You're Not Thinking Big Enough

Suzanne: All right. Why don't we get started. Tell us who you are. What's your name? What's your role? Who are you?

Nacho: International man of mystery. No, so my name is Nacho as you know. Nacho is in fact my real name. Nacho is short for Ignacio. Just like the nickname for Robert is Bob. So, it is in fact a real name, in case it was a concern. Also, it's a, another important fact to know is that the food is named after the person, not the other way around.

Suzanne: Is that true?

Nacho: It's absolutely true. Nacho and I invented them. They were Nacho's especiales. So that is why the food came in with the name. So, at least, if you learn nothing else, you'll learn that.

Suzanne: Yeah. Interview over.

Nacho: So that's the name. I am Principal Product Manager here at ADP. I've been here for almost 3 years. I am working in our innovation lab trying to help establish products, processes, ideas, and basically evangelize for innovation and product here.

Suzanne: What is a Principal Product Manager?

Nacho: Yeah, so Principal Product Manager is a completely made up term. It's a position that I made. Basically, my role focuses ... I have no development teams, first time in years I haven't had a development team. So my team are the product managers. I work with the product people. I do individual coaching. I work on sort of, as a one man product center of excellence. I help produce processes and supporting documents we follow. And help develop the team and develop the product. I work across organization to help spur innovation and the correct way of thinking sort of across ADP.

Suzanne: Now, ADP, I mean maybe for our listeners benefit. I'm sure people know ADP, or they've seen the logo on their pay stub. What is ADP briefly, but how then is ADP innovation center? Which is what you're a part of. How are they different?

Nacho: Right. So ADP has been around for over 60 years. I mean the reason why pay statements look the way they do is because of ADP. Right. We've been around for a very long time. But we cover the whole payroll world. Right, from your moment of hire till you retire. ADP's focus is definitely payroll first but the innovation lab is here to help start off or kick off a lot of new things that can happen in this space. You know, ADP pays so many people, we do so much work. We can leverage our position, our data, our products in ways that we haven't considered before. So the innovation lab is one of 2 innovation labs that we've started to focus on those long term goals as well as help ADP become a leader in the software space for our market. For the B2B market.

Suzanne: Wow. So, and maybe this is me being judgmental, but I mean looking at you, you've got a Star Trek t-shirt on, you've got a cool blazer. You don't seem like, when I think ADP, you don't seem like that guy.

Nacho: That's-

Suzanne: It feels like it's outside of what you would typically be doing.

Nacho: Yeah. That's exactly right.

Suzanne: I'm being judgmental, but accurate.

Nacho: Judgmental, but accurately judgmental. That's right. So, yeah my career started out of high school basically knocking on doors and telling people their website sucked. I turned that into a design agency. Taught myself how to code, design, and really kicked off my career from there.

Suzanne: Wait, did you not know how to design and code before you told people their site sucked?

Nacho: No, not really. No.

Suzanne: So you're just like-

Nacho: I knew a little bit of Photoshop.

Suzanne: I can't do it better, but I'm pretty sure it can be better.

Nacho: Yeah, absolutely. It was so bad, like I can do better than that. And, we did, I mean it turned into a whole design agency at one point. ADP specifically was almost an accident. I was actually working for Kerio in Irvine doing practice management software. So, working with billers. So at the time ADP had a competitive product, AdvancedMD. They called me for a position in health care. I'm like, oh great! Competitive intel, so I took the job interview hoping to get some competitive intel on AdvancedMD. Turns out first round, they were like, no thanks we don't want to hire you right now. You don't have a college degree, but thanks for trying. No skin off my teeth. Two weeks later I got a call from the VP of innovation lab here and he says, hey Nacho, that thing about not hiring you, that was a huge mistake. Can we have you come back in and work here? So the interview process was really interesting. I remember coming in and meeting with one of the GMs and she said, why do you want to work for ADP? And I said, I don't. I said, you know, your products suck, it's clear you don't care about your customers. You know, you're failing to invest in the right areas. And they said, well that's why we want you here. Right. We want you here to help build up our products, to help us invest in the right areas.

