Product Manager Turned CEO

Jen: Hi. My name is Jen Marshall. I'm the CEO of Brainmates from Sydney, Australia.

Suzanne: I was going to say you have a distinct accent or something. We don't get a lot of Australian guests on our show. You're the first one, I think. Actually, that's not true. I had a New Zealander, but he's living in Chicago, so that doesn't count, does it?

Jen: No, but that's awesome. I'm so pleased to be the first Australian.

Suzanne: Amazing. What is Brainmates?

Jen: At Brainmates, we do product management, training, consulting, and we have a conference in Australia bringing together product managers in Melbourne and Sydney.

Suzanne: I did a little bit of sleuthing around. It's not a new company. I know you haven't been with the company since day one, but it's 13 years old.

Jen: That's right.

Suzanne: The thought that came up for me is what were people doing in product management 13 years ago? It's a discipline that is coming into ubiquity in its own way. Many people listening might argue, "No, it's been around," and it has been around, but more and more people are talking about product management. What was happening back then?

Jen: Adrienne Tan and Nick Coster are the founders of Brainmates, and they were working in businesses at the start of the Internet. They were bringing broadband to life. They were working in broadcast television. Adrienne especially got to the point where she wanted to start her own business. She had the opportunity to go out and start as a product management consultant, so it really started with the consulting piece, and the training came a little bit later on.

Suzanne: Right. Let's talk a little bit about product management consulting. It's work that I do in my field. I'm always fascinated. Where is that moment where a company realizes they need a product manager? That's maybe question number one. Then question number two is when is it right in your opinion to bring in a consulting PM versus actually insourcing that role?

Jen: The moment is different for a lot of different companies, but the type of work we end up doing is often helping with their process, with their product management process. There will be different symptoms that the company might be able to see. Maybe it's that they feel that they aren't delivering the right things to market. Maybe they feel like they're going too slowly. Maybe stakeholders feel like things are getting really stuck. There can be a whole lot of different symptoms that probably sound familiar to a few people who are listening. That is a starting point where someone comes and says, "Hey, let's take a look at this process. Why isn't it working?"

Oftentimes we will work with companies in a really collaborative way to evaluate and redefine the process, and create something that's really fit for the context of their business. Some businesses are really entrepreneurial. They like to give people a lot of freedom, so they need a process or framework that matches that culture. Other companies are more traditional still, and they need a process that actually fits within that more traditional culture.

Suzanne: Does Brainmates have a proprietary product mindset framework that it applies? People talk a lot here of course about Lean. That's a movement that's gained a lot of popularity. If there is, can you tell us a little bit about that process?

Jen: Yeah. We have a framework which essentially asks the product manager to identify the customer to be able to understand the size of that target market, and to see their problem, and to be able to find a solution to that problem that delivers value to both the customer and the business. It aligns to I guess the mission of product management overall.

Suzanne: Great. I want to backup a step. When we started 100 Product Managers here, a lot of our mission ... I think we really had two. The big one was demystifying or bringing into shared understanding what is product management, right? I think sometimes even through of us who work in product are like, "What is product management?" We have our own ideas. I think the other part of our mission, candidly, is also shining a light on the diversity that can exist and does exist within product, because sometimes we hear a lot of conversations with men about what is product management.

It's nice to have women on the show, always. Great to have people of color, all kinds of different viewpoints being represented. Our vision is a diverse landscape that also tells a lot of different stories about what is product, but through the telling, specifically through the 100 interviews and stories, the hope is we begin to surface this common definition or understanding of what is product management. I'm curious if you could share in your own words what is product management to you, or what is product management according to Brainmates? Or both, if they're slightly different.

Jen: Yeah, I think it absolutely goes back to that definition of saying, "Who's the customer? What's their problem? How can we solve that, delivering value to the business?" Which I think is forgotten sometimes these days, as well as delivering value to the customer. You're actually trying to create something. It's created with purpose. It's created with the view of having a long-term value. It's created to be competitive. Essentially from a Brainmates point of view, our mission is to help our clients create products that their customers love.

