Entrepreneurial Disease

Suzanne: I wanted to get started by talking about your path to product management. One of the things that I find consistently having these conversations with people is there's rarely a straight path taken to this job. What is your career story look like? Take us kind of back in time and help us understand where you started and how you got here.

Motea: Sure. It all started when I started studying software engineering in college in Jordan. I liked many of the coding courses, but not all of them, so I tried to finish as early as possible because I was so excited about going and work. I finished in three years instead of four and then started working with an online business company. They used to make content, so I managed to get a job there and start writing for the web.

That was great because I learned how different that is from writing to magazines and newspapers because I've done that before during my college and I learned search engine optimization and social media and all of that. How to focus on writing and finding out what users want to read. More than what I liked to write about. That was maybe the moment that I realized how online business is different than any other business because it's so direct with the user and you can actually know what the user want. Know about the user even more than they know about themselves.

That's why many people now when they ask me if you have a strategy in building your product and someone asks you to add a feature or add a change, or support different programming language; do you do that or not? Do you already have that strategy? My answer would be, most of the times, even if they ask for it, doesn't mean that they're going to use it. Even if I have an idea and ask them about it, their answer, their feedback, not necessarily what they are going to do actually on that product.

I learned that the hard way because I built or managed the teams to build many features and products that nobody loved even they said so. They said they going to love it. They said they going to pay for it, but when it comes to the reality, they wouldn't. That's why Lean Startup is great. Going back to my experience after joining that company, I got the entrepreneurial disease and I decided to start my own startup.

Suzanne: Did you call it entrepreneurial disease?

Motea: Yeah because it's like you might get it from someone else.

Suzanne: It's contagious. All these people are running around, quitting their jobs, starting businesses and you want to do it too.

Motea: Yeah, especially if you live next to a business park or an incubator. You know, viruses go around the area and you get affected and it's like, oh I want to build my own business. I want to be my own boss.

I started a couple of businesses, one of them was great, the other failed miserably. Then joined another company. Actually, I had a couple of ideas and I pitched them to an investment company and they were like, instead of investing in your ideas we would like to invest in you. That's entrepreneur resident. This position was very interesting for me because I work as product manager, but my job is to come up with ideas and convince the management that I need to have the sources to build the first iteration. In that job I learned what iteration means. What minimum available product means. How important it is to know what question you need to answer in each phase of the product.

First phase, for example, you go towards is there a problem I want to solve? Then you go to, is the market ready for the solution? Then, how it can scale. My experience as entrepreneur resident was great. After that, I started doing consulting with companies and startups. Then I moved to San Francisco, joined big company Rackspace. Then the product I worked on, one year after my work got acquired from Rackspace. Then it became a startup again and we were able in the last year to do 100% growth and revenue in less than a year and that was great.

That's a brief about my experience, but you ask question about, is there a path for product managers? You express anything that there is usually no path...

Suzanne: No straight path.

Motea: No straight path.

Suzanne: It's always, somehow we end up... I call it accidental tourism. I did all of these things, and somehow I ended up in the center called product.

Motea: Yeah, but you know, within all these different paths, I think there is one thing in common. Which is a lot of try and fail. A lot of okay, your friend told you about an idea and they were like okay lets do it. There's a lot of practice and building products. I think that's the common thing between all the paths that takes you to product management. It doesn't matter if you started with a big corporate or with a startup, or your own business, but as a product manager, as a great product manager I think all the great product managers have something in common which is that willing to building and fail fast. Try, try, again until they build that great product that will take it to the next level.

Suzanne: I'm glad you brought up that point about perseverance, if you will. It's interesting, you very candidly shared, I got the entrepreneurial disease, I had to go out and start my own thing, I failed miserably. You're telling me this story, our listeners can't hear this, but I can see you're smiling when you're telling me about your failures. How difficult was it to kind of dust off your knees, get back up and say, well that's a failure, and keep going? Did you have to wallow for a little while? Or what? How did that go for you?

