[00:00:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, if you've been following my work for some time, you will know that when I talk about experience, I'm specifically talking about four key elements of experience that you need to intentionally focus on: customer experience, employee experience, brand experience, and product experience.

[00:00:55] Diana Stepner: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here as well. And yeah, thank you for introducing me. It always scares me when I hear how long I've been in product management, but it's, yeah, it's been an exciting journey, especially being in a role that changes all the time.

[00:01:10] Diana Stepner: Exactly, as you said, we wrote a book about it, just helping people navigate the different ebbs and flows of product management, how to get into it, how to succeed at it and where we think it's going next. And it's called Next Gen Product Management, and you can find it in Amazon.

[00:01:35] Diana Stepner: Summarize that in a quick sentence. My background's in user experience research. That's how I started in product management. I, did the typical ebbs and flows, graduating from school, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I went to business school. I worked at a startup, which was amazing. Did, wonderful things. It was designed by engineers for marketers and the marketers really didn't understand the interface. They didn't get it. It didn't reflect their mental models. They loved what the product could supposedly do, they couldn't figure out how to get it to do that. And so that caused me to go to school again, to get a degree in user experience research, specifically human computer interaction. And so my first quote, real product job was user experience research. And I loved it. I love talking to people. I loved trying to figure out, what made them tick. I loved, diving into the nitty gritty of why was this easy or why was this hard or what were you expecting?

[00:05:49] Jason S. Bradshaw: So much that I want to touch on there. My mind is going at a hundred miles an hour. I want to go right back to the beginning, but before I do, launching people, I absolutely love that term, launching people, helping your team members grow and succeed in their career. What elegant and delightful way to put it. Absolutely love it.

[00:06:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Right at the beginning you said that you joined a team. They developed a product and the concept, shall we say, of the product or the promise of the product was amazing, and that's when people bought. But then they bought the product and they couldn't get it to do what they thought that it could.

[00:07:11] Diana Stepner: And I think that company was starting at things from an engineering mindset. The customers weren't engineers. And so I think it goes back to some of the pieces that you said right in the beginning. You need to bring together- the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand, all of those facets together. The company had positioned itself as being customer oriented. It was a customer relationship management company. Its brand was that it was going to bring things to the cloud, make it easier for people to do customer relationship management, and that all of the employees were focused on that opportunity; helping individuals do CRM in an easier way in the cloud. That's what the product should do. But because it was coming at it from an engineering lens, as opposed to a customer that created that disconnect. And I think that's something that now probably seems obvious to people but at the time when anything is new, you often don't know all the ins and outs, and so we were learning. We learned we could build something really quickly with engineering, but if it didn't have the right user experience, the right mental model that matched or was at least aligned to what the customers were seeking, getting over that initial hurdle was just too great. And I know there are probably people going Apple changed the way that we do things, or this company changed the way we do things. Yes, there are always exceptions in any type of situation. There are always exceptions. But you shouldn't plan or expect yourself to be an exception. I think a faster way to ramp up, to gain advocates and your customers, are to really understand them, and how they think and act and, live their day. So that you can fit into their environment without thinking or hoping or dreaming they're going to fit into yours.

[00:09:39] Jason S. Bradshaw: And then they went out and built some stuff that at the time seemed perhaps engineering led, but ultimately has proven to be exactly that- what customers were wanting. And I'm not saying that as an Apple fan boy, although I am. I'm saying that because if it wasn't the case, every other major tech company in the world wouldn't have copied their work or been inspired by their work. If we want to be politically correct.

