the world of product management? And she’s currently product director at avia, but is previously held senior product manager positions at both Amazon and compared to the market she’s really passionate about products and she has a great track record of success.

So everyone say hello to Lucy. Thank you so much for joining. It’s great to have you here and great to have this conversation. Now, this actually came out of a conversation that we were having some time ago when we’re talking about, what kind of things we could talk about.

If you and I jumped on this fireside and you’d mentioned an article that you’d written not too long before, which was called Dragon Thinking. Is your Product Strategy really up to scratch? So it’s a, it’s an article filled with metaphors and joy. Absolute delight to read with some illustrations as well.

So, love that about Lucy. She’s always adding a little bit extra zing to her presentations. But Lucy, do you wanna tell us a little bit about the dragon thinking and how came across applying it to product strategy. 

Lucy Spence: Let me give you a bit of a con bit of context around what prompted the article.

Yeah. And I think at the time I was working somewhere that was really battling with prioritization, trying to figure out what to do. I think we had some strategic planning events and we probably had, oh, something like 300 engineers and 180-odd strategic priorities. And you can just do the sums on that and figure out that’s not. 

Janna Bastow: That’s not priorities, is it

Lucy Spence: They’d actually told quite a lot to get to that, to get parent down to that list. And I was trying to think about that and also going through that process of we’d had a changeover of a few people in leadership and I guess something that I’d heard on and off throughout my.

Career was this idea of, Oh, that’s not strategic enough for you. I need to see the strategy. I need to see the strategy. And it’s and you put something together and they’d be like, That’s not strategy. And it’s, it looks like this. And you’d be like, Oh, I don’t really recognize that as strategy either.

And it’s like this looming sort of strategy. And we end up as an organization, paying consultants, quite a bit to come and talk to us and capture everything we said and play it back to us. Which, the cynic in me says, Wow, great. They told us what we already knew, but actually they did the work to pull all of that together.

But again, they came back with a list of things. It’s This is like 10 years worth of work , right? How do we work? How do we work through this? And I was kinda like, and I was probably a little bit burned out and a little bit cynical at the time and I was just like, it feels like I’m just dealing with dragons that just go, Ooh, there’s a pot of gold, let’s go after that.

And they can’t decide between the pots of gold because all of these things have some level of value. None of them were bad things to do. There were probably a few that were bad things to do. You’re not gonna get 180 initiatives and not have a few things in there that you should probably think about.

But, there was someone in the company that could defend each of those things pretty well. And some of it was regulation and some of it was all sorts of things. And it’s how, this is actually really hard because this sort of wasn’t really that overarching product strategy that would help people filter.

And so you’ve got a lot of these things that are a lot of them are already in flight and so there’s a cost to stopping them . There’s a huge overhead in trying to manage it and having the kind of, the arm wrestles between peers about which is the most important, how the hell you’d actually deliver any of this stuff.

And so huge amount of, wastage in terms of, discussion on this stuff. Cuz there probably weren’t the overriding principles to guide. And so that was the context for it. And I was like how can we make, and people were asking me as senior person, it was like what does strategy look like in this context?

And so I was wrestling with it a little bit myself of what would be useful here? And so I was just thinking about in that, in those terms, and I guess there, there are there are a couple of. Where it’s ended up was like there’s a little bit of a framework at the end and I don’t usually do frameworks cuz I’ve tried so many different frameworks.

 I love them. They’re really good for enriching your thinking. Never actually managed to implement one properly. It’s like they move you forward and you’re a bit scrapy and you go, okay, I got 30% of the way that’s useful. Like now we’ve got a different problem. Doing the rest of this probably isn’t gonna help thing.

Or maybe that’s just me. Yeah, a little bit sketchy and moving on to the next new shiny thing. 

Janna Bastow: But you know what, , you know what, actually, I’ve heard something similar around frameworks like product managers. The more senior you are, the more frameworks you’ve tried, the more frameworks you’ve been exposed to, and no one sticks to one particular framework.

It’s like having a pocket full of different ones that you can deploy at any one point in time. And so if it gets you, it moves you that much further. And a lot of these frameworks are just around facilitating the conversation to get the information outta people in a way that’s structured in a way that the team can understand what’s happening and why.

Yeah I agree. And it’s funny listening to I was at mind the product last week and listening to Martin Erickson talking, and he was saying, here is over a hun, there are over a hundred different documented strategic frameworks that you could apply. Yeah. And the one he likes to use is from 1969.

Now, it’s strategy isn’t a new thing, but it’s act. But it is something that’s difficult for people to grasp and wrestle with. I think. 