Motea: I think it has something to do with my willing to live with uncertainty in my life in general. Knowing how to live with uncertainty, not only in the business but also in the personal life makes you stronger and makes you know that it's not easy to fall in love. With anything, especially products because this is a big mistake that some product managers do and I did in the past, which is falling in love with an idea. Which means that you will be certain that this idea will work the way you are thinking about. The way you are designing it. The way you are building it. That's fundamentally wrong. It's great to be passionate, but it's... I say passion should be related to what I want to achieve. To what I want to change. To the success I want, whatever that is. Either money, or power, or just helping other people. That passion should be... Or, lets say love should be with a mission. With what I want to do. It's not about exactly how I'm going to do it because that could change. That actually changes in any successful product. It always changes.

Suzanne: It's funny that you're bringing this up. I was having this conversation just the other day and saying exactly that. The role of the founder is to have perseverance of vision, but at the same time be absolutely willing to change what the thing looks like. I like the way that you phrase that. It's about having a real clear idea of what you want to accomplish and not being incredibly married to the specific thing.

You see this all the time with entrepreneurs. They go immediately to features. They go immediately to design. They skip over the viability. You brought up viability. Failing is the real narrative that people don't talk about. If you just sort of go online and you read all the articles, it just seems as though everybody is starting businesses and then immediately selling them for billions of dollars. That no time passes. That nobody fails, but in reality, most of the people who are out there doing it never raise the money. Never get the exit. Fail miserably. Right? This is...

Motea: Well, I mean, look at the most... Most of the successful businesses around us are actually could be the last result of many experiences and many trials and many products they built and failed. Many of the games that we play now, many of the products... I like how you put it in words, actually you put it in a different... In better words than I do. Being married to the idea is definitely a challenge that product managers go through. It doesn't matter if it's your business or you work for a company, falling in love is dangerous.

Suzanne: Your most recent project Airbrake, you just left the company back in L.A. but tell us about your time there. What's the company do? What was your responsibility while you were there?

Motea: Airbrake is seven years old sass product. When it was built, it was the first of its kind to help developers capture the bugs in their code and know the root codes of that bug so they can go and fix it immediately. Also, Airbrake gives you some data about the bugs and errors in your software and the trend of the errors so you can see that. Oh, I have that trend of errors when it comes to, for example, the communication with that server or working on this component and you can focus on it.

We eventually... What Airbrake does is helping developers figure out what are the 20% errors if they fix it, they would have been fixing 80% of the problems that the users face. You know the 20/80, 20%/80% rule? That also applies to errors and bugs because usually what users... The problems that users face, 80% of that could be solved if you solved the most popular ten bugs in your code. That was what Airbrake does.

I was the only person on the business growth, product side of the product and that means that I was the hub of all the data collecting and analyzing. Looking at what problems we have when it comes to the users journey with Airbrake. They visit the website, what pages they go to. Do they sign up or not? If they sign up, do they complete that? Then the onboarding process, the conversion from sign up to an active user. Then we have the installation of their software. Then onboarding process was big with Airbrake because it was sophisticated software. We had a lot of slipping away points that I needed to figure out and find and then conduct an AB test. Conduct a change to see if that will optimize my conversions.

Suzanne: I'm glad you bring up analytics because it's such a critical part of the product management role. Or it can be. I imagine when you describe that, you're sitting around in control room with a hundred different monitors and looking for all of these cracks and fissures in the customer journey as you described. How does the developer team, or the management team respond when you come and say, "We have attrition, we're losing people somewhere between the activation process and coming back and using this feature." Or, "They're not sticking around because they're not finding how to move forward." How do you see that and then how do you communicate that back to the team? Do people even want to hear that?

Motea: Definitely. I believe everyone would like to hear where the user is most activated and least activated in the whole journey. What I used to do is collecting the data... We can talk more about how we collect the data. After what I do is I collect the data and I document that. I share with everyone but I take what... Every week what could be an interesting fact about what happened in the last week and I share it with everyone and then I suggest what we can do to optimize these numbers.

For example, we have less new paid accounts or we have better upgrade rate, or worst downgrade rate. We had a lot of KPI's to follow. I think that the main challenge with any product manager is to know what KPI's to collect. I believe that there's no one answer to this. The most important practice is to take one KPI at a time. You mentioned all these monitors I might be seeing. You know in movies when you see the hackers? Hacker needs just a laptop, but movies you see all these monitors and green texts and they're going on the screen up. Same for product managers, you just need the laptop. Sometimes an iPad is enough.

