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Ladder Up

with Chris Hall of Red Bull Media House
Dec 21, 2016
21
Back to Podcasts
21
Ladder Up | 100 PM
00:00
Ladder Up | 100 PM

Suzanne: So we're here at Red Bull in Santa Monica. I have to admit I was a little surprised how calm it is here. I mean, I had this imagined idea that people would be snowboarding inside and bouncing off the wall. Like, vans and rock and roll. Is that a legitimate perception on my part?

Chris: Absolutely. In fact, if you would have come before we actually, physically removed the skate ramp that rolled through our office it was a half art installation, half physical skate ramp, I think you might have felt a little differently. Going through some office reorganization and potential remodel, so in fact, it is a little bit less exciting but I can promise you that the work being done is energetic and exciting.

Suzanne: Right and you're actually drinking a Red Bull right now, so this is ... We don't have a visual audience, but that's how much you're bought into the brand here.

Chris: It is my after 3 p.m. 12 ounce sugar free. Yes.

Suzanne: Is Red Bull coming into its maturity? Is the removing of the skate ramp and the much more sophisticated campus some indication that Red Bull, as a company, is moving to a mature place in the market?

Chris: That's a good question. We're a very multifaceted company, so obviously we have the consumer package good the actual beverage itself that's been on sale starting next year for 30 years, if you can believe it.

Suzanne: 30 years?

Chris: It's a 30 year old company started in Austria in 1987 and came to the United States in the late 90s. On the Red Bull media house side here in Santa Monica, we're really focused on inspirational products to bring our world of Red Bull content to users around the globe. That, in and of itself, is incredibly energetic, exciting and we're very happy with the progress we've been able to make to try to build a companion product to the beverage side of the business. This allows us to bring the world of Red Bull to people that might not ever even consume the beverage.

Suzanne: Awesome. I guess I just dove right in because I was excited. I am excited, but let's go back a step. I want to talk first, Chris, about your journey. One of the themes that comes up on the show over and over is this idea that there's no straight path into product management. So many people we've spoken to accidentally ended up into it or put the product manager label on themselves after they realized that they'd spent a decade doing product management without actually necessarily knowing it.

Your path is yet again a different path. It's one of kind of laddering up. You really got your start at NFL. If you look at your sort of professional resume it's like job at NFL, different job at NFL, yet another different job. Sort of becoming increasingly senior and then working more and more toward product. Can you just take us back in time from that sort of first role into how you got, certainly, into product at NFL first?

Chris: Sure, absolutely. It all kind of started with a dream that I had in high school. Like probably a lot of young men that grew up in the Midwest. Well, I want to be on Sports Center. I want to be an Anchor. I had decided that, you know, you always here preached find for your career what you love to do. Well, I love to watch and play sports, why not get paid to be a broadcaster?

I evaluated all sorts of different options on how to make that work which culminated in me deciding that in front of the camera wasn't the place to be because there's a very specific journey and path that you have to take to do that and accomplish that. Let me work behind the camera. That took me into my opportunity at the National Football League working as a production assistant and telling the story of the game through producing content for live studio and remote television.

That was tremendously rewarding, but as a lot of people might know that have worked in television or have worked in really any position where you start and it's exciting and it's intense and you learn a ton, but you do it for two years and you wake up one morning and you say, "Where am I going? What am I going to do with this? I don't see a job that a superior of mine has that I want to take." It was at that moment that I said, "Okay, what's next? What can I do?"

I loved working at the National Football League. I loved my colleagues and the camaraderie and the product that we were putting out, specifically the game at that point and the content surrounding it. I transitioned into a management training program that the NFL facilitates called the Junior Rotational Program. That took me into a crash course in business. It was through that lens that I was able to analyze and see a path forward for where I could see my career going.

I moved to New York City from Los Angeles and had a whole new world opened up to me from a year and change spent in marketing. Entertainment and player marketing to a brief stent in our broadcasting department. Working with the likes of NBC, CBS on broadcast compliance. As I was sitting there in New York City after two years in New York I was like, "Gosh, I really miss living in LA." In addition to that, I was like I really miss story telling. I'm not doing anything that connects to media and that allows me an opportunity to be creative and to get stories out into the world and help facilitate the people that have those stories to tell them.

In a fortuitous bit of a slice of life I was able to work my way back out to Los Angeles which is where the emerging digital center of the National Football League was centered. It was in that capacity I was able to jump into product. I know that having talked with you, some of the listeners of the podcast are trying to break into product. Did you get a computer science degree? Have you been doing product at internships and whatever else? Guys, I didn't know HTML from CSS from JavaScript from poorly written email. I mean, I didn't have any sense for that. It was repeated mistakes and questions and failures and answers and successes and whatever else that lead me into becoming product manager. After two years was promoted and then after two more years I was the lead product manager for a video service that was brand new for the NFL.

It was a tent pole initiative at the time. A personalized video streaming service that there was no PRD for. There was a loose business plan/idea and as I've talked about with some friends in the past, we had a super bowl commercial before we had an API.

Suzanne: What happened there exactly? Somebody on the marketing side said, "The best way to launch this will be when ..." How many viewers in the super bowl?

Chris: The super bowl gains somewhere between 150 and 170 million viewers.

Suzanne: Let's just quickly launch the commercial to 170 million people. I mean, that's a good way to experiment with the value proposition.

Chris: And to turn up the heat on the motivation for the team. I mean, in product I know there's a number of people that have been in this business and have felt that void in like how do I motivate? How do I get people to do what I want them to do? Put a super bowl commercial out. There's no doubt in my mind that you'll get ... But in seriousness, it really was a motivating and inspiring thing to do to say, "We got to deliver. We know generally what we want to build but we absolutely have to start executing because we only have five months to get this out and because of the fact that we were going to have a ton of paid media and a ton of user acquisition tools at our disposal, we were going to get the audience."

