What I learned from chatting with 4 CPOs during Pulse for Product Keynote
Last week at Pulse for Product hosted by Gainsight, I had the opportunity to talk with and learn from 4 imminent Product Leaders during our closing keynote — Eilon Reshef, CPO from Gong.io, Suresh Vithal, VP of Product Platform from Adobe Experience Cloud, Jen Taylor, CPO from Cloudflare, and Karl Rumelhart, CPO from Gainsight — and it couldn’t have been more enriching.
The conversation was filled with so much goodness and insights, that it warrants to be shared more broadly. We spoke a lot about how to ‘level up’ across 3 key tracks: 1) Product Career, 2) Product Strategy, and 3) Customer Experience, which also the key theme of the conference.
Key attributes to level up the career:
- Insatiable Curiosity — Understanding the users are human, what are they trying to accomplish, where they are stuck, and simply walking in their shoes, can help solve customer problems in a unique way.
- Deep passion for customers — The passion that exists for the customers in every team — Product, Engineers, and the Customer success teams, and it very much reflects in the product roadmaps, processes, strategies, etc. The hyper-focus on the customer and their success takes us a long way.
- Mentorship, and relationships — Generosity, and assistance, from having a mentor, someone who can guide you, has been key for most of them. So seeking out help, mentorship, and ultimately leading up to a position to be a mentor. Having strong relationships to be successful in every job as PM has to work with so many different teams.
- Empathy during challenging times — This year has witnessed accelerated digitization, so keeping up to speed with the acceleration, and understanding the shifting trends, and bearing empathy/ human-first approach. For eg: it was truly inspiring for Jen to be able to help SMBs by making their Cloudflare solutions available for free. Many other software companies including Adobe took that approach.
“Greatest accomplishment has been building a product that customers use, and love, which was with lot of luck, and some intent. We bear an obsession around providing value, and making raving fans.” — Eilon Reshef CPO, GonG.Io
Key Takeaways to level up Product Strategy:
- Build a scalable platform architecture - At Cloudflare, the founders focused on building an architecture that is massive in scale, flexible, and very powerful. The culture is very Engineering driven, and innovation comes organically from the development/ research org. The robust architecture will enable you to pivot the product strategy very quickly.
- Experiment and innovate — Create a culture of innovation, taking a crazy wild idea to the market to see if this spaghetti sticks to the wall. So, creating a nimble and flexible organization where innovation and experimentation is part of the culture.
- Establish Listening Posts to welcome ideas/ innovations from the ecosystem — Good ideas come from everywhere if our eyes and ears are open. For example: At Adobe, which is a 25,000 people company, they have a very Product-first CEO who believes that the great ideas come from ‘everywhere’ — that extends to the whole organization. Adobe believes in establishing ‘listening posts’ to collect feedback from engineers, customers, adjacent teams, etc. Then it is the Product Team’s job to shuffle the deck to build upon the most important and impactful ideas.
- Be Customer-centric— Listen to and build for your customers. Gainsight is a super customer-centric company. It closely listens to Customer Success Teams, the User Community, through In-Product feedback and direct calls, and gives a lot of weight of to customer-centric ideas to the development team itself. Further, it encourages the ideas by creating a culture of innovation, hackathons, etc.
“Karl’s Law: Always keep thinking about the customers when you are thinking about Karl’s Law.” — Karl Rumelhart, CPO of Gainsight
Key considerations to level up the Customer Experience:
Serving to different personas is significant from Day 1 whether while building the product, or in the GTM Strategy, or while supporting customers post-sales.
- Serve to End-user or Execs? —From Day 1 every product team has this dilemma — to focus on the execs or provide value directly to the end-users/ ICs, and the GonG.IO team decided to focus on end-users early on. End users are very different from the buyers, and it is important to research/listen to both parts of the population to understand the daily needs, and toolchains but also think about serving the ladder up, and the value proposition. So, considering a complex matrix of personas and to bring the whole product successfully to the organization is significant in the customer journey and their experience with you.
- Identify and solve pain points — At Gainsight, the CPO thinks about who has ownership of the business problems, who are we trying to help, as it turns out to be extremely diverse. So thinking about the disconnected experiences of different personas in your product, listening to your internal/ external users, and simply striving for — how can these different people get along with the help of your product, and contributing to their goals along their user journey.
- Personalize and optimize the first-mile experience — Adobe serves to broad personas, and with a broad portfolio of products, the team’s ‘mantra’ is “driving value every single day for the users”. The key metrics they track are “Time to Access”, “Time to Use”, “Time to the First Value”, “Time to Value”, and really emphasize these goals for the team. Dig into what they are trying to achieve, guide them with in-product messages and serve in-product guides thinking “how do we make sure that we make it easy for the personas to solve the first-mile problem. Once you solve for that — great things can happen!” Suresh also mentioned that “Using Gainsight PX guides helped us drive 300% lift in feature adoption.”
- Raise new feature awareness — Getting new functionality in front of the new users is the #1 challenge as customers aren’t always aware, so using a combination of in-product guidance + emails + customers to help raise awareness relevant to their use cases is one of GonG.io’s focus. “Sometimes we are running faster, and thinking of how do we bring the customers up to speed with us by serving relevant in-product messages.”
Bonus: Fun but insightful stuff from the Lightning Round Qs:
(Q): Eilon, What is better — a new feature or a customer request?
(A) Customer request, always, we might not do it their way but always showing love, and attention.
(Q)Suresh, Quantitative or Qualitative data to drive roadmap decisions?
(A) Both! Our PM tends to live in qualitative a lot but both are important.
(Q) Karl, What comes to your mind when a customer says.. “I want it that way”….?
(A) I hope this customer is representative of the market.
(Q)Jen, When I say ETA for the product release date, you say?
(A) Tell me more about the problem you’d like us to solve for, and tell us the priority of the problem you just shared with us a few mins ago!
(Q)Jen, How will you describe Product Management in one word? Customer!
(Q)Karl, How much do you love ‘prioritization’ of feature requests?
(A) A lot, That's my day job, I love it!
(Q) Suresh, What is the best career advice you’ve ever received?
(A) Talk less, and listen more!
(Q) Eilon, What is the worst career advice you’ve ever received?
(A) “Plan out your career very rigorously”, doesn’t work this way!
“How large this market is we operate in, and seems like we are in the first innings of this, to transform the customer experience of large and small brands.” — Suresh Vithal, VP of Product Platform, Adobe Experience Cloud
You can listen to more sessions from Pulse for Product for free by going to this link: https://pulseforproduct.exceedlms.com/student/catalog