Suzanne: You just destroyed the entire vision. Nobody wants to be a product manager anymore. All you need is a laptop. Okay, good. It's accessible.

Motea: Or iPad.

Suzanne: Okay.

Motea: A tablet, lets just not be promoting one kind of tablet. It's all about focusing on one data at a time. One KPI at a time. Doing something to optimize, to improve that KPI. By saying "doing something" I always refer to an AB Test because there's no right answer about user experience. You go to any, what you consider successful website and you check it and then you go to Google to check that. The last version of that website and then you can see something totally different. What happens is that okay for example, if I have that sign up page that makes 50% activation, which means 50% of the visitors actually sign up and finish the sign up process; I would say, okay what if I do some changes on that page to optimize that conversion rate from 50% to 60%?

Now what happens... The challenges after you come up with this theory is the team. How can I convince the team, especially the developers, that I have a problem and I need to solve it? I found it very very successful way to convince them is to link the KPI to the revenue. Talk in the money language which means, hey guys I have this page that makes 50% conversion rate which means that the average for example, the average return from each sign up is say $100. Now we're making from each 100 visitors, we'll have 50 of them sign up. If we make it 60%, we're going to make $1,000 more every month. How about that?

Suzanne: Is there anybody in the room who says, "I don't like it. I just want to make less money."

Motea: Yeah, well you will never hear that answer. You just... Using the money language, you always break the ice. You're going from why to do this to how to do it? Everyone will be convince when you talk in money language. Then of course when it comes to how, that's a different story. I don't know if you want to...

Suzanne: Well, I want to ask you how much of this analysis and coming up with the new hypothesis to test and coming up with the specific way that you're going to test it happens solely from you? Versus in bringing the team together? You're there with your laptop, not one hundred monitors, you're looking at conversion rate. You've got that sort of one metric that matters most approach. You're thinking to yourself, how can we go from 50% to 60%? Do you then take all of that thinking, develop the hypothesis yourself, sketch out different landing pages yourself, put all of that together and then make a business case for it? Or do you start bringing in the UX team, the product team, maybe others from the marketing team to throw ideas together?

Motea: There is my way and there is what everyone might face in their company because it depends on the company's culture and the way the whole... The way that they handle this. Some companies know it's your job to find the problem, find the solution, wire frame it, sketch it down and show us how to do it and then we decide if we want to do it or not. Now the culture is going more flat communications in startups and big online businesses. Which means, okay, it's all about chat and it's all about tree time, it's all flat. You can talk to anyone at any time without wasting much time to writing emails and sketching before someone else says no, we don't want to build that.

Now what happens is that you find a problem and you share it with everyone, like hey guys what do you think? If anyone has an idea, share it with me. You start receiving some ideas and then the product manager's responsibility is to make an advanced research when it comes to this. It's important to see the competitors. It's important to see the best practices. It's important to read any articles, researches about this and come up with an initial plan that also includes the other suggestions from the rest of the team members.

Then more discussion will be say higher level discussion will start with, okay this is a nice plan, how can we build it with the least resources? Building a feature should be handled the same way we build the new product. First, how can we prove that this would work before we build it 100% technically? We might spend a month building this new onboarding process for example. Or a new registration process. Instead of your email and password and other things, we want to do it no data for example required from you and you just go and use the tool and then you sign up later. This is a big initiative. We need to test if this is going to work.

I always tend to build a landing page or make some changes on that sign up without any technical changes on the backend. Just front end changes. With some HTML's and CSS and some optimizing or visual side optimizer tools. You can build a landing page. You can build a... Make some changes on that page and test the reaction from the users for a while. Of course, it depends on the amount of traffic that comes to that page, but you see, okay I test the theory on the front end and then I bring this data to the team and I present my plan, but this time packed with real data from our users. Not only research.