That wasn't the question. They were going to be there. Which is an amazing proposition to have to know that you will have an audience.

Suzanne: And rare, frankly, for a start up. Even if it's a start up within an existing brand.

Chris: Yeah, the eyeballs would come and we needed to have a product that would meet them that they would really like. I think we learned a lot because we put that out, it was done counter to some product best practices that myself and my VP at the time knew that we should do. We were kind of one hand tied behind our back, do some business structures. Sure enough we had to pivot, but we pivoted it in a way and so fast while the audience was still coming that we were actually able to make a modestly successful turnaround in performance and consumption engagement.

That was a ... Everybody talks about fail-fast. Everybody talks about build and do things quickly and learn from them. That was invaluable, so I guess, to put a capper on that little anecdote about my career, coming up through the business and making decisions throughout. To put myself in a position to be able to wake up one day and be like, "Wow! I'm doing product work. This is pretty cool. I'm shipping things that people use and they can interact with a game that I love and with a sport that I'm passionate about and I would be a consumer if I was on the other side of the screen." That's a pretty amazing feeling. It's only extended as I've come over to Red Bull and even grown in leaps and bounds from there.

It's absolutely possible to get your foot in the door someplace and end up a product manager, much like you said, waking up 10 years later and all of the sudden you're a product manager.

Suzanne: Right, well you bring up two points that are interesting and I talk a lot about this with my students. We talk a lot about it on the website, as well. Advice for getting jobs. We sort of dove right into this, but we're here so let's hang here. One thing that I love about your story is, and this, for whatever reason, seems to be going away. At least it's been my impression, is starting first with what you love. Here you are this young guy from the Midwest. I love football. I've been indoctrinated from an early age and I'm going to be in football somehow, some way.

That kind of tenaciousness and that sort of passion around whether it's a specific vertical, whether it's a specific company, that's a really important place to start because that passion you can't ignore it. When somebody comes into the office and they say, "I have been waiting my entire life to be part of the NFL," you believe them. I mean, they must have believed you because they let you in the door.

I think lesson one, start first with those things that you love. Govern yourself from your own passion place. I think the other thing is thinking strategically about your own direction. Right? Maybe what I'm getting at here is the difference between being sort of a passive player versus actively, strategically aiming yourself at product. I have a lot of students that come into my class because they're sitting in a junior user experience design role. Or, they're a digital project manager. Or, they're working in marketing and they're kind of, how I describe it, peering over the fence and they're seeing how fun product can be because it's strategic, because it touches so many different things. They want to get there.

Certainly taking a class is a great way toward that, but the other part is setting a clear intention within your organization to say, "How do I get from here to there? Show me the road map from whatever. Whether it's intern to senior product manager, and if it takes 10 years, fine. Show me the road map."

Chris: Yeah, I second that and I would say a great way that I've seen to do that, and I've actually hired people in this capacity, is find projects that you can work on in whatever role that you're in. Certainly if you're a project manager, certainly if you're in QA or if you are in marketing. Find those projects where you touch product as much as possible. Not that you would be an owner, so to speak, but that you could liaise with them and just look for the trades. Look for the opportunities to learn from the people that are doing it well in your company so that when ... And try to take responsibility in whatever way. If you have even a small task that relates to an initiative that is going to ship or is going to be a product feature or functionality, own that and treat it as if you were a product manager.

Whatever that concept is for you, so that the next time you're talking to someone about being interested in product or about something associated with that role you can speak more authentically to it. You'll have seen it in action and you can say, "Yeah, and I had a slice of that." Maybe bring some insight to a meeting that you might have that would be with a product type role, whether it's a data point or an article that's about a similar aspect and related field. These are all things that you can do to subtly be thinking about how to become a product manager that are absolutely free, absolutely at your disposal, super easy and honestly, like, I think from my position in a leadership role in product if people are bringing that stuff to me and to my attention in a meaningful way, I'm instantly going to be more interested in what they have to say and hearing about that.

Again, we have hired in both of my main product stops. People from the business that we know and are trusted and get the brand, and get the culture and understand the core of what it is that we're doing and bringing them into the fold and making them product managers. That, to me, is just as viable as going out and trying to interview 30 people to 40-50 people to try to find, okay you get the sport or you get the brand Red Bull or you get this lifestyle. If I already know that you're here and I already know that you know that intrinsically, great. I'm going to bring you into the fold. I can teach you product and you're going to learn on the job versus let me go find somebody that knows product but is going to have to indoctrinate themselves in a whole new way of thinking about product because of how important our brand or our sport or whatever it is that we're trying to get out to our audience.

Suzanne: Again, testament to the passion pieces being part of it. This is another thing that I hear a lot. Side projects and I think the variation on that theme that you're describing is look, if where you are right now within your existing organization is leaving something to be desired well number one, congratulations for having enough self awareness to see that. Right?

Chris: That's a great point.

Suzanne: Not unlike you in your sort of every two year self reflection moments stopping and saying, "I'm not feeling fulfilled. What would help me to feel fulfilled?" That kind of awareness is amazing. Number two, dive into something. Demonstrate ... You know, the expression goes your actions are speaking so loud I can't hear a word you're saying. Don't tell me how much you love product, show me.

Chris: Exactly.

Suzanne: Whatever that looks like. Whatever opportunity exists whether it's doing side projects because you don't have a clear path to touching within where you are or just getting more actively involved internally, kind of as you described. Taking action is essentially the theme I'm hearing.