Suzanne: Right. I guess what's so fascinating, and I notice this more and more when I go and consult enterprise-level organizations, especially organizations that have raised a hand and said, "We feel that we're not innovative, or that we're falling behind. We're waterfall, and we're supposed to be agile, and we don't know what that means." So many businesses do seem to operate without that mindset happening. That traditional siloed effect of, "Well, there's a sales team, and sales has a specific mission, and that's go out and sell things. There's a marketing team, and they have a specific mission."

My favorite part is how all those departments have their own personas, but none of those personas are speaking to each other. It sounds a little bit like part of the work that you do is actually try to bring an entire organization into alignment around product-based thinking.

Jen: It's actually a problem we see so often, and our clients will come to us, particularly when they're in the product management division, if you like. They'll come and say, "Hey, the rest of the organization doesn't understand what we do, and they're trying to get us to do X, Y, Z, and therefore we can't do what we think we're supposed to do." I think it's a really interesting change problem that we as product managers have to help shift mindsets. We have to educate those senior leadership teams, because a lot of folks on those teams are really talking about customer focus, but at the same time, like you said, there's a misalignment.

Almost like each different department or function will go off and do completely their own thing. The change that we really like to see is to be able to get some of those senior leader teams to be more aligned, to get them moving in lockstep, and also to understand what the job of product management is, and to work collaboratively with product managers to deliver on the organization's mission. There's a massive change project that we've all got to engage in to influence those senior leaders and get them up to speed with what we're doing. I guess we're fighting for legitimacy at that top table.

Suzanne: I'm laughing to myself because so often I get approached by individual PMs who will say a similar type of problem, right? "I can't get buy-in from my CEO about customer discovery as being a valuable exercise." We talk a lot about what are some different strategies that you can employee to shift that thinking. Sometimes it doesn't work. What I'm hearing here is just call Brainmates, and then you'll deploy a whole team onto the CEO's office and say, "Your product managers have called us. There's an issue?" A bit of a SWAT team.

Jen: They're different tactics that I would use for different organizations based on their size and their situation, and how the problem actually works. Whether it's actually a team, and whether it's co-creation, whether it's actually training, there's a lot of different interventions that we can run to help get people aligned, basically.

Suzanne: Right. One of the problems then to speak as product managers, one of the problems is I'm part of the product management team at an organization, and I don't feel that the rest of the departments or individuals are connected with my role, supporting my role, or allowing me to support their roles in the necessary fashion. They might come to Brainmates and say, "Can you help us create that alignment?" What are some other entry points that's not coming from the product management team, if you will, where an organization can get connected with, "I think we have a product management problem?"

Jen: It can sometimes come from a CTO, or maybe the chief marketing officer. We still see in Australia that sometimes product management isn't its own function. It might be reporting into technology. It might be reporting into marketing. Those two individuals can be very important, as well, depending on the structure of the company.

Suzanne: Right. What is the state of product in Australia? We're here in the US. We're hyperconnected to everything. The world is hyperconnected to what Silicon Valley is doing. Are you doing cool stuff down there?

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. There's some really amazing companies. What has been interesting coming on this trip to Cleveland is talking to different product managers from I guess corporate, all different scenarios. When you start having the discussion about what happens in day-to-day life for them, it's not too dissimilar from what's happening in Australia. I think sometimes us Australians, we feel like we're a long way away. Maybe we're feeling a bit behind, but the same sorts of things are happening. I guess it's that product management agony that you get where we share some stories and we're in the same place.

Suzanne: Right. How big is Brainmates? I guess I'm just aware of my geographical ignorance. I keep referring to Australia like, you know, all of Australia. It's a lot of cities, right? Are you in all of the major cities? Are you the empire of product management training down there?

Jen: We spend most of our time in Sydney and Melbourne. We do go elsewhere. We also go to New Zealand, and sometimes also to Singapore. The biggest engagement we get is from Sydney and Melbourne.

Suzanne: Cool. Let's talk about training as product. One of the things I think is always interesting, certainly for me with 100 PM. This is a podcast about product management. 100ProductManagers.com is a website with free and actionable advice for product managers. It's the product. In your case, product management training is the product, so then as product managers ... You have product managers at Brainmates that aren't actually consultants? They're just managing the product of training?