This is how I do it always. First, talk money language. Second, do your homework and research. See you competitors and other best practices. The third, try to test it without any technical work from your team. Don't waste their time on something that's not going to work. Test it first, yourself. There is always a way to test yourself. You don't need to be a senior python or PhD developer. With some basic HTML you might test a big theory easily. Then come back to them and ask them how we can build all that plan into iterations as well. Did that answer your question?

Suzanne: It did. It did. I'm so... Well, I think this is such an important thing to break into because we talk a lot about metrics and we talk a lot about, you brought up Liam's startup, Eric Reese says the most important metrics are the ones that inspire us to take action. What you're describing here is the practical steps that a product manager can take and should take when they need to take action based on data that they're seeing. Are there... You mentioned optimizing... What are some of the tools that you've used just in your arsenal that you think are the best for measuring app performance or seeing those places inside the software where people get stuck. For making these type of quick AB type tests to landing pages, et cetera?

Motea: Many tools. When it comes to data collecting, we used to use only Google Analytics. I think Google Analytics is great. Although it might be a little bit complicated when it comes to events handling and sending all the data from the backend to Google Analytics. What we have done, we kept Google Analytics for the basic metrics, but we started using a segmented IO as a hub for all the event data from our backend and from the website.

What happens is that when any event happens, occurs, we sent a segment... Segment IO is not an analytical or reporting, it's just a hub for data. In one click from segment, you connect with some analytics tool like Segmented IO or Casemetrics. This means that using a tool like Segmented IO enabled us to integrate with many other analytics tools without the need to making the configuration with each of them every time we need to. We sent all the data to segment the data... Means, for example, a user with that IP address visited the website, visited that page and that page and then signed up and then signed in and then whatever ever events we send from the backend like made installation successfully, created the first project, resolved an error, et cetera. We get the full picture about the whole journey in real time.

This data we send to a reporting tool like Segment. Segment, so easy. Create a new report, and then select the evidence I want. For example, visited pricing page, then signed up, then made a payment. That would be...

Suzanne: The ideal journey.

Motea: The ideal journey. Of course. For example, signed up within the last year and then upgraded. Then upgraded again for example. You create whatever reports you need and I explain this in detail because I need to focus on one important thing, it doesn't matter what the tool you use. What matters is that you have all the data and evidence from the whole journey of the user. From clicking on that back link on a website. Or your ad on Facebook to literally everything that user has done on your website, marketing website, and then your application. Making payment and upgrading. Even referring your website, your tool to a friend. If that friend responses to that invitation and how many friends respond to that invitation. What important to have to be able to collect all this data, send it to one place, and then connect it to whatever analytics tool.

Suzanne: This is what we call Pirate Metrics. AARRR. You've heard this?

Motea: Of course. Yeah.

Suzanne: Acquisition. Activation. Retention. Revenue. Refer. Right, forget about everything else. If you can't complete that entire bridge for one customer or many customers, this is another helpful way of thinking about focusing on the right things in the right order. You don't have to solve the problem of retention if you haven't solved the problem of signups.

Motea: Absolutely. That's another challenge for many startups. Is going to focus on, for example, acquisition and referral before they enhance the activation and retention. A product without activation and retention doesn't matter how many users you acquire, you're going to lose them all. That's a different story anyway.

Suzanne: Talk to me... You brought up culture before, right? Culture, being up in Silicon Valley, you said Rackspace had great culture. What do you think makes for great company culture?

Motea: It's like, I believe culture is how the employees feel when they are working that company. Just like user experience, how the user feels when they interact with your business. It doesn't matter if your form is one hundred fields or three, what matters are they inverted enough to complete it? The same with companies. I want to everyday to go to that company, am I willing to take it to that extra mile and do something more than only what they ask me for.

With companies that you feel that you're safe, I think feeling the safety in the company is one of the most important things when it comes to culture. I mentioned Rackspace because one of their culture, not rules, but it's like culture... I don't know how to describe it, but they say treat your [inaudible 00:33:15] as friends and family. That's actually what happens in a company like that. Even when something wrong happens with any of them they share it with everyone. Hey, who can help that [inaudible 00:33:30] in any how? Also, for example, the CEO, the way he treats everyone else. The employee of the month gets to ride his fancy car for I don't know, two days. It's small things.