For people wondering that one from was it 69? It was the swat the humble little swot Analysis. Analysis. Your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Still holds, Yeah. But there was something like a couple hundreds since then that have been documented as strategic frameworks. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. And it’s this sort of idea of strategy with a big S, which, everyone wants to do because you think if you do strategy with a big S, you get paid lots of money.

And maybe you do and maybe you don’t. 

Janna Bastow: I think that’s what the people who were getting paid to come in and play back the stuff you were already telling them to them. That’s exactly what they do. Strategy with the Big s . 

Lucy Spence: But it’s also, it’s that sort of thing of okay, big strategy is great, but you only need one big strategy for the company. And if every individual product manager is getting told, be more strategic because it’s hang on with like, how many products have we actually got here? Aren’t we just and so you then get down into sort of the more detailed lowers strategy of what the hell are you actually doing?

Which is fun and games. And so, because there obviously aren’t enough frameworks, I decided to come up with my own . 

Janna Bastow: Thanks lucy. Throw that one on. 

Lucy Spence: If you need another thing to have a play with cuz you were a bit bored. Yeah. Feel free to crack this one out. No it was just, it was something I was thinking about at the time.

I think there’s very much a kind of. The grand strategy of the how do the point of, the principle of strategies. How do you create competitive advantage or lasting competitive advantage, and where do you get real leverage out of your business?

And there are books like the Seven Powers which kind of go into that in quite a bit of detail around bus, the things that kind of generate, huge leverage. Things like network effect or branding or things where you’ve got significant switching costs and things like that.

And that’s like they, they’re all really good things to think about. I think they’re quite, for me, they’re good frames of reference, but actually, There aren’t that many people. A lot of that is determined by the industry you’re in, what you’re doing. Guess what, If you’re a social network, it’s all about network effect.

There are sort of dimensions of other things. So, but a lot of that is actually, very much around, determined by the industry and the business model and what you’re doing. And unless you’re in quite a small company, 90 plus percent of PMs probably won’t get a huge level of influence over that sort of thing.

 There’s then another, there are various different ways of doing it, but I I like the defend, expand and innovate model. There are, there’s sometimes it’s called zones, sometimes it’s called other things. And, but it’s three, horizons of if you’re making money now, what do you need to do to keep making that money?

And if you’re growing now, what do you need to do to keep. Kind of maintaining the growth that you’ve got which is the sort of defend idea. And then there’s expand, like how do you reach new market segments? How do you expand your customer base? Is it international expansion? Is it a new segment, Is a new, what is it is a new channel that you’re exploring, all of that kind of stuff.

And then there’s innovate, which is like, how do you actually disrupt what you’re doing and change the offering of your product? And you don’t have to be playing in all of those three areas at any one time, but it’s not bad to think about. And so it was but the , but so, But you talk about that.

And whilst I can explain that now, it’s all pretty theoretical, isn’t it? And so I was okay, if we got these dragons, what’s the alternative to being a dragon? Cause if I’m a dragon, I’m just like smog and I’m building this hor, and then little bilbo comes along and he starts stealing my fucking gold and that.

And I’ve gotta now defend my gold and I can’t go out and find more gold because Bill will come in and nick it while I’m doing that. Yes, I have read far too many fancy books and various things like that. And it, the alternative was this idea of, actually strategy. It’s this is how civilizations got built.

Look at history. This is, Yeah. Why there are major cities developed where they’ve got, Yeah, good access to water or to transport. There’s usually some resource that they were originally able to capitalize on that they were able to, that they then became part of a trade route and that sort of thing.

And so it was building out that analogy as how you have to think about what your situation is and you can use this kind of model of dispen, defend, expand, and innovate across those different powers to just to bring a bit of almost as filters to your backlog to then go.

I often think like people go I don’t really know what my strategy is. Let’s look at what’s your, in your backlog and then try and bubble that up and summarize it. Cuz often you might not quite have the strategy in place, but the stuff that you are doing is leading someplace and you can reverse engineer out the place that you are going to from looking at what you are doing, and then you can work out whether that’s actually a useful thing to do or whether you need to shift it or not.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And this Defend, expand, innovate concept really jives with me in my thinking of what happens to large companies. I think they become dragons, as you say. So this idea that you’ve got these large companies and they’ve built up their market share, they’ve built up their their their, the revenues, and they’re complacent to actually doing much with it because as long as they’re growing just a little bit quarter on quarter, month on month, year on year oftentimes these are quite happy to just, continue holding onto their hoard.