Chris: Yeah. I think it's true in most facets of business. One of the things I look for when I'm interviewing product managers to come and work for our team is the sense of ownership, sense of responsibility, pride of taking something on and seeing it through from start to finish. You have to have that. I think there's a lot of people that might be very smart or very technical or big thinkers, but a product manager that can do and exceed at execution is going to be far more beneficial because the more repetitions that you have at that, I do believe that at some point if I were to say, "Hey, stop doing. Let's take a step back and let's think strategically." You're going to know the underpinnings. You're going to know the challenges that you need to avoid as you're taking that level up of that big picture view.

You can always think greenfield. You can always say, "I want to have the biggest and best or the newest or the most successful," but you have to stay grounded. I've heard a ton of stories about startups and different technology companies in the world that completely disintegrate based on the founder wanderlust of what their product actually is. If you have executed and you have shipped and you know what it takes, I actually think it makes you a better long term and strategic thinker because you're still grounded as you're putting that out there.

I think it's important because we can't all be launching balloons into space to give Internet to the world or building amazing electric vehicles in our garage that we're going to sell to the mass market. We can change the daily lives of people with simple and elegant software that allows them to, in most of my experience, watch inspirational stories or get access to information that they feel really passionate about. It can also help you book a doctor's appointment, listen to your favorite song, book a reservation for you and your friends to go out to dinner. Those are all amazing opportunities to touch the lives of different people in small and significant ways.

Suzanne: Well no, you're absolutely right. Not everybody's mission is a philanthropic one and that's okay. There are people who have that mission and they're going to bring great products and solutions to the world and we're grateful for that, and then there is the philanthropy of creating products that are valuable to people whatever that is, right?

Chris: Right.

Suzanne: It's funny listening to you speak. You so clearly come from the world of sports because it's like all of these concepts are rooted in tenacity. One of the things I say with my business partner all the time is starting is easy, finishing is what's hard. When we consult clients, especially startup clients who have an idea and want to bring a first version of a product into market, inevitably what comes up, well first of all what comes up is I always have to force them back in time to do customer development because they've already made a bunch of assumptions that we have to go back and validate.

After we do that you get into this place where the sales and marketing strategy is still very rooted in well yeah, we want to sell to this company but we would also sell to this company and you can see that they're teeing themselves up for becoming a custom software solutions business instead of a product business. As somebody who's run a customer software solutions business I can say I don't wish that on anybody to go into. It's a hard business.

If you're creating a product there is a certain merit in having a vision for it, getting to that first milestone. If you need to pivot because you realize that the market or the segment that you thought was the best segment isn't, fine, but finish, get there, make that discovery, then pivot, then reopen it rather than sort of never finishing anything. Always being in the detail. Always adding a feature. Always changing your mind. Being blown about by every wind. That's that founder wanderlust I think you're talking about.

Chris: Yeah, and I think for a team psyche perspective, as well. You should ship. You should get something out there and start to collect that data even if this is the minimalist viable product that we could have shipped. The psychological effect of getting that out there and saying, "Team, we did it. There's something that's now out in the world." Whether it's a new feature that is just bolted onto something that existed, or if it's never existed before. That's an accomplishment.

I think to your point, being able to have that experience of bringing it to life and then starting to collect the data and the analysis of how you can then shape what it is it should be. I mean, the history books already are littered with examples of different apps and services that started out as one thing and literally became something totally different in a really meaningful way. I think is really amazing and that's true, not even in just technology, but in business for the longest periods of time. Think about all of the advances in technology and science that we have because like, well, it was going to be for the space shuttle but it ended up being now it's in everybody's kitchen, or something like that. You know what I mean?

These are things that if you don't do you will never know. Taking it 80% of the way and then be like, "Ah, well, we don't know if it's going to work." That to me, that would be a stagnation point for me at a company where I would say, "It's time for me to start thinking about what's next for me," because I would much rather spend, even if it's an incrementally high amount of effort to go that last 20%, then it would be to start over with brand new assumptions because we've totally pivoted.

But - I realize that what we just talked about is actually a dichotomy. Right? We say do and ship and get it done versus well sometimes you need to pivot. Maybe you're 80% done, but the data suggests that you shouldn't finish that last 20%. These are, I think, at the crux of what is interesting and challenging and fun about product is that you have to walk that razor's edge and figure out what's best. I think the most successful, the best product managers find a way to walk on that edge as long and as best they can but are okay with falling off either side. I think you have to be willing to be like, "Yeah, well, one time we're going to make the wrong decision and that's okay."

Suzanne: One time? If you only do it once that's pretty, that's a good track record.

Chris: Absolutely. I mean, I think learning from your mistakes that's true literally in life, but absolutely true in product. Repeatable mistakes a death note. That's how you're going to lose your audience. That's how you're going to lose your user base. Your fans. Whatever it might be. Learn from your mistakes and then iterate on top of those and make something better.

Suzanne: Well, I like that you also bring up the point about moral. This is something that comes up in talking about product road mapping and best practices which is, if you've got a road map that's got a lot of sort of big releases and big ideas, throw in a couple of small projects in there. Let the team have some wins and see some things get stood up. It also speaks to the merit of small batch thinking, right? Which is that if you're somewhere between getting data at 80% that you shouldn't continue and you throwing something out there, it brings back this concept of is there a smaller, faster thing we can do? Not just for shipping for moral sake, which is important, but also let's just see. Right?

I mean, we have a product we've been incubating and I said, "Well, let's just put up this landing page with this form." The team is like, "That's not going to be enough. No one's going to see the value in the form. We have to at least have the downloadable report. We have to at least have the video." I'm like, "I know, I know, but it's going to take six hours to write the white paper and 12 hours to do the video and another week to get back and approve and finalize those things. In the meantime, that's two weeks of data that we're not collecting. Let's put up the form."