So, sort of accidentally stumbled upon one of the greatest opportunities where I am.

Suzanne: So, ADP innovation lab is specifically for innovating ADP products.

Nacho: That's exactly right.

Suzanne: How many products are in sort of the ADP ecosphere?

Nacho: There are probably hundreds of products in the ADP world. It's hard to realize how big ADP is. We have 60,000 employees worldwide. We have at least 3 payroll products. Each of those payroll products have ancillary products. We actually have the number one business app on the app store. Most people don't realize, the ADP app is the number one-

Suzanne: Is that like just by necessity-

Nacho: Free business app.

Suzanne: Because of so many customers?

Nacho: Yeah, exactly right. They're looking up their payroll, they're punching in their time. They're doing what they have to.

Suzanne: Wow.

Nacho: But yeah, I mean we have products everywhere and people don't know that.

Suzanne: You, I want to go back to your story for just a minute because you talked about being out of high school and telling people their website sucked and then sort of reverse engineering a way to solve that problem in the form of a design agency. Where did you kind of go from there? Fill in the rest of the journey a little bit for us.

Nacho: Yeah, so I was always wanting to go into fine art, actually, in high school. My school had a really great program. I'd follow artists around for a while. It became clear that you really can't make a very good living in fine art. It's like professional sports, right. Unless you're the best of the best, it's gonna be really hard to do very well. So, that drove me to use my creativity in different ways. So I was knocking on the doors because I could draw better logos, right. I could draw better websites, so I did it. And then from there, you know, went to various other jobs, worked for a lot of other small start ups. But what I realized as I've tried different positions or worked for different companies is, although it wasn't called product manager at the time, that was what really fit me very well. Partly because I have severe ADHD and I can't focus on one thing.

I had this huge creative side that needs feeding and I had this huge analytical side that needs feeding. And there's very few roles that bring those two things together. So, along my journey, right, so the start up agency, did a little design agency. From there jumped to various start ups. Did a lot of great work there. Had a lot of fun. Stock market crashed, right. The bubble popped. Had to find more work. Started my second business in the software space back when cell phones were small candy bar devices. From there went into the gaming space and consulted for iPhone games and created different iPhone games.

All throughout, sort of taking product jobs, different business to business jobs, and going through I found out if I feed my creative side too much. I love it, but I get bored. So, that was one of the things the agency did very well. But I had to sell it because it just wasn't challenging enough, right. Then my second business, I taught myself to code. I did a lot of PHP, front end work, learned CSS for real for the first time. Which is great, but then I'm not feeding some of the creative side too. So, yeah, product just ended up being the place where you could bring those two worlds together.

Suzanne: It's balance.

Nacho: It's balance. It's balance and it's also attention. I think I would get fired in any other job because I'd be a bad designer. Because I'd get too distracted in the analytical side. Or I'd be bad project manager because I'd want to creative side.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, it's funny, we talk a lot about, on this show, the challenge of product management being that it cuts across so many disciplines. But we don't talk as often about how that can be a bit of a blessing. It's kind of one of the only roles that you can justifiably get aware with being not great. It's like, well I can do but I'm not the best at them because don't we have a whole UX department for that.

Nacho: That's exactly right.

Suzanne: Everyone says, oh yeah yeah, that's fair. That's to be expected. You just do the best you can.

Nacho: Yeah. That's exactly right.

Suzanne: You know you brought up the bubble crashing and I can't help but, I know you're not the industry predictor of things but I sense you have opinions about a lot of things. It seems, like I was as WeWork yesterday and my impression, was like, I was walking through and I was like, this is a lot of kool-aid has been had here. It's like 20 start ups per floor. Everyone working that kind of quintessential dream that, you know, the 2 start up founders and then their going to sell the company to Facebook for 2 billion. And that's a very different kind of dream and experience than, I mean, how many people here in this office?

Nacho: Yeah. Almost 3 hundred people here.