But as you say, like there’s always gonna be startups nipping at their heels. There’s gonna be always gonna be like BBOs coming in and stealing away their gold and disrupting their big pile. And so these companies have to either think about how they’re gonna expand, And find new hordes or add to their horde or innovate, find new ways of maybe not collecting gold, but maybe collecting other commodities that might be useful, for example.

Whatever it is, but to keep ahead of the market. 

Lucy Spence: I think it particularly as a lot of us are digital product managers, we’re working with technology and a lot of the bene, the value of our product is based on technology. And unless you manage that correctly, technology gets old and experiences get old and there will, someone coming in, you has newer, cleaner technology, they can move faster and they, figured out, they’ve learnt what didn’t work in your original kind of architecture or your original experience and they’ve moved forward from that.

And so, continually staying on top of that is really tough. 

Janna Bastow: Not many places do it. And technology is getting easier and easier to replicate. You still need humans involved right now. But they’ve got the tools to basically take most technologies and replicate them because what are we actually doing besides a whole bunch of, pretty complex CRUD apps, they’re all the same sort of bones and there’s nothing to say that these things couldn’t be recreated faster and faster going forward.

So if technology is your moat, it’s not much of one. 

Lucy Spence: No it’s a really tough moat, to maintain. If you want to be maintaining a moat in technology, you need to be at the very bleeding edge and you need to be paying the people who are, doing their PhDs and inventing the new technology.

Because if it’s just writing code, we’ve got, Yeah, you. GitHub co-pilot and things like that where people are saying I can write code six times faster than I used to be able to. It’s like humans can’t, we can’t scale and progress at that rate. Yeah. So yeah, it’s, it’s fascinating to see what will be lasting.

And you see it with companies now, think about like Facebook, one of the world’s biggest companies. But who here is confident that they’ll still be a player in 10 years time? 

Janna Bastow: I don’t use it anymore. I do use their peripheral products. They’ve bought up everything else. But yeah, I could see that definitely taking a dive in the next 10.

Lucy Spence: Because they’ve got network effect strategy. As soon as that tips and starts to decline, it becomes pretty difficult to reverse. And so you have those challenges. 

Janna Bastow: This is arguably what they did and why they bought, they paid so much for Instagram. Like at the time the acquisition was massive. It’s in hindsight it now looks completely obvious.

But yeah, it was building out a a different moat. Cuz it’s not on technology, it’s on the people that you’re able to connect with. They bought WhatsApp. Yeah, that’s, another just, they’ve got. Fingers in every pie now. 

Lucy Spence: And it’s not, sometimes it’s for the people, but people don’t hang around that long.

Yeah. Particularly if they’re a startup going into Facebook, I would imagine. Yeah. I dunno, I’m just having a sort of approximate guess there. But what it does help Facebook do is it means they don’t have to spend time defending against those things. Yeah. And they could invest in things like the Metaverse.

And the reason why they’re investing so heavily in the Metaverse is because they know that Facebook itself as a product isn’t going to last Wow. For that long. It’s that’s fair. Cause what happens when the advertising, when people start to disappear and the a ad revenue goes suddenly, the stock drops.

You can’t employ as good of people because you can’t attract them with big stock options. And suddenly, Aside from turn. Yeah. Completely balking the world’s democracies and probably, and doing incredible societal damage in many ways. You’ve also then got a business that’s not really functional as well.

And so, like pretty big price to pay to blow up democracy to then have a company that only lasts for 15, 20 years. Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: Absolutely. And you know which company I would, 

Lucy Spence: I’m not suggesting that it was ever Okay. A price to pay to have a successful company at the cost of what they’ve done. Just, so if anyone’s unclear about what my opinions are on that. 

Janna Bastow: One of the companies that I would absolutely bet on is Microsoft.

People give Microsoft crap all the time, but honestly I think it’s got it’s head screwed on. If you look at what they’ve acquired, they acquired Skype, which at the time was actually the world’s largest. Social network. They’ve acquired LinkedIn, they’ve acquired GitHub, like who’s there that they can’t reach.

Oh, in Xbox as well. If you consider all of those users, if you consider all of that, like their expand strategy, strategic steps have been massive and I think going to be game changing for them in the next 20 years. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. They’ve definitely, mi Microsoft are an interesting one because they’re, they do some consumer stuff, but they actually, they really like playing to corporates.

That is their bread and butter is, that’s who has the money. 

But it’s also If you work, if you’ve worked in an office environment for the last 20 years, you have probably used Microsoft Office for, a majority of that time. It’s actually really difficult after a while to switch away from that.