Sure enough, the market, a lot of validation was yeah, the form isn't enough. Then boom, somebody comes along and they buy in and they're going, "Yeah, this was useful to me." You don't even get a chance to collect those little insights if you're always in the planning. Like, sort of hunkered away. It's a fear mechanism, too, right? As long as you're in development you're not failing.

Chris: True.

Suzanne: Theoretically, right? It's the product is just not perfect yet. When it's ready. When it's ready.

Chris: We're in beta. We're in beta. We did something similar with Red Bull TV and it dates actually back to before I started on the project here at the media house, so focus most of my time at this stage on Red Bull TV which is basically bringing the world of Red Bull content to inspire people, again, through story telling on any of the different platforms. We're live on upwards of 13 different code bases which is amazing.

We didn't start that way. Obviously you don't necessarily start, you don't just all of the sudden come popped out fully formed on all these platforms. We started on a handful. Obviously, make a website. You make a mobile app and we experimented with apple TV and with some others. You start to collect the data. You put the content out there that you think people will like and you organize it in a way that you think makes sense. We have teams that analyze data and do the programming. When I say programming, I mean actually set up what content shows up where first and what position on the page. You just learn from it.

That, to me, when I was coming over from NFL to Red Bull and making this career transition was amazing because I knew that we weren't starting from scratch. I knew that there was a data set that was going to be there that would help inform where we wanted to go. That we took and brought into our design and UX investigations. It helped inform our focus groups and our user testing that we did in multiple locations around the world. Red Bull TV being a global service. We couldn't just use Southern California bias to be like, "Oh, this is probably what people like." We talked to people in Japan, we talked to people in Germany. We tried to gather enough data and user feedback based off of prototypes that we built to help inform that decision.

Look, I think it's amazing that Red Bull and to some degree, NFL, we had that opportunity. I know that I would imagine for a lot of listeners there just isn't that. There's not the funding to spend as much time or there might not literally be enough time or runway that they have to actually do some of those steps to get out there and you have to make some assumptions. If it's possible, it's incredibly valuable to help inform the vision and the scope of the project. We really put a lot of that, not only content and programming learnings that we had, but usage behavior into the entirely re-imagined interface that we built for the next generation of the platform.

For me, that's really, really cool. Because not only were we building a new frontend we also completely redid the backend of the service. When you start to peel away those layers, that is a massive project. Those are I think for a product manager like myself who's kind of come up in the world of product inside of mass organizations, is the sweet spot. That's the cool stuff. That's the we're funding this big initiative, we're funding this big project, you guys got to make it work and you got to get it at scale and it has to grow and people need to come to it and they should love it.

It's just really fun. It's a ton of pressure because you have stakeholders, you have internal people that have expectations that may not align with what you know to be true about product. That's a very interesting political challenge to navigate. I actually think that it comes kind of part and parcel with being in this role in that seat. Being able to evangelize for the product to all stakeholders in the business, to external technology partners to QA engineers and everybody in between. You have to be able to talk to all of those different communities and I think that's really great.

Suzanne: You're speaking so compelling that I think somewhere after this interview there's going to be a lineup outside here at Red Bull and maybe down the street at NFL of people going, "I heard Chris talking. It sounds amazing. Sign us up and he also said we didn't need any real skills."

Chris: Oh right.

Suzanne: You said that earlier, I just wanted to remind you. We really love football, we really love Red Bull. Let's talk about how you got to Red Bull. You spend a decade, was it a decade with the NFL?

Chris: Eight and a half. Yeah, eight and a half years.

Suzanne: You know, you were sort of pivoting within the organization. How did Red Bull manage to loosen your grip on this organization and this sport that you love so much?

Chris: Totally. Great question. It was a wrought decision. I mean, it really was. Anybody that's worked at a place for a long time and kind of come up with that organization I would think that as long as there hasn't been like a major facilitating moment that soured you on the place, it's a tough decision. The relationships that I had that I made at NFL I'll always treasure and they're still some of my mentors. They're still some of my closest friends. They're still some of my most respected colleagues and who I can call to bounce ideas off about product. Of course we still play fantasy and rib on each other all the time, right?

Suzanne: Of course, of course.

Chris: When I was thinking about, after I had launched my last project at NFL and we had pivoted and we'd built this product and what not, it became a little nebulous as to what the future of that was. I think, you mentioned about self awareness, and I think it's a great trait to have in life but certainly also in product. I started to say, I have done everything that I reasonably know that I could probably do at the NFL. In my current role I've launched multiple projects. I've worked in a subscription business that brought in 10's of millions of dollars in revenue. This has been just an amazing ride. What could I do to top it and what is my path to continued growth?

When I looked at it and I really reflected on it it was X number of years more before the up-leveling happens and more roles and responsibilities are provided. I said, "Okay, I'm not sure that I want to sign up for that, even though I know that I could do it and I know that I would really enjoy it." The other side of that is, if you spend a lot of time in a big organization and you're coming up, at least for me, it's hard to shake that sense or that feeling of I'm really junior and everybody remembers me when I was less than I am now. I know that I know more now and I know that I should have a bigger seat or a more prominent seat at the table, but it's especially when I think certain executive level types have seen you and in your younger days or in your less experienced days it's hard to shake out of that.