Jen: We have a product manager for our conference leading the product, and we have a head of training who looks after the product along with some others in the business, and he also trains. We are always iterating our products. Of course we're always interviewing customers in a more formal sense, sometimes. We'll often have a hypothesis or a particular goal we want to achieve with interviews, and we'll go out, and we'll recruit customers based on what we need to find out. For example, one time we went and interviewed the buyers of training, so those more senior product leaders who will buy the training for the more junior folks in their team.

Sometimes we go out and interview people who have trained with our competitors, of course, to find out why did that happen? Then with those insights, we start to iterate, whether it's actually in the course content itself, or how we actually package things together for our clients. We really listen to that feedback. I think one of the things that we heard from people is that they want a little bit more than just ticking the box of sending people to training, and ticking the box, and saying, "Hey, people will be more engaged now." As product managers, we really believe that training should be about actually changing the behavior in the workplace.

The day after you've done your training, what is it that you're going to go back into the workplace and change? Not just the next day, but through the next week and the next month? How will that training actually come to life? We've become really passionate about trying to help product managers make that behavioral change in order that they can achieve a lift in performance, in order that the business can see some kind of goal achieved. It's all about a goal for the business, which is beyond engagement. Engagement's great. It's beyond ticking a box. Training is about helping the team to acquire capability in order that they can do something, they can achieve something within the business.

Suzanne: Yeah. I'm glad to hear you speak about it because product management is conceptual. There's a lot of skills that you can go and learn. If you take up programming, for example, it's not that programming isn't conceptual, but fundamentally there's a point where it's like, "This is how you code a login module, or this is how you can put together a database." A lot of product management is actually just thinking about how to think about situations. The challenge certainly that I've seen come up is you can read all of these great books or go to conferences and hear all of these great speakers, leave really excited, and then you get back to the office, and you're like, "How do I land that?"

Can you share some of the tactics that you leave with your students as a way for them to begin to assimilate the concepts that come up in a training program?

Jen: One of the things is really simple. Just to make a smart goal around a stop, start, or continue. At the end of the training to get people to pick out and say, "What is it that they're going to do?" It needs to be in the next week. Be really specific about it. If they've done some training around customer interviews, they might say, "I'm going to conduct four customer interviews within the next week, and then I'm going to analyze the results using what I've learned here today." If you can get them to do something in the following week, it helps them to retain it, and it helps them to feel confident.

Then they're more likely to go on and use it again. We're also trying to weave in a little bit of coaching so that potentially after the course is finished that they have a resource to come back to to call, to meet in person and say, "Hey, I tried to do that thing you talked about in the course, and it didn't quite work out how I expected. Now what do I do?" Or even for the coach to say, "What did you do after the course?" There's just a little bit of that sense of accountability that they know that they're going to be followed up and there's someone holding them to account.

Of course the worst thing when you go away for a training, even if it's just one day, you're going to come back to a ton of email. It's really easy to just come back to your desk and go, "Man, I'm smashed. I've just got to get this stuff done, right?" Yeah, it's about making sure that there are some really clear steps that people sign up to hand on their heart that they're going to do.

Suzanne: It's funny that you talk about that. Certainly when I've led organizational training, you always get that mixed bag of some folks are just so enthusiastic that they've been sponsored to be there. Some folks are just happy that they get a day outside of the office, and then there are folks who are just mindful entirely of the fact that email is piling up, or maybe even one step further, which is, "I shouldn't even have to be there." What do you do to get those, I don't want to call them bad apples, but for some reason that's the word?

Those disenchanted individuals, how do you get their buy-in early on in a training so that they can see the value of what's in front of them?

Jen: I guess one thing is just to simply engage, and to not ignore them. In a training, what I always try to do is give everybody the opportunity to talk. I guess that's part of adult learning. You hear the theory. You probably hear it applied. You get sent away to do a little exercise, so you do an application yourself, and then everybody comes back into the center of the room and has to talk about their experience so that they can clarify and solidify what they've just learned. I think the temptation might be to say, "Well, I won't call on everyone, or I'll steer clear of that person who doesn't feel engaged."

I think persistently trying to engage with them is really valuable, and to make them be heard, feel heard, to actually listen to them is really important, as well. Sometimes it may be the case they just haven't been listened to in a long time, and I think that goes a long way to people building a relationship, and then getting more engaged.