Yeah. How many big corporates actually switch to G Suite? Not many startups. Yeah, sure. We’re all using G Suite, but actually, the big players, like you’ve got the IT support there and there are so many things that you can build off that. And then and no one else has really got the same foot that they’ve got there.

Amazon, on the other hand, they’ve got retail. 

Janna Bastow: Right? And they’ve got retail for everyone. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. Playing to the corporate market versus, Amazon of got retail and used that as their way to leverage things. I remember, one of the things that, I worked for Amazon video or Prime Video at the time, or Amazon Instant video at the time.

And one of the things we talking about strategy, one of the things that like, I’d like for them for a couple of years, and I was like and there was always this thing about is video. We were behind Netflix. Our offering sucked a bit relative to Netflix. And it was, and we were bundling it in with the Prime subscription.

It was like, is this really gonna fly? What’s the point of this? And one of the VPs just went, Everyone in the world who already reads a book probably has an Amazon account. Who are the people who don’t read? What do they do? They watch tv. So we’re doing video. And I was like, Wow. Oh, okay.

Right now I’m on the same page. Cause we were just thinking is this gonna cover its costs? Cause we are spending like serious cash on content. Knowing and knowing I, I think there was, like, there was the fir I was there the first year when they spent a billion on content for the year, and it’s and we weren’t making anything like that.

It’s like, how is this? And there were some financial models that were saying no, we have increased engagement with prime and Prime video users buy more through retail. So it’s not quite as bad as it is, but it’s just like you’re spending huge amounts. But actually as soon as someone said that, I was like, Yeah, okay, I get it now. 

Janna Bastow: and it’s actually fascinating that you were there at that time because it’s when companies take risks like that, this is a company who’s willing to invest and basically have their results dipped down and look bad for a while in order so that they could take advantage of the steeper slope that’s, across the valley.

So many companies get stuck in this local maxima where it’s yeah they’re, they’ve been climbing up and they’re at the top here, and either it declines or they get marginal gains, right? They just, sit a top this little. Gold pile that they’ve made, and they’re not willing to take that dip down.

Yeah. And say, actually there’s a bigger hill here. In some companies, the culture there, it would mean that the CEO would get fired for, their bet not turning out in the next but the next, some of the quarterly results come out. Whereas, a company like Amazon was forward thinking enough to say, actually, you know what, This is a risk worth taking.

It was really great that they were able to explain to you what it was they were thinking behind that as well. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah, it, it’s funny, we talk about, big bets and little bits and things like that and people go, everyone’s thinking about experimentation. The kind of, one of the things that stood out to me while I was there, I was, fire phone came out and, spent 250 million on developing the fire phone, maybe sold like less than a thousand handsets or something like that.

I think it was in that realm, probably one of the more spectacular product fails ever. Yet when someone pointed out and went Fire phone only costs the same amount as three series of Top Gears, Top Gear or the Top Gear presented. Sorry, the Grand Tour. It’s so they paid as much for Jeremy Clarkson as they paid for the fire phone.

It’s that’s actually just small bets for Amazon. That’s worth the punt then, wasn’t it? Yeah it’s like they’re making, it could have worked. , they’re making bets like that all the time and they’re not just, they’ll have.

Probably 20 or 30, seven figure bets. I don’t know. I have actually, I have no idea. Across the business, they’re probably far more than that, but every, at any point in time. Yeah. Then you get the really big bets, which are like prime video, where it’s we are going to invest billions in this and we’re not going to know whether it’s the right thing to do.

Really, until, we’ve modeled out what spending a billion on a single TV series looks like, which is, where they’re now with all the rings or no rings of power rings. Power. Yep. Yep. rings get remarkably little. Attention 

Janna Bastow: Spoilers was, I was mentioned, 

Lucy Spence: Someone’s mentioned Google Stadia. 

Janna Bastow: Oh, it’s Google Stadia.

Lucy Spence: Google Sometimes just so spectacularly terrible at product management. . Sorry. They’re like, obviously they’re very successful as a company that they’ve done some very good things.

Janna Bastow: This because we’re seeing their failures and it’s fun to pick on them going, Yeah, this totally blew up. But actually, if you think about the bets that Google has made, it made bets on things like maps and mail and, other things. They were originally just a search product, and those ones, absolutely sailed.