I totally believe that it comes from up to down. From the top management to everyone else. The culture starts on the top, the way they treat each other and the way they treat everyone else. It's still hard for me to describe what culture is. I'm sure there is better way to describe it, but for me it is how I feel when I go to that company. Do I feel like I'm working with friends and family? Do I feel like... Am I forced to go there? Do I go there just to get that salary at the end of the month? Or do I love working for that company?

Suzanne: Do you think it's possible as a product manager to love the company and not love the product? I mean, the culture is so great. Friends, family. Drove the CEO's car and then somewhere in your heart think this product isn't creating real value? Or is that the ultimate conflict for a product person?

Motea: It's possible to hate the product and that also has something to do with the culture in the company because is the culture about having a product and you need to make successful whatsoever, even if you hate it? Or do they force you to work on something you hated? That has to do with the culture. Everyone should work on something that they love, first. Second, the culture of [inaudible 00:35:37] startup, which means this product should prove a theory, a hypothesis. If this product, we either need to pivot or just put it on the shelf and go on with something else. Again, we have a mission we need to reach or achieve. It's not about how we do it. We have plenty of ways to do that product.

It's possible to hate the product but I would suggest if anyone that hates the product they work on, but they love the company, is to talk with their managers, the management and explain. Not to say anything about it is the problem. Working on a product you hate is not a problem. It's just a challenge. It happens to everyone but if you don't say anything about it, that's the problem.

Suzanne: Thank you.

Motea: No problem.

Suzanne: I don't know why it strikes me as so funny. I think another way to think about it hearing you respond is, remembering that sometimes the products that we work on wouldn't necessarily be the products that we would choose, or that we need in our own lives. This is that important piece of, the role of a product manager is to always be the lifeline to the customer. To always be remembering, are we creating value for this person?

You use Airbrake as the example. If I'm not a developer, whether it's a good product, or not a good product, or I would do it differently is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is do I understand who these people are? Do I understand what their day looks like? Do I understand how this product can create value for them? If you remember that I think that can give you a path to loving your product's mission. Even if the product doesn't necessarily inspire you.

Motea: Yeah, I agree with you. I also think that working on something that you don't love won't bring your innovation and creativity. This is very important for product managers because product management is all about creativity.

Now the technical side of product management is fading away with all the program languages and all the advanced re usability and working with great talent and the development team. When it comes to the product management, it's all about finding an innovative idea. Things that he can prove that's going to work and bring value as you said to the customers.

Working on something you don't like... I know other people might disagree with me, but don't suck it up. Say something about it because life's too short to work on something you don't love.

Suzanne: What's it like being part of a great company like Rackspace, with a great culture? Then seeing the company get acquired. You have to imagine that the founders are going, finally. We've got our exit. We've been realized. What is it like being there?

Motea: What got acquired is Airbrake. From Rackspace.

Suzanne: Ah. Same question.

Motea: Okay.

Suzanne: You were there for a number of years and so what is that feeling?

Motea: It was so weird. It's like working on a product within a big company and then this big company decide to selling this product out to another investment firm. At first I was shocked, how can that happen? Then I saw the picture and I understood how this is a better fit for the product. That is related to liking and hating the product.

This product should fit with the whole company. Airbrake should fit with the Rackspace mission and should help the big company. If it stops helping that company achieving their goals it becomes a challenge more than an obstacle to the big company.

Actually I think it was smart to sell Airbrake out. Airbrake now is doing great and working as a startup, not as a big corporate like it was in Rackspace. Now working as a startup, great growth, more space to hire, more space to innovate and that was win win situation for everyone. It felt weird at first, but I got it after.

Suzanne: Do you have advice for somebody listening in that's thinking about getting into this world? You talked about finding something that you love, but maybe something more practical. Where do I start building my skills? What is the best thing that I could be doing right now to build a case for hiring me as a product manager?

Motea: Companies that want to hire product managers, they want them to have an experience in building product. The thing that happens with these new product managers, or student project managers, is that when they hear the company say we need experience, the first thing come to their mind is experience means a job. Experience doesn't mean only a job. Experience means trying to build a product. If you're new to product management start building a new product yourself, with your friends or yourself.