I recognized, all right, I don't know exactly the next thing that I want to do or have to invest X number of more years before that happens. It's probably mostly mental, I'll be honest, but it's something I had to listen to and be true to myself for. I said, "Okay, let's go see if I can be successful some place else. Let me just see if it's repeatable. Could I do what I did at NFL at some other place? " That was going to be, I think for me, is product right for me long term? Like, is this where I want to be? Let me go see if I can do this again. I'm thrilled that it worked out as well as it did because after two years at media house, absolutely know that this is the path for me and the industry that I want to stay in with technology and with product because it can be just incredibly rewarding. It can also keep you up at night and cause you to work longer than your significant other.

Suzanne: The actual drink or the company? Both I guess.

Chris: Both I guess.

Suzanne: Right, right, right.

Chris: The work and the pressure that really as a product owner is your thing that's out there in the hands of users. You want it to be as best as it possibly can. Anytime it lets someone down you feel it. You feel that intensely and you understand that if the tables were turned and it was their service letting you down you know how that feels. When you do that to a user, that inspires immediate action. Certainly on behalf of product, but certainly also because your executives probably have heard about it and they're going to let that rain fall right downhill directly towards you.

Suzanne: Did you seek out Red Bull Media House specifically or the opportunity presented? Why did you set your sights here?

Chris: Yeah, opportunity presented itself and was very eager to listen. I had been aware of what the Media House organization was doing just based on the fact that we're in Los Angeles and they were, even early on, a pretty well respected media property. I know in I think it was 2012, fast company did a big profile on most innovative companies and I remember reading that article and thinking, "Wow, Media House. Okay, they're in our backyard. I should at least like maybe keep an eye on that." I think that's actually important. Wherever you live, whatever you do, be aware of the people that are doing things in industry and in product that you think are interesting so that you don't wake up one morning and be like, "I need to do a job search. Where do I go? What do I do?"

Suzanne: Right.

Chris: You have a list of, maybe you just have ... Even if it's a mental list, you have a list of things and you're like, "Well, I know that Riot Games is down the street. I love Legal Legends, so maybe I'll look into that," or, "Hulu's in town. Fandago's in town. What are they doing that's interesting right now and do I know anyone in that network and what not?"

It absolutely was opportunity presented itself, let me jump on that. I know that these guys have great content, which is absolutely true. Some of the most incredible things that people can do as a species, really, is documented in our VOD archive. Just really incredible, and it's not all action sports. Obviously, that's a stigma that we fight. We broadcast six music festivals last year. We have an incredibly well received program right now about search and rescue operations at the Matterhorn in Switzerland. I mean, I'm telling you what. I've watched this and the work ...

Suzanne: Who knew how sensitive the brand really was?

Chris: Yeah, well, it really does ... We have, obviously, really strict brand definition but it reaches into far different many corners of culture and life. It's a lifestyle brand. We have a lot that we bring to users and I'm excited to be a part of what that looks like.

Suzanne: Let's talk just for a minute because maybe there are people listening in who aren't familiar. I mean, certainly I think a lot of people are familiar with the drink.

Chris: Sure.

Suzanne: Maybe aren't as familiar with what is Red Bull Media House. Tell us, first of all, what's your role here and then what does that actually mean as it relates to the product.

Chris: Absolutely. Red Bull Media House was created in approximately 2007 in Austria. A lot of people might not know that Red Bull is an Austrian company based in Salzburg and came over to the US in the mid 2010s. We have basically since been really focused on creating the media network that can distribute all of the different things that Red Bull does.

Red Bull, still a private company, and distributes a number of different properties. We have a print magazine, The Red Bulletin. We have a record label, Red Bull Records, which has AWOLNATION, for instance, as an artist. Ripple Music Academy in Los Angeles, specifically we have 30 days in LA which is a concert series we put on. If you really start to unpack the things that Red Bull does it is multifaceted and very varied.

What I focus on at Red Bull Media House is the creation and distribution of Red Bull TV. Again, speaking to that, that's the world of Red Bull in moving images where it relates to adventure content, action sports content, culture and arts and lifestyle content which is heavy presence on music, and we have a ton of live events. A lot of people know Red Bull from a number of different live events. Everybody always says, "Oh, is that the, that's the one where like people drive off that cliff into the water. What's that thing called?" It's the Flugtag and yes we do still do those around the world in different locations.

We have so many different things that we co-produce or produce entirely on our own. Downhill mountain biking events, a cliff diving world series, we just had a tremendously successful Spanish Rap battle in Lima, Peru.

Suzanne: Wow!

Chris: It was called Batalla de los Gallos. It was absolutely amazing. If you know Spanish, you should definitely watch it. I know Spanish a little but not in the speed with which they were rapping at one another.

What's amazing to me about Red Bull in so many ways is there are really no limits to what we could do or what we can bring to our users. Because of that varied nature of the content, we have to build an interface for Red Bull TV that can satisfy a ton of different niche audiences as well as bring a best in class and premium experience to users. How that manifests itself for me is I am a lead product manager completely focused on the connected device space. That's really, at this point, everything that has a screen that we distribute on, and again, we're on a number of different code bases. We bring Red Bull TV to the users.

Obviously, your Android and your IOS Apple TV, but we also do over the top boxes like Roku. We also do Smart TV's, so like Samsung and LG Smart TV's we have our application experience on, and game stations, so PlayStation and Xbox. All of those different platforms have their unique oddities and eccentricities and little bells and whistles that you can tune to make the experience feel authentic to an audience that has an Xbox. Voice controls with your connect for Xbox, those have to work. With Smart TV, certain Smart TV's have a magic wand experience where you can literally mouse around on the TV by waving your hand in the air. Which, if you have one you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you probably are like, "What is he talking about?"