[00:10:37] Diana Stepner: Yeah, I think you're bringing up really valuable points and the person who pops into my mind, whenever people talk about, customers discovery is Teresa Torres. From her perspective, the continuous discovery, I think is a practice that every product manager should follow. There should be consistent, continual customer touch points. Some organizations that may be harder than others, but they'll always be customer feedback coming in, whether it be through sales, whether it be from customer success, whether it be direct. There are always these methods to consume as much knowledge about how the customers interacting with the product. If you are early stage and you don't have sales or you don't have customer success yet, speak to the customers. Go out and talk to them. Even some of the earliest stage companies I worked at, just putting an icon on the screen saying Contact Us! People will, amazingly enough. you'll get insight, and then you follow up with people. So when people are passionate about something, or to be honest, when they're annoyed about something, they're going to reach out. And so you like to have those extremes because then you can identify more people like those that are passionate. You can also determine, do you want to service those people that are upset? And there are going to be some customers who, based on your insight through your customer discovery, that you'll determine that niche isn't for us. And so without having that insight into customers, you'll try to serve everyone, or you'll try to serve the wrong people. So you really need that customer knowledge through, internal, external touch points and the external being the customer to be able to identify where is your product sweet spot and then be able to dial that up.

[00:13:09] Jason S. Bradshaw: The other thing that I want to highlight to the audience to you listening today is did you hear how Diana said you might choose not to serve that customer ongoing? Because not every single person in the world is going to love your product. That's why we have Samsung phones, Google phones, Apple phones, and even Nokia phones still. It's because not everything is for everyone and that's okay. And you can have very profitable business as every brand I just mentioned has proven that by serving who you choose to serve because they will be loyal to you and, in some cases fiercely advocate for your brand, despite the realities of the product.

[00:14:27] Diana Stepner: Yeah so the thing that I realized and it's more reflection. So I think your question is perfectly timed because I can now look back on it. But what I was doing was preparing for the next wave. And so when you see the next wave happening, try to be able to either get ahead of it or surf it. I was seeing mobile and social and other types of digital appear. I love the company. I love Monster, but I knew it wasn't going to give me that in depth experience that I wanted. And so for me, in order to get that knowledge, I jumped. And I did that, other times as well, where I saw that, I had that foundation of emerging technology, which was brilliant. I could then, bring that to Pearson and be able to help others make that jump. So I try to balance, what's going to help me advance, but also ensure that I'm giving it back too. And so whenever I make a leap to, the next place or the next thing, I also want to ensure that I have, insights that I can share with people who are doing exactly as you said, trying to figure out, do I stay or I go? So my approach has always been look at what's happening next, try to get the experience in that and then help others get knowledge about how they navigate.

[00:16:13] Diana Stepner: Yeah. It's a really good question. I think it's one of those things. It's my first book and if I had written it in a different way the first time coming into it, with three people as my second might have been kind of weird. But given that it was my first book, it seemed perfectly normal. And a lot of advantages, I would say. Teresa Cain, who is one of the co-authors had written a book before. She wrote the Two Hour Design Sprint. And so she had put all the pieces together to essentially have a publishing house, which is what she has now. They're going with, someone else, O'Reilly or whoever it may be, she did it on her own. We were able to leverage her experience to be able to have the book come together. She had a lot of learnings about the structure- when are the milestones for the chapters, how do find and source and bring on an amazing editor, how do you work on covers- she had all of that lined up. And so essentially was able to give us a roadmap of the milestones that we need to hit to make the book a reality. It was up to the three of us then to meet those dates. I read a newsletter- Bart, who's also the other co-author writes a newsletter. So for us, it was expanding on what we do already. Teresa's got amazing insight from her years in product management as well. So it's blending together, our craft as well as, what we share with the community today. Making it all gel very nicely. Everybody wants to thank editors at some point in time. And yeah, being able to go through, edit it, find spelling errors, layout errors, then make it even better.

[00:18:12] Jason S. Bradshaw: I'm glad that you talk the energy and put in the effort to make the book possible because it absolutely is an important topic. And I don't think we talk about product management enough because what I always say to people is your product is the thing that the customer is most likely interacting with the most.

[00:19:06] Jason S. Bradshaw: Really appreciate that you've taken the time to put the book together. Now I'll say it again, Next Gen Product Management. You kick off book perhaps not in the gentlest way, shall we say because chapter one, or sorry, part one product management is changing better keep up.