The product doesn't necessarily need to have that great sophisticated backend. Just go to [inaudible 00:42:51] and build a website that is offering something and test the market. If you get enough sign ups for it, or subscriptions, or whatever, or leads; bring someone on board and start building the product. Get yourself into building products.

Product management is building products. It's not only about how to build products. My advice is get out of the building...

Suzanne: That's Steve Blank's advice. Are you testing me?

Motea: I was about to say, Steve Blank's advice, is to get out of the building. Get an idea. Wherever that idea is and go and get feedback from targeted customers. Get their commitment to use it if you build it. Then build a case about what you've done. That's a project. That's the experience.

When you apply for a job in product management, say hey here's what I've done. I get an idea and I have a theory that this could work but I validated that theory by asking the customers and they are willing to pay that much. One of them actually paid me that much to build the product. Or, I built the product and they got testing. Or something... Build a case and that enough I think will be great for you to land on a project management job.

Suzanne: You mentioned Steve Blank. You mentioned Eric Reese. Are there, in your experience any must read books, or blogs, or podcasts? Whether about products specifically or business that you think... You have not touched this resource. You don't even know this world.

Motea: I would say, Getting Real for...

Suzanne: Thirty Seven Signals.

Motea: Yeah, for the founders of Thirty Seven Signals. That I think is a must to read book. I'm looking at my Audible library, see what books I've read. Getting Real is definitely very important, especially for new product managers because it takes you from the theory to more practice. To understand whatever you've read before, Getting Real, gets you real. Gives you exactly practically what you need to do.

I would say, when it comes to if you want to start your own business, as a product manager, Zero To One, by Blake Masters, Peter Thiel. It's just a great book. Zero To One is... Peter is one of the founders of Paypal and Zero To One gives you a great view into what makes great companies great. Zero To One, it's funny. Peter has only one tweet on his Twitter account and when he had this book published and this tweet was Zero to One. He had zero tweets, to one tweet, and that was... Anyway, irrelevant. Irrelevant, but this way you won't forget the name of the book.

Suzanne: Amazing. I didn't know that. That's great.

Motea: It's a great book. Other books, I love The Tipping Point, Malcolm Radwell. This is very important because project manager should focus on data and if you aren't focusing on data, you need to understand... You need to know two concepts, the tipping point and the slipping away point. The tipping point is when or where the users become very active. Their attention goes up. The upgrade rate goes up that point, something happens and you need to figure it out. For example, how many monthly payments they make until their retention rate hits the 90%. Which means, for example, after three payments they're 90% likely to stay with me for another year. Figuring out the tipping point is very important because this way you will have a goal for any user with less than three payments. Your goal is always to hit the three payments with that user.

The slipping away point is the opposite. Where it goes down. For example, in the second step of the signup process they slip away. They go. Creating tipping points is very very very important.

Suzanne: Motea, do you have a sound bite, a personal mantra that you use to get you through the day? Or something that stands in for your own kind of philosophy about work or life? Something you feel comfortable to share.

Motea: Can I ask that question in different words? Different words and different way?

Suzanne: Yeah. I always talk about it like, if you were world famous and there was a poster on the wall, with a quote and then your name was attached to that quote, is there one? Something that you always tell your friends or your colleagues?

Motea: Yes. Actually quotes are important to me because every while and then I have a quote that I religiously follow. The one I had before last year was... What was it? It was, one of the best way to find happiness is the ability to ignore things around you. I know this quote maybe needs some explanation, but long story short, if everything around me gets me angry or sad or something like that, I will never find happiness. The more I can ignore these bad feelings, the more I can find happiness.

This year's quote is, education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence. For Robert Frost.

Suzanne: One of my favorite poets.

Motea: Yeah, it's just great and it gives a new definition to education because education is actually, yes, if I can listen to anything. Whatever I read, whatever I listen. Whoever I listen to, without losing my temper, without feeling oh he's attacking me, and without starting to compare myself to that person; this is the only way that I can learn from that person, or that book, or that Podcast.

Suzanne: Motea, thank you so much for coming by. Really appreciate all of your wisdom and thank you for sharing with our audience.

Motea: No problem. Thank you.