It's really a fascinating challenge to have to bring this truly unique amount of content into a user interface that makes sense and stylistically has a throughput to all of these different platforms and all of these different user bases who are really accustomed and familiar to navigating through there. We have to be authentic to those users so the main UX and UI is similar as possible, but we do make concessions, obviously, for the platform. That's a lot of what my team and my time is focused on is building those experiences for all those different platforms.

Suzanne: It's fascinating specific kind of area and I think what it brings up in my mind is the ways in which ... If you've got a product that's starting up then when you talk about creating value or creating a user experience, almost all of that conversation is rooted in fundamentally is this a product worth creating and how can we prove that and demonstrate it? Once you have a product that is in market and has some degree of product market fit, then the decisions of product management become less about these sort of overarching should we come into being or not, and it becomes should we make the experience feel more native to the operating system? How do we make sure to honor our Xbox users by making sure that this product feels like a natural extension of that platform. It's way more nuanced value creation is what it strikes me hearing you speak about it.

Chris: Yeah, and I think it helps to really influence our road map because now that we're out with our new experience, and I think this is true generally like we were talking about before. Once you're launched and once you've shipped. We have a ton of different input mechanisms that can help drive what we should do next by listening to the users as they come into our social media channels, through our customer support portals, and then of course, obviously, we have executive feedback in mind because there are ...

Suzanne: Damn executives.

Chris: I wouldn't say that. A lot of times they have good ideas.

Suzanne: I'm allowed to say that. I'm arms length.

Chris: That's right. It is, it's important. A lot of times they do have a longer term or a strategic thing that we might not be thinking about on the ground that we need to bring to bear as it relates to a bigger thing that might be coming as it relates to a marketing opportunity or something down the road.

A lot of times that's actually really helpful because we aren't privy, necessarily, to those major deal terms that are happening at the highest of levels, but we need to make sure that the product is ready to inherit that functionality, that responsibility down the road. You've got your user input, you have your executive input and then you also just have the raw data. Working incredibly closely with the teams that swim in that data to help drive what we should be doing next.

Along the way, yeah, you optimize, you turn the knobs a little bit, you tweak a little bit for the specific platforms and so you can build what you hope is a fully formed, full functioning system that allows the user to really immerse themselves in this video product. In the sounds and pictures, these moving images that is really meant to inspire you to be ... Maybe it's just to skateboard again. Maybe it's to read a new book. Maybe it's to discover a new musical artist that you hadn't had before, but those are the things that Red Bull TV tries to, I think, to bring to the world and I'm really proud that we've tried to build interface to reflect that.

Suzanne: We just had an episode where we were talking to an amazing story producer, Liz Armstrong's episode 19 for those of you who haven't listened already, and we were talking a lot about content as product. Funny, one of my former students specifically came to me in a class and asked about Red Bull. We were talking about kind of metrics and using data to inform the decisions that we make. His question was, "You know, Red Bull, so much of their product is content. How do they do it?" Of course I could only speculate, not sort of being kind of on the inside, but Lee, this is for you, by the way.

What I'm curious about, if you can speak to it, is how much of the content stream, which is now a Media House. I mean, it didn't begin as a Media House. I'm sure it probably began as some ways to create brand engagement, but it's now a stand alone entity. It's got a whole series of products as you've outlined. How much of it began as a way of bolstering the sort of lifestyle messaging of the original product, the drink, and how much of that is still true versus is it just simply a media company that shares a label with the product that's drink?

Chris: Yeah. One of the, I think, best things that is a part, has always been more or less made evident to me, is it's great if the can business is doing well. We are a media company. I have never had a KPI or a performance metric tied to whatever our sales are for the beverage business. We have user growth targets, we have monetization targets, and we have engagement targets. At Red Bull TV, we are a digital media product.

Even if the cynical view is, "Well, yeah, okay, but aren't you really just a giant commercial for the can?" Look, I mean, again, I think that's a cynical way to look at it. We're positioning ourselves so that we are a companion product. Red Bull TV is something that we would love to have elevated as a product akin to the drink. You might not, or some of your listeners might be like absolutely no on the energy drink. Not interested whatsoever. You should still have a positive brand association with Red Bull. That's possible through Red Bull TV.

You can still be inspired. You can still be excited. You can still find passion in our content and never touch the drink. In fact, you can watch for hours on our platform, there's never a wink and a smile, a swig of the drink and then a person going down a ramp or a mountain. That's not what the content is. That's not what it's about. It's about them telling their story authentically. One of the things that I think we do best is that Red Bull gives you wings, as you might have heard. We try to give wings to people and ideas. A lot of our content creators we've had relationships with for years. We will simply say, "What do you want to do?" They'll come up with the craziest ideas and we'll say, "Great. Here's the means to do what you want to do. We'd love to come along for the ride and film it and tell it in a true way about you and who you are and what you're trying to do and why." That comes across as, I think, passionately and authentically as humanly possible. You just feel it when you watch it.

In fact, this is a brief aside, but it's really hard to QA our products because you'll be, "All right, I've got to turn this on. I've got to check this settings feature to make sure the dialogue doesn't hang or freeze up." You'll turn it on and you'll be like, "Is he gonna do that?" Then you're five minutes later and you're like, "Snap out of it! I have to test this thing."

Suzanne: I love that.

Chris: Honestly, that's how you know that you're in it but in a good way. When you can connect, I think, as true to self as I can feel sometimes when I watch the content. I mean, really ultimately that's kind of a dream, you know? I felt that way with football, I certainly feel that way with a lot of Red Bull's content.