Lucy Spence: They’re doing a great job with that. Yeah. And then otherwise spectacular with maps But yeah, think about like Google Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Duo. Google yeah. How did Zoom ever get successful? Zoom got successful because Google. Missed the boat. They had three products trying to do exactly the same thing, and everyone just got really confused by them. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Somebody’s actually pointed out, the hard decision between choosing Fire phone as an initiative Yeah. Or Jeremy Clarkson, like top gear as a product decision, and how do big companies deal when they’ve got so many big chunky potentially impactful initiatives and make decisions between which ones go and which ones don’t.

Lucy Spence: I think, with that, if you followed that one through fire phone would’ve been in the Kindle, the hardware division, and Jeremy Clarkson would’ve been in their video space. So they would’ve had different VPs. Yeah. Probably reporting up to the same vp. And so there’s one person sitting there and looking at the annual plans Bezos would ba it would go right.

Those decisions would go right the way up to Bezos to get to be involved in them. And they just, they use the same process. It, the, there would’ve been a PR, FFA Q written about those. Bezos would’ve reviewed them and scrutinize them. It’s up to those leaders within the business to go.

These are the strategic initiatives we’re doing and they’re judged on their merits. There’s no real point in comparing them because if they can fund them in their different areas, you don’t have to choose between them. And you want to, it’s probably looking and going at something more kind of akin to that, to, to a strategy framework of going, Have we got enough in the boxes of innovate, Defend?

What are we doing? Fire phone was a defense mechanism against smartphones. Where you have Google and Apple with considerable control over that market, and Microsoft I think at the stage was dancing around the edges. Yeah, no, that’s it. They wanted to play in there.

Did they pick the right strategy for how to enter that market? I think the results speak for themselves , but they done something similar with the Kindle fire, and it had actually were and it actually worked because they came in with something and it was targeted very much to people who couldn’t afford an iPad and had probably 80% of the functionality wasn’t as pretty, but yeah yeah, it had worked for them.

So they were trying to repeat that, and, that’s a reasonable bit. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah.

Sorry. I guess one of the key things to remember here is that, they didn’t have to make the decision. They had such a big pot of gold that they could do both. Yeah. Ah, did I break up? 

Lucy Spence: Yeah, you did. Yeah, but I caught that last bit. I’ve just seen one of the comments come up and I think I know that the background to this, there’s a, there, there was, someone was saying one of the reasons that Google PMs or Google is so interested in or at least why their PM function might not be working as well as it could is because people are promoted when they launch things, but there’s not actually a lot of benefit in maintaining and developing products.

And there’s a, there’s, there’s a lot of, incentives can always skew behavior and there’s usually some fairly skewed behavior in places. When we’re talking about things like Stadia though. Good point. The other thing is that, yeah, people do get real rewarded for putting out fires once they’ve become fires generally, rather than preventing fires because if there are never any fires in your area, it just looks like people are like, what are they doing?

They prevented the fires before the fires, they made sure there were no fires that actually appeared. That, that’s not as visible. And to get that, to get recognized for doing that is a lot harder. And unless you have people looking for it and know what’s going on, you have to have really smart leaders who can identify people who are doing that and make sure they’re getting.

Janna Bastow: Good point. Incentives play such a role in what a company actually does with their time and with their people. If people are incentivized to launch new products or in small companies ship new features, the incentives are all about that burndown and velocity and, getting tickets out on time, getting stories built, then you’re gonna end up with a whole bunch of stories built, a whole bunch of launches, a whole bunch of stuff being made, but doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody’s incentivized to make sure it’s the right stuff or, track through the stuff that was actually finished and see that it actually worked.

That’s the glorious work that product managers should be doing. We should be carving out time to do, which is the, not just building stuff, but like taking stuff away. We’re, not just builders, we’re curators. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. It’s really hard to take stuff away. It’s really hard to justify the effort.

It’s almost. 

Janna Bastow: Have you ever killed a product? 

Lucy Spence: I’ve killed features. Yeah. Often more through mismanagement than being entirely intentional about it. I was reflecting on this the other day. There was something that we. We had a migration that we needed to do from one platform to another.

The technology was out of date. This was on living room devices and so had to have the right sort of technology underpinning it. And so we were rebuilding our entire app. And obviously, doing that, you get to a point where you’re getting to diminishing returns. You start with the big features and you’re almost going back to your MVP of what is it?

How do I compare an upload time of 60 seconds reduced to 15 seconds, but we’re gonna cut away these features? It’s and this was in the video, so it’s if they can watch a video after 15 seconds as opposed to waiting 60 seconds, which most people will not hang around for cuz they’ll think something’s broken.

That makes a difference. And so we cut out a significant section of the product. 