Suzanne: You were a trainer at Brainmates before you became CEO?

Jen: Yeah, I was, just for a short time. Yeah.

Suzanne: How did that transition happen? Someone pulled you in and said, "Jen, we need you at the top?" You're like, "I'll do it."

Jen: Yeah. I was working some contract work with Brainmates, and I was interviewing some other places. As a group, we were getting to know each other. I was participating in different things in the office, getting involved in a bit of consulting here and there, and I was really enjoying it, and getting along well with the founders. One day, I came in the office and they said, "Did you get our email?" I was like, "What email?" They said, "We're wondering would you like to be the CEO?" I was like, "Oh, wow." I was floored by that. It's quite amazing. It had been my ambition to get a CEO role, so obviously I jumped at the chance because apart from being a CEO, working at Brainmates gives me the opportunity to really participate in the product management community, to participate in helping to form product management in Australia, champion product management in Australia, talk about product management, and those things are really fun and exciting for me.

Suzanne: Yeah, that's super cool. Always so exciting to have more women taking up leadership roles. What would you say has been the biggest learning moment for you? This is the first time as CEO?

Jen: That's right.

Suzanne: You stepped into this role, you had had an ambition to do it. Was there a first moment where you're like, "Oh, my gosh, this is a real thing here?"

Jen: Every day. Every day still. I really believe, and I think I believe now more than ever that you continue to learn and grow over your lifetime. Maybe when I was 20 I didn't believe that. As you get older, you're like, "Oh, wow." In the past 18 months in this job, I've grown so much, and I've changed so much, and I've been confronted with so many things. So many things from within myself. It's been a huge period of learning. Every day I'm still thinking about what do I need to learn myself? What of my own behaviors do I need to change? Which mindsets must I be aware of? Which mindsets do I need to address? I'm constantly iterating myself, if you like.

Suzanne: Right, yeah, absolutely. Self as product is as much an important opportunity to apply some of the things that we think about to say, "What's my roadmap? When am I going to get better at this public speaking, or better at listening, or whatever?" As you say, that limiting factor might be, or limiting factors. You weren't always in product management. This is a theme we surface a lot on the show, which is your path into product management. Can you tell our listeners where you started in school, and how you ended up as CEO of Brainmates?

Jen: I trained as a broadcast journalist. My bachelor in arts, communication, and broadcast journalism. From there, essentially I got into 24/7 news. I was a TV producer, and I produced for Sky News in both Australia and the UK. During my career, more than ten years doing that, I got to report and be present for some really exciting news stories. I often tell people that I was in the Sky Newsroom when Saddam Hussein was captured. I was in the Sky Newsroom in London when Shock and Awe was on for the Iraq War, and I reported from the first Bali bombings. I've been present for a lot of really big moments in history, and that was just absolutely fascinating.

Over time, I became more interested in how the business ran and how other things outside the newsroom ran. I was back in Australia in a more newsroom leadership role, and I decided that I would study an MBA. I had this idea I wanted to be more involved in the business. From there, I started looking around for what I could do. I had no idea what a product manager was. No concept at all. I was just looking for another job that was something to do with being more involved in the business. As it turned out, one of the telcos was looking for a product manager for news and information, and all they really cared about was, "We just want somebody who knows about news."

"Nobody here knows about news, and product management, we could teach you that because we have tons of product managers." I was lucky enough to find that job. I was like, "Oh, okay. I could do this." They believed I could do it. They said, "Look, we could see you've never been a product manager before, but in the interview, we could see that you've got the skills from what you're talking about in your MBA." They gave me an assignment to do. "We can see that you can think, and we'll be able to teach you that product management stuff." That's how I took my first step into product management. In that first 18 months, I was telling someone earlier, I had no idea what I was doing.

I was just making it up on the go. In some ways I'm ashamed to say that, but maybe that's a similar experience for many people. Over time, I've learned from many peers and colleagues, and even from my staff have helped me to better understand product management. I moved it to Fairfax, which is a publisher in Australia. I spent some time there, and again, continuing that media theme for myself, but I got to the point where media is in decline, and there were a heap of redundancies at Fairfax over many years. Eventually, I took one. I took one, and I took a big leap, and I said, "You know what? I want to do something different to media. It's my time to jump out."

