I love writing code. I love everything about it. Coding is like solving puzzles. You get a problem and you need to think how to solve it. Think up the best solution, optimize it, debug it, squash bugs. I love writing code so much that I spent 20 years working as a developer. I even got used to waking up at night with a deep understanding that I just found a bug in my code. I love it! And despite having had several opportunities during my career to shift to other positions, I always decided to stick to coding. In a sense, I was afraid of not getting my hands dirty, of stepping away from the keyboard.
Product Hunt
When I joined Outbrain as a backend software developer in the Platform group, I took ownership of a backend service called Dyploma. Dyploma is a deployment gateway built on top of Kubernetes, enabling developers to build artifacts and deploy them to multiple data centers and environments with the click of a button. It makes our developers’ lives super easy.
Dyploma is a product with 200 users. A live product which is being used constantly, with feature requests, bugs and direct impact on the production services of Outbrain. With so many users, requirements and impact, we realized we wanted a product oriented approach to managing and evolving it. But we had no prior experience managing products, nor any product managers in the group. Our solution to this challenge was to introduce the Product Leads.
Product leads were an attempt to get the best of both worlds – keep the technical people doing the tech stuff they love and excel at, but also allow them to take on Product Manager responsibilities part-time. Dyploma wasn’t the only product in the Platform group where we wanted to implement a product-oriented approach, we had others as well. So when Platform leadership invited people to volunteer for these Product Lead roles, due to my deep sense of involvement with the product I was developing, I decided to take the challenge head on.
I took it upon myself to be the product lead for Dyploma, in parallel to being its backend developer. I met with the users, heard their wishes and complaints, mapped the different flows they needed, the new features they wanted, prioritized them… then switched hats to “backend developer” to do the implementations. It was fun, exciting, difficult, satisfying – it was everything I loved about writing code, but… not necessarily writing code.
Since I started doing something I was not familiar with, I decided I should start learning about what it takes to be a product manager. I have worked with product managers but to actually be one is different, and it had (and still has) its learning curve.
The Lean Startup
I learned that there is a constant loop of Learn->Build->Measure (Lean Startup anyone?).
For us, the “Learn” stage included creating a focus group, meeting the customers, documenting their requests and feedback.
One of the big advantages of working on internal products is that you can meet your customers all the time (should be handled with care, so it does not become a pain….). I would walk in the corridors and people would jump at me and start bombarding me with ideas and problems that they had. Corridor chats are nice but we needed more formalized communication channels to make communication scale, so I created focus groups and held periodic meetings with them. I used the documentation of these meetings when prioritizing features.
I used users stories to help me focus on what was really important, on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I then sat with a focus group of developers and we reviewed these user stories for feedback and validation. A slack channel for more ad-hoc documentation (and a paper trail), and boy, was it busy…
Next, the ‘Build’ stage. I figured this would be easy, since I was also the developer. But working with the UI team and seeing how the backend and frontend code work together toward a common goal, required going beyond just writing code. It required synchronization and team work.
Once built, came the ‘Measure’ stage. At first, this didn’t seem important – “if you build it, they will come” felt intuitively right. But that wasn’t the case. After implementing one specific, large feature, we found that user adoption was there… but we didn’t get the value we wanted. Partially because we didn’t define the value clearly enough, or had KPIs in place to measure it. In fact, once we implemented the KPIs, it seemed we were moving in the opposite direction!
Our learnings here lead us to implement a “KPIs first” approach, which wasn’t simple or necessarily intuitive. Instead of working on the feature, we would first work on the metrics, define the measurements and only then move onto building the features. This allowed us to “focus on the target” at all times and change direction quickly if needed. Another set of KPIs would focus on feature impact (for example, # of affected users) and implementation effort (high level estimation is mostly good enough). These reflect the feature’s perceived value and cost, so we could not only measure whether the feature moves the needle, but also understand how to prioritize the different features and manage our resources.
Measuring KPIs was true for customer satisfaction as well – we started gathering customer feedback, and were happy to see that our customers played along. They felt they were being heard and given a mandate to influence product direction.
To close the loop, following measurements, we returned to the ‘Learn’ stage, plotting the next steps in the product’s evolution.
Present day
Fast forward a year and a half – the Product Leads initiative was a partial success. Unfortunately, the number of Product Leads that kept the addon role over time wasn’t high. It was… one. But wherever we had a Product Lead, we got what we asked for :-). We had good user interaction, a product roadmap and a regular release cadence centered around it. This was the proof of the hypothesis we had in mind. As an infrastructure group we build products! And every product, no matter if it is internal or external, should be managed as one.
From this point on, we decided to invest more in this direction. I moved on to a role of full time Product Manager in the Platform group. While writing these lines, I manage 5 different products, developed by multiple teams, with more to come!
Looking back, here are some of my insights on what made this adventure a successful one.
- Personal Skills – Like in many cases, a great human interface makes everything work better. The ability to build good relationships with different types of customers, make them feel they can approach you anytime and give feedback. Building these relationships will also enable you to facilitate better coordination and collaboration between the different teams.
- Being a good Listener – As any good Product Manager, you need to collect ideas, listen to problems and needs, get feedback – and for all of that to be done well, you need to be a good listener. This usually involves keeping quiet while others talk 🙂
- Being a good Investigator – Sometimes your customers are “too nice”. It might be that they don’t feel comfortable passing criticism, or they simply did not put the effort to think about it. They might not even realize they feel uncomfortable with some aspects of your product. To overcome this obstacle, you need to learn how to ask the hard questions. Look for the criticism, even if it doesn’t feel great, and focus on it. Dig deep, listen and look for hints.
- Methodology – Working with different people, getting requirements all around, and choosing the right things to focus on – you must have a system if you want to get those right. When a VP has a feature request – is it more important than the feature request of the single developer? The system is more than just the priorities, it is also the KPIs, making sound decisions and holding conversations based on data and not on beliefs. The lighthouse should always be the value you bring to the product, and not necessarily the requestor’s role, how often they ask for it, or other “psychological bias factors”.
This past year was quite a ride – I learned a lot, gained exciting new experiences, failed and succeeded countless times. There’s still so much for me to learn, but one thing I already know – I love being a Product Manager!