It's not possible in every product job. It's not possible in every business job. You might not care about widgets that you're selling, but it helps you live the lifestyle that you want to live. I find so much more happiness in knowing that what we're putting out into the world is interesting, compelling, crosses language barriers and it's distributed globally. I mean, this is stuff that can be enjoyed by a person in Sydney. Another person in Johannesburg, someone in Siberia. It doesn't matter where you live, you can enjoy and experience the world of Red Bull through Red Bull TV. That, to me, helps to inspire passion for what I do.

Suzanne: Well, it's beautifully put. I think two things, number one, forget about the long list of candidates standing outside. I might actually hand in my resignation tomorrow. I'm like, I'm bought in. Where do I apply?

Chris: I have not given her any Red Bull.

Suzanne: That's true.

Chris: I promise. Just water.

Suzanne: He did offer it, though.

Chris: I did.

Suzanne: Again, going back to what Liz was saying in that episode about story production. She was speaking from the vantage of a content creator. We were surfacing this exact thing is what is that fine line between sort of sponsored content and real content? Her point, which I think you're echoing beautifully, is the best kind of content is the synergy between the story tellers and the brand is so seamless that it's no longer about the product at all. It's like, this is a story that needed to be told. It made sense for us to participate in the telling of it and honestly, drink Red Bull or don't, but like don't deny this beautiful story because it's awesome.

Chris: Incredibly well said and I think you just basically summed up the exact measure of how we judge content here. I'm obviously not on the content creation team, but our producers, I think, have a very keen eye for should we have a product placement in that shot. No, it doesn't feel natural at all. Get the can out of there. It doesn't make any sense. It is absolutely about providing the opportunity for the story to be told.

If there is something that deserves an audience, odds are that we will be talking to that influence or to that person that wants to put that out into the world and we can help them tell it in a way and give them a platform globally to tell it. That's, I think, something obviously you can load something up to YouTube, but you don't get the benefit of having, I think, an audience built in to come to you and we provide that. We provide that platform that we can distribute globally and it's also a free app. I mean, we're talking about a free service here. Netflix and Hulu and many of the other staples in the US have incredible libraries and obviously, I'm a consumer of both, but right now, obviously, we're evaluating an advertising model but right now we're not even ad supported. I mean we're talking about a massive, massive library of free stuff.

Suzanne: Get that free content.

Chris: That's not even really to advertise the service, it's just, again, I get lost in QA. Like I just, you can't help but if you turn on our service you're going to find something that you'd be like, "That is wild." You're going to get lost in it for a period of time.

Suzanne: You have an application on PlayStation 4?

Chris: I do.

Suzanne: Okay, I'm going to get it. I've bought in.

Chris: Great!

Suzanne: I've drank the Red Bull. Let's move on here to sort of what I call the lightening round. We talk a lot on this show about get the job, learn the job, love the job. Obviously, we spent a lot of time earlier on with some really great advice for how to get into product management or move in. Talk to us about the hard parts about being in the role. These could be examples of things that you've seen maybe other Junior Product Managers or even yourself where it's like a common pitfall mistakes that can happen.

Chris: Yeah, I'm going to share an anecdote that kind of works both ways. It was a pitfall and then it's actually something that's come back around to be a positive. It ties back into a sense of urgency.

Very early on in my career when I was still not in product, but in production for television. I used to get, there's a TV term called gripping, which just means you're like white-knuckled. Like you're holding on to the roller coaster bar like really tight. I was really stressed about trying to get a couple of these different pieces of tape, these pieces of content edited. I was driving my editor, who I was working with that was producing a piece, and I was driving my editor crazy. He's like, "We will get these done. You have to chill."

I will never forget that moment because he was so spot on. We were going to finish in plenty of time, but I was just really nervous about not finishing. I took my medicine that day and I took a step back and it's helped me to be more of like that duck with the legs moving really fast under water but like very calmed and composed above and really internalize a little bit more to keep that.

On the flip side where I have seen, I think, some product managers struggle is if we have an outage, or if we have downtime or a bug that has slipped through, I don't want you to say, "Hey I saw a bug, filed a ticket. Done." I want a product manager to be like, "Hey, I found this or I saw this or I noticed that we're in an outage. I am now online with the developers. We are troubleshooting." Really to jump in and own it. Again, that's another one of those things where it's a fine line. It's important to have a sense of urgency, but you have to remember that there's a human element and there's a reason why things have to follow a process and you don't have to think that the sky is falling. I think that's one that's really interesting.

Then, I wish it was more interesting or sexier than this, but communication.

Suzanne: Communication is sexy.

Chris: Yeah, that's true. I have seen really smart and talented people just kind of work themselves into their own silo and you kind of forget then what they're doing and how they're impacting things. Then all of the sudden they'll send an email and just be like, "Hey, this just launched or this just updated or what have you." You're like, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! That's not only either duplicative to what I was doing or counter to what we needed to do, but I also could have helped you with that in a way that would have made it easier for you. I was halfway down the road for that anyways. You could have just built on what I was doing."

Product, if nothing else, you have to be a facilitator. You have to play the game between at a startup, basically everyone at a midsize or big size company, you absolutely have to be able to talk to legal, to finance, to developers, to QA, to business stakeholders, and everybody in between. External partners. Again, you have to talk to them in a way to evangelize, but also to troubleshoot and don't forget to eat your hat, sometimes. I mean, when you mess up you've got to own it and you have to be able to communicate that well. A mistake I made early on was being too transparent or too honest to be like, "This is exactly what happened." There is almost always, with a little bit more thought, a better way to frame things so that you're telling them what they need to know but you're also doing it in a way that better represents your personal brand and the business.