Suzanne: Yeah, like very different sort of application, I mean, being that you've come from the start up space and you're not in that space really truly. What are your thoughts about the next bubble crashing? Is there going to be a separating of the wheat from the chaff? I mean, that happens in market, just as a path to pursue.

Nacho: Yeah. I think your seeing that everywhere in the market now. Yeah, to back up for a minute. So I grew up in San Jose. My grandfather still lives there. He's in Palo Alto like a block over from Zuckerberg, like I actually check into Zuckerberg's house when I visit, on Facebook. So it's really funny because every time I go back to the Bay Area, I almost can't stand the mentality there because you find all of these young people who are like, I'm going to start this new start up, right, me and my friend are going to work in our garage and we're going to make millions of dollars.

The fact of the matter is, especially working with so many company start ups and starting my own businesses several times, you realize that dream is faded. That the idea of starting something, you know, selling it to Warner Brothers. Right, like if you're AOL or if you're whatever doesn't happen anymore. If you look at First Round, they did a really great article about the state of start ups and they talk about how investors have kind of figured out the game, right. They have more control than they used to before, so they can go in and force your vision to change. Or, you'll see people that start up and they want to solve a problem, but the problem is bigger than 2 people now. Right, we've kind of taken a lot of those easy ideas, taken the low hanging fruit and solved a lot of those problems.

So, I think the next big opportunity is in the business to business spaces in the larger markets. It's going to require, and it's going to require different skill sets too, it's going to require people to be able to work across bigger teams. To care more about the diversity of teams. To worry more about incubating those ideas in more meaningful ways. It's one thing to say, you know, I want to start up pets.com and make everything available online to sell my pet products. It's another thing to say, I'm going to fix these complicated tax issues for large organizations. And in many ways it's a more meaningful problem to solve because the other one is sort of easy if you will. Where these are taking real complex problems that are actually fundamentally affecting our world and solving those for people.

If you think about, you know, we have this dichotomy of our personal life and our work life. And our personal life, we surround ourselves with products that are fun, right. We use Tinder to hook up, or you know, Jobber to find the next job or whatever. I should not use the E R vowels anymore, but the, we have this sort of curated space outside work. And then work, almost by definition is horrible, right. But when we can transform that work, the software you work with to make it meaningful, to make it valuable, to make it so that work is less of a grind and more creative and engages more of you. We think it will fundamentally transform the way people do what they do today. ADP I think is that space to capitalize.

Suzanne: I like that you talk about, not just that the problems are bigger although I think that's a really important observation. But this idea of team structure and size, because another thing I think that comes up a lot for me, for our audience, is it's difficult to know the product manager role when the complexion of that role changes so drastically from place to place. Not just sort of from corporate environment to cool culture. Not just from sort of enterprise to start up, but am I the product manager, is the CEO the product manager and I'm just sort of bearing the title but doing more project manager tactical work. Do I need a second product manager? When do you go from one person to a team? How is is structured here? I mean, if you're the principal product manager, what does that look like in terms of how the product teams spread out?

Nacho: Yeah, so organizationally, the principal role sits aside. I get to kind of work across with all the teams and projects and dig in wherever things are necessary. Think of it more as a product coach or an innovation coach. But each team is set up on an outcome. So, if we have a tax team, they're built to solve tax problems, right. And then we assemble whatever staff we need necessary to solve that problem. Sometimes that's three teams, right. A development team that might solve one slice of the problem. Another team might solve the other slice of the problem. So, we have to have them sitting together. We have to have an organizational structure where they can communicate. We have to be really clear about roles and responsibilities, and we have to support them. I think a lot of the work that I do here, is defining our roles and defining what you do and don't do. Because again, both a large organization or a small organization, there's that ambiguity of, is that my job or is that product marketing's job, or you know is that the designer's job?

I think as product managers we fall into this trap of wanting to solve all of the problems too, right. We are, a lot of us, entrepreneurs at heart and we just want the product to ship and if I can design something and get it out the door, I will, but we fail to reflect or have sort of a clarity. A lot of my job is actually defining those roles and making it clear so that there is some kind of a standard on what you do or don't do. And that's both internally to help product managers to know what they can do and what skills they should learn. But externally, what should the business expect? What should designers expect? What should other people expect from their product managers? And what should they not expect? Right?