That's when the opportunity at Brainmates came up. I've worked with the folks at Brainmates before. When they found out I was available, they were like, "Hey, could you come and help us out?" That's just the luck of the draw, I guess. The luck of how I landed there. It's been really great.

Suzanne: I guess. I'm sure it's much more than luck, as well. First of all, I love your candor in saying, "I spent a year and a half not knowing what I was doing." It resonates with me. We've had other guests on the show make similar confessions, and I think it is important for people to hear that because there are individuals I know who are listening, and they're listening precisely because they're looking for support. They don't have trainers coming in, or they don't even maybe have allies within the company. Was there a revelatory moment somewhere around that year and a half mark where you're like, "Oh, this is what the job is, now I get it?" When did you really begin to understand what is product management, given that you were self-taught to an extent?

Jen: There's probably no particular moment I think that stands out. I think it's that gradual process of being mentored by so many other people over a period of seven years. I'm still learning. I'm at the conference today. I'll show you my notebook. I've got hundreds of notes scribbled. There’s no one moment where I feel like, "Wow, I'm here. I've made it."

Suzanne: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think if that moment came, it would probably mean it was time to get out of the industry, because if you feel that you've learned everything, then you're not growing anymore. It's just more that realizing what product is, or what the role entails. Then it's also problematic because it changes so much. It's another theme that we surface a lot, which is what product management looks like in organization A may manifest very differently in organization B because of where the product is in the life cycle, because of the construct of the company. You talked a little bit earlier about, when I was asking about how people come to Brainmates.

You said there's a few entry points, and sometimes product reports up into different divisions. Is there a configuration of product teams that you particularly like? If you were going to go and be CEO of, I don't know, an Internet startup company, how would you structure your product management department?

Jen: Ultimately I would like to see product management as a function and with a seat at the table, so equal to technology, equal to marketing, equal to sales, if you're going to organize by function. Of course I would say that, because I'm a product manager. Of course, and I've recommended it to companies. I think what is even more important than structure is the relationships that individuals build within the business, because without that communication, without that trust, and without that collaboration, structure is nothing. In some ways, I think you could have any structure.

If people talk to people, and if people trust people, and if people collaborate with people, maybe the structure isn't so important. I guess you probably see that in a lot of smaller companies where the structure is not so important. In the larger companies, I think it's great to have product management with a seat at the senior leadership table contributing to the discussion and the debate, and being in a position where they can talk about the potential trade-offs between sales and marketing and technology, and I guess be the owner of those trade-offs in that discussion.

Suzanne: How important is it in your opinion for, if Brainmates is going and doing a training engagement in a larger organization, how important is it to have folks from the marketing team actually go through a product management training? Is that something that you advocate for? Or engineers?

Jen: Yeah, it's actually incredibly powerful. We've had a couple of clients who will bring along their engineers, their UX, their product manager, the whole team. The testers. Everybody goes through it together. What we see is that when everybody shares the same language, is using the same practices, has a transparent view of what product management and doing is why, all of a sudden things speed up. That's a really powerful thing. Not all companies want to do that, but yeah, absolutely. We'll always encourage that situation.

Suzanne: Yeah. I just encountered it myself where I was doing a discovery for a potential product management training. The problem was we really need our product people to think more like product. We're going to send them all to training. It's like, "What do the engineers think about product? What do the salespeople think about it?" They have all of these siloed departments, and then the instinct is, "We'll train up the product people." I said, "How are those product people going to get the buy-in from the engineers, especially if those are engineers that have been there a long time, have been doing it a certain way?"

You're essentially now requiring them to, from the bottom-up instill these values across the company, which I guess in a roundabout way takes us back to those phone calls that the PMs make when they're like, "We need your help. The developers need this training, too."