Janna Bastow: This actually reflects back to Martin Erickson’s talk Mine, the product the other day when he was talking about the decision stack and the principles that underpin and why it’s important to have really good principles.

I reflect back on the one that he highlighted, which was Google’s principle if Fast is better than Slow, or there’s another one which was like the user breaks the tie, or we, we focus on the user. Yeah. And it’s, it was things like this where it’s actually, you know what it, when you are stuck between two product decisions, these underlying principles are often the things that do break that tie.

Yeah. 

Lucy Spence: It’s an interesting one. I always find I’ve tried to sit down and think principles first. My experience is that that’s a very good way to intellectually exercise yourself and not achieve very much because you tend to create artificial scenarios in your head to test these things against and get into all sorts of hypothetical debates.

And actually, when you come to it, when you’re in that spot, was all of that thinking super helpful? Sometimes, you need to actually be in the hard place for it to crystallize and go, We now have a choice between these two things. Yeah. What are we going to do and what is the cost of doing that?

Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: There’s always this extra context that is possible to consider in any sort of framework. Yeah. Which is I think why frameworks end up falling over. 

Lucy Spence: Yes. Frameworks are great, but like when you have to learn, when they take more than. Like you have to learn how to apply them.

It’s jobs to be done. It’s that wonderful thing where people explain ah, you don’t, no, no one’s, no one wants a hammer. They just want a hole in the wall. And then someone else they don’t actually want a hole in the wall. They want, they wanna hang their picture or they want their place to look like, and like, all of this makes like huge amounts of sense.

And then you go and look at the framework, it’s but there, there’s quite a lot here. And I’m not sure I really understand how to apply all of this. And now I’ve gotta teach everyone else how to do this and I might be doing it for the first time. And now we’ve gotta trot off to a training course.

Now we come back and we’ve got different interpretations and all the while we’re focusing on the process. Yeah. And if it’s prompting good conversations about what you are doing, that’s absolutely fine. But when you start to spend more time talking about the process and the reason that I’m a bit critical about this, because I’m one of those people that will fall into talking about process, and it’s but this isn’t actually moving us forward necessarily.

Sometimes there are just, it’s what are the contextual problems we have here and what is the next step that we need to take forward? And, who is it that we need to engage in this? Yeah. Do we know? 

Janna Bastow: And also what is right? Yeah. And also accepting that done is better than perfect.

In so many contexts. You can’t get away with it in every industry, in every space. But done is better than perfect, works beautifully for the software space because you know what? You can get something out and if it’s not perfect, then you’ll learn what’s not perfect about it, and you can it on that.

But so many teams get. Hung up on trying to find the perfect decisions or the perfect strategy and it holds ’em back. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. It’s very much that sort of thing of you or actually wouldn’t know what I was gonna say. So I really like it when people like, do you know what the research to find out the answer to this isn’t worth it. We could find out the answer to this, but it’s not good enough. We need to or it’s gonna take too much work and we could just build it and we’ll know the answer pretty quickly after that.

 Janna Bastow: I also wanted to ask you about operating in a domain that isn’t necessarily your core domain. You’ve had experience with this, You’ve moved into spaces that like you weren’t trained in, you don’t have domain knowledge in.

Tell us about that. Yeah, 

Lucy Spence: so this is my current, the current role that I’ve been, which has been a great learning experience cuz I’ve previously always been B tob, B to C, sorry. I decided to take my first B to C role. Sorry, I’ve said that the wrong way around. I decided to take my first B2B. And I went in as an individual contributor and not that long afterwards, got promoted through, not through my work, but through a vacancy to product director and it’s in cloud infrastructure primarily around Kubernetes management.

If anyone on the call knows anything about managing Kubernetes, what you’ll probably know is it’s really rather complicated. And if you are not from a technical background, it’s almost impossible to, I am never going to be the domain expert within the business on this stuff. I don’t, I’ve never been a DevOps before.

Not, Sorry. No, you don’t actually have DevOps. DevOps are not people really, it’s a process. People just call themselves that. Now I’m getting into quitting things. Controversial. 

Janna Bastow: I like it. Yeah.  

Lucy Spence: Going into that space and then going, How do I actually add value here? It’s been, it enormously.

I think beneficial for me. I’m a little bit of a know at all at times. Just a wee bit. I like, I think I usually pick up things quite quickly and actually what that, there are advantages to that, but there’s also a massive disadvantage, which is that you suddenly think you know more than you, you might think you know more than you do, and it.

Often inhibits curiosity, or it means you miss opportunities to be more curious about things. When you have no idea about anything, it’s very easy to be curious. You don’t need to go, Oh, let’s go and explore this. It’s I actually have no idea what we’re talking about here. We’re gonna have to go back to baby steps.