So we make it really clear, like one of the examples I use is, product managers are going to be really good at helping solve customer problems. Not very good at setting dates, right. You ask us to come up with the right answer but if we have to push a date to solve a customer problem and we think it's going to be better, I think product managers will push the date all day long, right. It's a different role, so you want somebody else to really be that task master.

Suzanne: Right. What skills do you think, I have students come to me all the time with this, right. They leave the product management course, you know, we've flown over this incredibly complex discipline at 40,000 feet and then they want to know practical things. I can't blame them for that. It's like, I got all this great concept, now I need practical. But, I mean, let's say I wanted to come here and work with you and be part of the innovation center as a product manager, what do I fundamentally have to be able to do skills wise in your opinion to be an eligible candidate?

Nacho: Yeah, that's a great question. For ADP specifically, because we're a large organization, so unlike start ups where you can pick and choose, I'm going to hire this guy from you know Netflix and pay him a ton of money. Because you only have 2 or 3 of them, you can kind of cherry pick, right. We need to help everybody and so we have to kind of be experts at teasing out talent. In fact, we have some job postings we're going to start experimenting with that aren't product job postings. To find product managers that ask for those specific skills.

So to get back to the question, I think as a baseline there are skills I can teach when you come into my organization and there are skills that I can't teach. So the things that I expect you to have that I can't teach are passion. Right, I expect you to have a passion, usually described as an unquenchable passion for product design, for something. One of the first questions in an interview is, what products are you telling your friends about right now? It's not about what apps you use or what software it is, it's about the shoes or the guitar or whatever. Everyone has some passion and I want to know that you follow your passions. The other thing that you're going to have is sort of taste. It's a hard thing to quantify but, you know what good looks like, right. You've, you're aware of things that have happened in the market, I think some of it just feeds into that passion. But you have sort of a sense of what ideal looks like. I think we're all sort of idealists at heart and I can't teach you that.

And then the last one, the last skill I can't teach but I really really value is grit. So as a product manager, you know, you know you're going to get punched in the face a hundred times throughout the life cycle of your product, right.

Suzanne: Sounds amazing.

Nacho: Things are gonna happen. Yeah, exactly, it's gonna, I mean things are gonna happen all the time, right. So, the ability to overcome those challenges and to move on. The ability to adapt and be flexible are one of the things that I can't teach. So those are the primary things I look for as far as baseline skills for product management.

Suzanne: You gave me a super cool tour and I have to say I was really impressed. You all were going for the look of innovation and then I think it was achieved. It's like open spaces, everyone is like real time UX is happening. White boards everywhere. And ... I guess maybe what I wanted to ask is, why come and work here? I mean, not you. You sort of explained a little bit why it felt like it was the next stage of your journey, but if you're looking for product managers, even through sort of surreptitious means, how do you convince people to come and work at a company like ADP, which to be candid, it's not like, it doesn't have the cache of working at Google for example.

Nacho: Yes. That is-

Suzanne: Is that a challenge?

Nacho: That is putting it politely and that is, that is our biggest challenge, right. Is getting the Google talent without the Google name, right. And so a big focus that we have here is, so we talked a little bit about career development. And so, ADP, because we put people on a path where they can be here for a while, right. So your start up career path is going to be 2 years, you're going to move on to something else, 2 years you're going to move on to something else.

Here we expect people to stay for life. We move them to different projects, to different teams. So there's that to start out with. The other thing is, ADP is sitting on sort of a gold mine of opportunity. You know, when I worked for a start up, I remember constantly fighting with our shareholders about what the right things to do was or what we had to do for the IPO wether it was best for the customers or not. And here we don't have those same pressures. ADP's already making a lot of money. We're already leader in the market. We don't have to prove ourselves anymore. So we get to do is say, you know, here's a runway, here's a problem, here's money, go solve that problem. So in a way, we have more freedom than any start up does.