Jen: Sometimes it ends up that we'll do a training. It's a cross between a training and a workshop. Sometimes it can be with a senior leadership team where we're actually talking about what is product management, the role of product management, the purpose of product management? All of those things, and then we open up the discussion with those people. That can be a really rich and sometimes a difficult discussion. It flushes out the fact that people are working from a different mindset. They're working from a different set of assumptions. All of a sudden you're having a very productive discussion, putting everything on the table, recognizing the elephant in the room, which is, "Hang on a minute. Product management is not just the place where you throw a feature."

"It's something completely different." I guess one of the other interesting topics that often comes up in those workshops is, "Hang on a minute, then. Who owns this product?" The CEO thinks they own the product. Marketing thinks they own the product. Sales might not think they own the product, but they might own the backlog, you know? It's about that discussion and getting everybody on the same page. I guess it comes back to that interesting concept of change. As product managers, we're having to create change in organizations as well as doing the job of product management.

Suzanne: Yeah. Is it necessary to train often? I know that you spoke earlier about assimilation is baked into the offering, that Brainmates is fundamentally saying, "We're going to come, whether it's two days or a week. We're going to do this training, and then we're going to motivate the individuals to assimilate that knowledge." In order to effect change, especially if it is a larger organization, is it required to keep a culture of training and education going? If so, really for how long?

Jen: One of our latest programs actually provides support over an entire year. It's not every day of the year, but it gives you some formal training through the year, it gives you some coaching through the year, gives you an assessment up front, regular meetings with the product leader. We're trying to help support over the entire year and give that longer engagement, which leads to that change in performance, and therefore the achievement of goals. Absolutely. I guess we've become really interested in looking at what are the training interventions that we can provide for those three and five year product managers?

What is it that we can do with those folks to help them take the next step? Some people would like to … They love to build, they love to be hand-on with the product, and they're always going to be in a product manager role. Then there are other folks who want to go into a more people leadership role. What are the interventions that are going to be suitable for them? We're really thinking about what we call the learning journey. There's a lot of offerings for people who are just starting out, of course, but we're now trying to focus on, "Okay, how do we keep building people as they go on with their career?"

Yeah, I guess sometimes we look at accountants, doctors, other professionals. They'll go on in services. They're always keeping their skills up to date in a range of different ways. I think ultimately we think it should be the same for product managers.'

Suzanne: Yeah. I love that. I talk a lot about the skills and qualities of product managers, and skills, as you even spoke to before, skills are the things that you can learn in any job. Then there's these more either soft skills or soft qualities. I think hunger for knowledge is an important one, because the ideas, a lot of the ideas that are in market today about product management, a lot of the frameworks ... We're here at this conference. A lot of these ideas that are being presented up on this stage are a handful of years old, if that. It's changing rapidly. There isn't this one, "This is how product management works," mindset. It's actually very much in flux, which is another reason to stay nimble and stay invested in the education piece.

Jen: Yeah, I think so. I think what I really urge people to do is, when they come across those things, it requires a little test and application in your own business to see how you could actually use them. See if it works for you, because without that, if it's just knowledge in your head, it means for nothing.

Suzanne: Yeah. If I'm a mid-level or senior-level manager in an organization that hasn't historically invested in professional development as part of the culture, but I believe in it, I believe I could benefit, I believe our team could benefit, how can I build a business case for bringing in a team like yours? Give some advice to folks listening who could use corporate training and don't know how to get corporate buy-in?

Jen: One of the ways, you can go through I guess a back door, which is workshops. I guess the way I would describe the difference between a training and a workshop is that in a training, the objective is to get through the content, to explain all of the concepts, and to get them all applied. You might do some exercises, but you're not trying to get any particular outcome except for that learning. If it's a private training, sure thing, people could work on live, real business problems, but as the trainers, we're not going to sign up and say, "At the end of this training, we'll have solved their problem."

With a workshop, we're going to try and achieve some business outcome with you. In the process of doing some, you'll potentially get some training because in order to achieve that outcome, whether it be helping you to create a portfolio or roadmap, or to analyze where your products are in the product life cycle, or to do prioritization, in order to get that outcome, we'll often do a little bit of training to get everybody on the same page. That's a way that you can say, "This thing that we're doing, it's not a training. It's a workshop, and from it, we will get this business outcome." The training's underlying there, hidden. It's not the full focus, but that's one way to get started.