And everyone helped bring Lucy along for this. And, but then trying to figure out how do I actually add value in that and make sure that you are trying to understand how other people are thinking about problems, what perspectives they might be missing, and how you can bring people together to have the right kinds of conversations is a really interesting kind of exercise to go.

I’m not a domain expert. I can’t actually make any. Strong decisions on this. Occasionally. Now after 18 months, I’m getting a few opinions, yeah. I can bring in the user research, we’re doing all the kinds of key themes and shape those co-conversations to be the right sort of things. But when it gets down into the like, technical details of stuff, like no.

Oh, I’m never going to understand that. Yeah. Yeah. So and just yeah, go on. I was just gonna say, cause it, it’s just made me think a lot more about the way I think I think when I’ve previously thought I’ve been suitably curious, realizing how much I was underplaying that,

Yeah.

I’m just checking. Are we still Yeah, I’m still a little bit still. Ok. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Okay, cool. I was gonna ask you, what do you do when you have an opinionated founder who’s, perhaps domain expert or perhaps thinks they’re domain experts and they’ve got lots of ideas and you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta work with them as a product manager?

Lucy Spence: I tend to think it’s a really good thing if your founder is a domain expert. Cuz let’s face it, most people who are working at a startup, unless it’s super successful and are gonna hang around for a long time to go through an exit and all that stuff, we’ll be there for a couple of years or however long it is.

But founders, if you’re starting a company, you’re saying, I’m gonna be doing this for a, a long time. How long have you been a founder for? It’s usually a decade or more’s commitment that you’re making and going and do this. And mostly people do it in a domain they care about.

Look at you, you care about roadmaps and product managers. I often hear people, there’s this sort of little, or I get worried how often I hear people going. Oh, my founder wants to do this and you, but I don’t agree with it. And it’s there’s this combative relationship between PMs and founders and it’s hang on.

How credible is the founder in this space? They’ve chosen to work in it. They’re choosing, usually to put an awful large financial and life commitment into it. Are they actually credible in their knowledge? Now they might implement, they might come up with ideas that are maybe not quite right, but they’ve usually got some sort of vision or some sort of understanding.

If on the other hand, you have a founder who is not credible, is not knowledgeable about the domain. Then there better be some other reason why you are working for them. Because otherwise, I would probably go, maybe they’re a really good leader and they’re really good at bringing other people together, in that case you shouldn’t have too much of an issue working with them.

Yeah. Is, they’re neither of those things. Why are you putting your career in their hands? Yeah. But if they are that kind of credible, knowledgeable person about this sort of stuff, it’s a case of work. How do you make them better? How do you complement them?

They’ll have ideas. How do you take those ideas and move it through? And I think one of the, one of the things we’ve been doing is doing kind of continuous discovery type activities and being able to reflect that back and challenge the thinking and engage in that debate and go okay, how do you see this fitting?

And actually making sure, it’s also very easy for founders to get a little bit removed from the actual product and think it’s different from what it actually is. And so bringing them closer to it, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get quite big before you can justify an air gap between a founder and the kind of flagship product of their business.

Janna Bastow: As you said, even Bezos was involved in the big strategic steps. I don’t think founders ever get the ability to step away entirely, do they? 

Lucy Spence: No. There is a reason that Amazon is the way it is, and it is largely because. They have had the consistency of decision making because all big decisions and all of the culture are based off one person.

Yeah, that’s, And that has been cascaded through the organization. It’s changing a bit now. But that’s interesting. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah. But you’re right. It’s such a key facet of some of these big companies and also, it makes it their weakest point as well. If anything if management changes or if anything happens there you can see what happened with Apple after Steve Jobs died, unfortunately, it’s just, it hasn’t been the same company.

And I guess you’re not seeing that consistency of decision-making that consistency of standards across the board. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. I do wonder what he would’ve done. Yeah, I do wonder whether he, there’d be an apple metaverse. Oh, 

Janna Bastow: wow. I didn’t think of Apple metaverse. But yeah, 

Lucy Spence: If everyone was gonna do it well, they would do it well.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: That’s actually a good point. That could be a good one. They don’t have necessarily the whole user base, but certainly the experience, 

Lucy Spence: they’ve got the attention to detail on the quality that, Yeah. Yeah. 

Janna Bastow: And Sarah says apparently they’re working on it, so there’s that. Yeah. . 

Lucy Spence: I’ve got enough money to, haven’t they?