I can tell you when I started here, I started a fairly simple project of sort of bringing our portal, you can tell it's a bad idea because we already called it portal, but up to more modern standards. The first 9 months were a complete failure. I said, we're not releasing this product. We have to say no. Where start ups would have to rethink they're strategy, ADP says, we're going to double down. We're going to hire better people, we're going to give you more time, and we're going to make it happen. And you won't find that happening in the start up space.

The other big thing is, we pay one in six of every American at any point in time. That's 30 million people that get paid every week. And so if you think about the life cycle of a single person, chances are we pay even more people, right? That's just a slice in time. We also do your taxes, we also do a lot of other services, so we have this data that Facebook and Google would kill for, right? So, we have this opportunity to begin leveraging that data but not only to create fun products that you would normally think of in the start up space, but to actually transform the industry. So, if you were to start a start up today and say, I want to change the way people get hired, like Indeed, right? It's very close to what Indeed is trying to do. They only have limited influence what they can do. ADP can say, hey we can create technology and we can influence our partners, or through our software and influence, you know, convert the way people get hired.

So, beyond the data and influence and partnerships we have, we will be able to do more to make a real difference in peoples' lives than I think almost any start up can today.

Suzanne: Well it sounds also too, like you know, what we're talking about is opportunities and threats and we've seen a shortage of big companies come crumbling down because they squandered the opportunity that they did have. That you just described, right. They had resources, they had runway, and they had customers, all they needed to do was start caring about the things that the rest of the world has started to care about. Like design. Right? It wasn't that many years ago that people who cared about design were just a tiny percentage of the population. And now, even if you don't consider yourself to be a designer or to sort of be design oriented, you still have a spidey sense I think for, this feels good. This doesn't feel good. You might not be able to articulate it.

Nacho: Right.

Suzanne: But, so I guess good that here we are, not talking about ADP could have.

Nacho: No, that's exactly right. It's exactly right. Yeah, very few companies have been able to have the self awareness or the moment to say, let's make this happen. So, I mean, I described that failure. Many companies won't have that opportunity. I remember even when I was starting here, it was actually really funny because I'm like, I don't know if I want to work for ADP. Same concerns we just talked about. And I actually had the chief product officer for ADP call me and say, hey this is real. So, where I think you've seen other organizations, like, if you think about Blockbuster’s missed opportunity back in the day. When they had an opportunity to buy Netflix. If you look at Blockbuster, they had people that worked there that knew the change was coming, right. They had staff that knew what was happening but the executives had their blinders on or they had different priorities.

I think in ADP's situation, the executives know what's happening and they are the ones that are dedicated to the change. So this isn't a grass roots effort that's getting squashed by executives, right. This is happening at the top and at the bottom. So we have grassroots people like me that are kind of pushing and climbing and trying to change the organization from the bottom. Then the executives at the top guiding and pointing, that's the way we should go. And putting their full support behind that change. So I think ADP is uniquely positioned to make change happen within their organization that hasn't happened before.

I actually tell product managers that start here, start writing notes now for your book because this is what the future of innovation will be. It will be fewer 2 people in a garage solving something to, going into a large organization and developing those people, right. It's, I can go into, when I started here my first 3 months in, my VP asked me, what would you do if this was your business. I said, that's easy, I'd rent the office across the way, I'd hire 12 people and I'd solve your problems in 12 months. And he said, you're not thinking big enough, that's how you would solve this problem but we're changing our organization. We're changing a culture, right. It's not about taking those cherry picked people and helping them solve a problem. It's how do you change the way ADP does it's work? Right, and that's the bigger mission, that's what we're focused on doing.

Suzanne: It's interesting, I did some work with the City of Los Angles and in some ways their story is a nice little parallel from what I'm hearing from ADP, which is, for people who don't know listening, the City of Los Angeles in particular is very committed to bringing sort of innovation, kind of, through its teams and really wanting to change a lot about what they put out, how they go about putting it out. And there are really really bright people and interesting things going on, but same, it's sort of mired in government everything is slow.