Suzanne: Okay, this is very practical advice. Now that you're CEO, do you get to train anymore, or you had to officially put down your trainer materials?

Jen: I do train a little bit. It's fun. I really enjoy meeting new people. I like being put on the spot having myself tested. That's really fun, and sometimes a little bit scary, of course. The scariest thing is when people I already know come to the training. That's really weird. Yeah, I do a little bit of that. I sometimes do a little bit of consulting, as well. Over time, I'll probably decrease that, but it's fun. It's kind of fun, so hard to let go of.

Suzanne: Absolutely. All right, since you've got this training background, maybe you can help us out with a little segment that we like to do on this show. It's called Get the Job, Learn the Job, Love the Job. The first question to you, Jen, for our listeners is what advice would you offer somebody listening in who is sitting right now in a PM-adjacent role, but really longing to have a little bit more strategic input, and step into a product manager position, either where they are currently or at another organization? How can they get the job?

Jen: If you've got a good manager, and hopefully you have, I would open the discussion with them, and I would start to look for those opportunities where you might be able to actually start doing some of those things. If your manager is not a product manager, is not the head of product, I'd be seeking I guess acceptance that maybe you can go to somebody else in the organization to try out a few of those things. I've done that with my team members in the past. In a different scenario, for example, one of my team once said to me, "You know what? I really want to be more involved in strategy."

The time he said that, I was like, "Oh, gee, what do you mean by that?" He's like, "I just want to get more exposed to what the strategy guys are doing." Okay, then. Off the back of that, he did two things. He got involved in the mentoring program within that company, and he got someone from the strategy team as his mentor, which was great. Secondarily, he also got involved in our annual strategy program or planning sessions. That wasn't a usual thing for somebody at his level. Hopefully you've got a good manager, you can open up that dialog, and once they know what you're trying to do, I hope they're going to be willing to help you.

Suzanne: Right, yeah. That goes back to the culture of professional development, and wanting to train people, and empower them into new roles. What about blind spots? We talk about it's hard to assimilate. Product management is conceptual. Where have you, either in your own career as a product manager or having gone through so many trainings and coaching other folks, seen product managers typically struggle the most on the job?

Jen: I think one of the things that can happen, particularly in big organizations, is you just get so much stuff thrown at you, so much of the urgent and important stuff is being thrown at you, and you can get stuck in doing that, and not looking after those things that are not urgent, but important. How is it that you are on a daily and weekly basis working towards the things that are your goal in one year time, not in the next week's time? I think that's where people typically get really stuck. I think people need to come into the office every day with a really clear idea of what they're going to do, and they have to start getting comfortable, even more comfortable with saying no.

I know as product managers, we have to say no a lot to features. We have to say no to a lot of things, and I think we have to get even better at that.

Suzanne: Why do you love product, Jen?

Jen: I think … there's two parts. It's a combination of the art and the science. I love things that are beautiful. I love aesthetics. I love creativity. At the same time, I love problem-solving and believe in being data-driven and science, and all of that sort of thing. Product management brings all of those things together. I guess as a product manager, you're faced with really interesting, fascinating, deep problems all of the time. I don't find it to be a repetitive job. I guess I love that problem-solving aspect.

Suzanne: Yeah. When you were talking earlier about broadcast, I was reminded that we just recently published, it was a guest post in our blog called You Are the Leonardo da Vinci of Product Management. Really the point of view is precisely this. There is so much crossover between what we do as product managers and what is typically associated with the creative process. I find over and over again that folks who started out in more liberal arts backgrounds or more creative pursuits, as you do, they find their way to product somehow. It's like a gravitational pull.

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. It's just a fascinating space.

Suzanne: Cool. Before I let you go, let our listeners know how can they learn more about Brainmates if they want to? They're going to go in, they're going to take your advice, petition to their CEO to get a budget to fly out to Australia and attend the conference. Where can we find more information?

Jen: The conference is leadingtheproduct.com, and our company Brainmates is brainmates.com.au. Our Twitter handle is @brainmates, so go ahead a shoot us a tweet. Join the conversation. We'd love to hear from you.

Suzanne: Lovely. Jen Marshall, thank you so much for being on the show. Great to have you.

Jen: Thanks, Suzanne.