Janna Bastow: No. Another thing that I wanted to ask you about is, as a pm like you mentioned in a chat earlier that you’ve been covering a design role for a while. What’s this how’s this been? What’s this brought? So 

Lucy Spence: I, because I’m at a startup again a small team and needing to, having a bit of a gap on design, I’ve been getting back to my roots of, I left being a designer cause I was a bit, a UX person cuz basically I was a bit shit at it.

And isn’t that way, or, are people who aren’t great at UX and not paying product managers? Is that, I dunno. 

Janna Bastow: We all had our janky pass-through. Yeah. 

Lucy Spence: But it was quite interesting to, to go and get, get back into doing design and building things. And actually just the sheer joy of sorry that’s my adult barking in the background, and actually figuring stuff out at a building level.

I spend time. Lots of conversations, lots of writing, all of those sorts of things. I think there’s enormous value in actually figuring out how stuff works. Just, and, but maybe it’s a Figma prototype or something like that. It’s like quite low-level stuff, but the mechanics of building things, it’s really good to get, or certainly, I found it quite energizing and interesting to get get back into that and actually start to remember actually what is involved.

And the, just the toil and the labor and the design decisions when you make a decision about, doing something a particular way, suffering the consequences of that three days later when you go, Oh, I built this Excel spreadsheet and I thought having 32 sheets that all referenced each other was a great idea.

And now I’m trying to find out where this little damn circular reference is that’s going around and breaking everything and just, getting, building that kind of engineering and builder sympathy for me is something that I haven’t seen a lot of people talking about it lately. I think I, I wonder if there’s something that’s happening in that a lot of people have fallen into product management, I guess from a.

From a bit of a builder background, but now you’re getting people coming in from being product managers very early in their careers and not necessarily having that experience. And I wonder whether there’s just something missing there of spending time doing that, putting stuff together, actually working through features in terms of wireframes and whether we should be encouraging people to do that more just to, to round out more of their understanding of the process and build empathy for other roles.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, I totally agree with that. It gives you that tinkering and I think a lot of us product people are tinkerers at heart, right? Pulling apart our electronics at home when we were kids and getting in trouble for it. But getting into the stuff that we’re building, just learning how the flows work, Creating something and seeing it fail, seeing it works, seeing, what the different constraints are.

It builds your knowledge of how things work. Because I know it’s so easy to get to step away from that stuff and miss how that works, particularly as you move up the ladder as a product person, but also helps build empathy with the people who are building, having done the early days coding of ProdPad, I now understand, that there’s nothing quite as simple as I might have once thought.

Having dabbled in bits of whether it’s email flows or campaign type. Stuff I now understand. How, automating emails is so difficult, right? There are all these things that I’ve had my fingers in over the years that I now realize, Okay. Yeah. So this is why we hire professionals.

We trust them with their jobs. Yeah. With the jobs we give them. And that’s why it’s so important. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. And it’s why like when you go, ah, this should be really simple. It’s really easy to knock this together. I could do it. No. And then you start to get into it and you’re like, Oh yeah, okay.

This, there’s a little bit more depth here than I thought there was. 

Janna Bastow: This is something that our co-founder, Simon he suggested this to me really early on before we even had team members when he was guy giving me some advice on dealing with my team way back when. And he said, Never call something simple.

It can be straightforward. Or complex, straightforward, meaning it has a known answer and it’s just a task to be done. Whereas complex is, it needs to be broken down, but nothing’s ever simple. 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. I ended up, I remember working with an engineering team once that I was like, Okay, we need to, Yeah. And this is getting into like super detailed stuff of there’s some button, there’s some text on that button and it needs to wrap across two lines cuz the button’s too long.

Yeah. And they’re just like, That’s gonna take us two weeks. Do you really want it that much? That’s the reason we haven’t done it. It’s like, how can that take two? They did explain it to me. Yep. I was a little perplexed by that. But the tool, the application wasn’t designed to do that. It wasn’t just an HTML application, but, and so had some constraints and it was like, ah this is surprising, 

Janna Bastow: It’s amazing what you learn as you get under 

Lucy Spence: Yeah. There’s all the stuff that they could do like that and you’re like, Wow, that’s really cool. I thought that was gonna take weeks. And you did that in five minutes. Awesome. So I’m just gonna shut up on estimates and not talk about that anymore.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. This is probably a good time to wrap. 

Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining today for this conversation. I found it really enlightening and a lot of fun. 

So thank you all for joining. 

Lucy Spence: Thanks, everyone. Bye 

Janna Bastow: bye.