[00:19:33] Diana Stepner: And I think it's a constant change. As you said, if people are going into product management, thinking that what they do at one company is going to be cut and paste into the next, they're in for a shock and surprise. There will be a lot of applicability. There will be a lot of themes that you can carry through. But I think some of the main changes that we're seeing- it's interesting. They come in and they ebb and they flow. When product management started originally, people weren't really sure what it was. Is it similar to project management? Is it similar to program management? And so there was a lot of confusion around what it was. I would say now product management is a thing. So that's probably one of the big quote "changes". It is a recognized, discipline. It is something that people aim to be. I do believe that people often find themselves in product management. It's one of those roles where it's better to have a lot of insight across a lot of different realms, then become a product manager, to try to just hop into your first role as a product manager without having all that experience.

[00:21:27] Diana Stepner: The other change that we saw is the acknowledgement that all of the roles are equally important. And so when you think of the product development process, there'll be times that design is taking the lead. There'll be that, product is taking the lead. There's times engineering is taking the lead. There's time that others are as well. And obviously that changes based on the number of people in your company or your team or your organization, but it's not on one person's shoulders. And I think, the phrase is empowerment and some people will roll their eyes at it. But I do believe to make a product successful, everybody has to be bought in to its success. That means there can't be one person driving it. There has to be a team effort, a team commitment to make it the best that it can be. That is also, I think, a change and one that I hope sticks. We'll see. But now we're seeing the change in the AI and wondering what that will mean for the future of all the disciplines I just described.

[00:23:02] Jason S. Bradshaw: I'm not going to take a prediction on AI. I famously made a bad prediction on social media and then started talking about it. So I'm on key on stages. No, this thing's not going to stick around. And then 12 months later, it's a part of a keynote. But anyway , it was said to the audience, you're straight out of the gate, you're knocking us between the eyes, telling us that everything's changing.

[00:23:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: And I love that you really have bookended the book. You start with, everything's changing. And then of course towards the end of the book you start talking about how to future proof your career. And, part of that is also, how to become a leader within product management.

[00:24:24] Diana Stepner: So sponsor may mean a different thing to different people. So from the perspective of a sponsor, they're often the executive who is advocating for your product at the most top levels. They'll be also the flip of a sponsor who may not be advocating for your product. And so you want to ensure that those individuals have insight in their terminology of the benefit the product can provide. And what I mean is each of your stakeholders, each of your sponsors will have certain trigger points. That's because they're human. All of us have certain interests or certain aptitudes that we listen into, and lean in for, and others that, yeah, it's nice. And so you really need to understand your sponsors as humans because you need to talk their language, you need to be able to, negotiate, influence them as a human as a person. That often means getting out of product speak and being able to talk to them, in terms that really resonate with them. With some executives, it'll be numbers. With some executives, it'll be, hitting all of our goals or milestones on time. With others, it'll be surpassing the competition. With others, it'll be a foray into a new space. And so by spending time understanding and listening and, just observing your stakeholders, you can get insight into them. What makes them tick and be able to use that to have an effective conversation and build up the rapport.

[00:26:23] Diana Stepner: Yeah.

[00:26:27] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now I love also that in the book, you take us a step further and you talk about balancing that need between two worlds really of sponsors and users, and think that is something that's absolutely worth our audience members diving in the book, because as you know better than I, what users want and what sponsors want can sometimes be completely different.

[00:26:59] Jason S. Bradshaw: Before I let you go though, as I mentioned before I hit the record button, I usually wrap up by asking one last question. But you've just been so amazing. I'm going to ask you two, I hope that's okay.

[00:27:13] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. For the novice out there who perhaps hasn't ever worked in product management or had anything to do with product manager, what ultimately is product management about?

[00:27:53] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yep, yep. And a product can be a physical thing. It can be a service. It can it can be many different things. It can be software. Fantastic. Now, the very last question, Diana, what's one thing that someone listening or watching today should start doing or perhaps stop doing as soon as they finished this episode?

[00:28:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic piece of advice. Remain curious. Listen more so that you can deliver more. Diana, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks again for your time.