Don't just say, "Well, someone changed something on production and we didn't know about it." That shows that you don't have tight control over your organization or your team. Say that there was an unplanned maintenance that needed to happen, and as we were trying to optimize the platform in one area it broke another. No matter what, you've got to own up to those types of things and you have to know how to communicate, I think, in all instances. I know I was talking about sort of a negative there, but, on the flip side you need to be a communicator to evangelize for your group.

If you're in a product leadership position or if you're in a Junior position, encourage yourself or your team to spread the word about what you guys have done. I think all too often you find yourself like, "Hey, we just did all this stuff. Wouldn't it be great if more people were like excited about it?" Well, who have you told? Have you been at the all hands talking about it? Are you in a newsletter? Could you communicate it in a slack channel? I mean, there are a ton of different opportunities, I think, to get the work that you've done out there. Because if the people that you're working with most closely don't know about the cool stuff that you're building, there's a far less chance that it could go and be successful outside. Because at least presumably the people that you work with should care about what you're doing.

Suzanne: I think this conversation just became the point of departure for a spin-off series which is like lessons in diplomacy and stakeholder management with Chris Hall from Red Bull Media House. Okay, you've talked a lot about your passion, but specifically re: product, what is the thing that makes you think product management is the place to be? What's that thing you love about the job?

Chris: It is absolutely, it's building stuff. If you would have talked to my grandmother while she was still around she was always like, "What do you do?" She would always ask me like, "When are you going to get a job with some social redeeming significance?" My counter to that was, "Yes, I'm not building a thing that you can go to the store and you can buy and you can hold, but when I was at the NFL we would build products that brought the game into your hands, into your living room, into your home, into your office, your car. At Red Bull we bring this incredible treasure trove of content and stories into all of those same places."

That is special. Having the opportunity to have eyeballs that look at something that you've put your blood, sweat and tears into and have them write into you, and even if it's only a handful of people, or you see the app reviews or whatever else and you see that like this was inspiring. I talked about that search and rescue outfit out of Switzerland. We get people from fire departments and paramedic outfits from around the world writing and saying, "This inspired me. These are some of the best in the world doing it. I'm going to go back to school and go and try to do something similar."

Suzanne: That's amazing.

Chris: That story wouldn't have been out there without our platform. Yeah, I didn't fly in the helicopters on these search and rescue missions, but we put together something where we could feature this and put it front and center for people to engage with it and have it like permeate through their soul. That is an honor to be able to ... I also am just so passionate about just media and content creation and facilitation. I'm a TV junky and I love watching things. If the screen in the room was on right now my interview would have been terrible and I would have just been looking at that. I'm drawn to that and again, it just goes back to I know that I have to stay where I am because I get to do things that I would be watching if I was on the other side of the screen.

I hope for all of the listeners that whatever it is, if it's a philanthropic or if you can make an app that does something inspiring for a community that you're passionate about in any way, I hope that you can find something that truly gets you going and gets you motivated because it is a pretty cool thing.

Suzanne: On the topic of compelling content, since you are an expert. Are there any shows, blogs, podcasts, books, just right now that you want to contribute to our recommended resources list? Doesn't have to be PM specific, though, it can be just something you think is worth checking out.

Chris: Yeah, I dearly miss my Google reader account, which I had set up and dialed in and I loved it. I use Feedly. That just brings me all of my like tech news and articles. I usually look for things and headlines that seem to inspire me or entice me to click and I've had a really interesting finds recently from fast company, which I mentioned before. Harvard business review. I'm really fascinated on the management side of things, too. Because now that I've done so many things in the execution side, I'm certainly growing now into even more of the leadership and management role which I really relish. I want to make sure that everybody on my team knows that I'm going to push hard and I want you to challenge me back and I want us to know that we're all in this together and we're humans. I understand that if you've got a thing that you need to take care of, but the work is always going to be there and we're always going to do it together. I'm really interested in different articles and different blog posts about what it takes to really form a culture for your team that will inspire them to do and be better individuals and also better employees.

Suzanne: Well, I think you're doing an excellent job at inspiration. There's been no shortage of inspirational moments just sitting here and chatting with you. As a parting note, is there kind of an inspiration quote or mantra that resonates for you as a way of living your own life or something that you bring to your professional approach that you can share with us?

Chris: Absolutely, so I had been thinking about this since I knew we were going to sit down and talk and I am 100% going to steal one of my favorite quotes. Something that gives me the chills every time I hear the quotation, usually set to a hype video. Legendary Michigan football coach, Bo Schembechler, has a speech that he did off the cuff. The culmination is a repetition of the team, the team, the team. I never want to be a product manager in my life on an island doing something by myself. It is 100% about building relationships and learning together and pushing things forward together and it doesn't necessarily always need to just be with product. It can be with your legal group, with your finance group, with your QA, engineers, everybody should feel like they're apart of something. That they're swimming in the same direction. That we're rowing the boat together.

Those are, I think in business in general but certainly in product, that's what I live for. That's what I strive for because what you can accomplish, I think, together with people that are like minded and similarly motivated is exponential to what you can do on your own. I am so privileged to have worked with some of the most talented people that I've met in my career and I hope that I get the opportunity to do so and I hope that your listeners get a chance to find exceptional organizations or start their own organizations where they can work with really talented people because it makes all the difference in the world.

Suzanne: Chris Hall, I think your elders at the NFL would be so proud of the product manager and man you grew up to be. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really amazing.

Chris: Absolutely, no, it was a true pleasure. Thank you.

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Red Bull Media House

Red Bull Media House is a multi-platform media company with a focus on sports, culture, and lifestyle. As an umbrella brand, we offer a wide range of premium media products and compelling content across media channels as diverse as TV, mobile, digital, audio, and print, with core media offerings that appeal to a global audience.
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