We did a panel. We talked about exactly this. There's a perception. It's a bit of a privileged perception. Those of us who come from start up. We have this arrogance, that, like you said, give me 12 months and 12 people and I can solve you problems, you guys are a bunch of idiots. Well, you know, you run an organization with 60,000 people. I'm not great at math but I imagine there's a lot of zeroes at the end of the P&L. You know, that's a huge company. There's got to be some credit to the fact that the problems are complex. The problems are not just simply waiting on a couple of flashy guys from silicon valley to like, throw a SAS product at it and be like, see.

Nacho: Yeah. I mean we have to play the long game, right. So we talked about personal development. You know, one of the things you notice when you go to start ups, like, when I go back and visit my grandpa in the Bay Area and walk around and meet people, is you almost see this same homogenous start up everywhere, right. It's the 2 white guys, you know, maybe the one brown guy, you know they get together and they start their company and then, you know, 12 months later, 2 years later, it's now 6 white guys, and you know maybe the one girl who is answering the phones or doing social or the social media marketing-

Suzanne: Just destroying me.

Nacho: No it's true.

Suzanne: It's truth, but it's destroying me.

Nacho: It's true, right. And if you walk around here, you'll see we have women, right. I mean, we have probably 50 percent women on our product team. We have women developers. We have all the different shades of brown. I think what we're tapping on is that, start up game works, but it's a short game play, right. I think this is the long game. Where, again, you're only going to come up with so many solutions when you have 2 white guys solving a problem, right. Versus a team of people that has diversity and they're not all top tier talent, that's fine, right. They're not all male, they're not all developers, but because they bring that diversity, because they bring their shared experiences, we can come up with solutions that they won't come up with, right?

Suzanne: Right.

Nacho: We have a perspective that is unique to theirs. One of the things, I think, we naturally self ourselves on our own product. We fall in love with our ideas, right. So, especially in that echo chamber where you have too many of the homogenous teams, the same kind of makeup, you're going to come up with the same kinds of answers to those problems. We really have a perspective that includes way more voice. The other thing about the long game is that because we're investing in those people, and we're investing in that diversity and that talent, is that as these people develop and as we work through these processes, we're going to come out the end in a lot better shape than a lot of these small companies are. Because we'll have brought sort of the whole zoo with us. The whole world comes with us. It's not just for a privileged few, or a few other people.

Actually one of the things I started here, partly based on that, sick of the echo chamber mentality and our tendency to fall in love with ideas. As a little phrase we call, your ideas suck. And you'll actually see this, we actually made it into a sticker. It's on. Yep.

Suzanne: They're right here on the desk people. They look good.

Nacho: They look good. Yeah, we'll give you a ... They're good for bad parkers too, just stick them on the key holes. But, the goal of that mentality is to say, the thing that kills start ups is the same thing that kills your product idea too, which is, you're not getting it validated by customers soon enough, right. We have a tendency to fall in love with these ideas and so your ideas suck is really a way to say, don't fall in love with your idea, test your idea. Come up with your ideas, and when I'm coaching my product people, I tell them, sit down in a room and come up with 20 ideas. And then know why you said no to 17 of them. Take 3 of them and prototype and then get those in front of a customer as fast as possible. Everything we do here is really focused on getting to that customer validation as soon as possible. That's what your ideas suck is really all about.

Suzanne: What are some practical ways, we talk a lot about validative learning and when you are a start up and you're in the early days, you can kind of take the Steve Blank playbook and hit the streets. Get out of the building, kind of talk to people, but when you are working at this scale, when you do have to get feedback, can you share with us some practical things you all do to get validation on prototypes or?

Nacho: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think our testing is probably as diverse as anybody else's so we do Starbucks testing like anybody else. We'll take a prototype sometimes and run out to Starbucks and test it.

Suzanne: A paper prototype?

Nacho: Absolutely. Absolutely. Paper prototypes and vision prototypes, whatever that is and we'll get them tested-

Suzanne: Is that like, can I buy you this Latte and then quickly show you-

Nacho: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it works out really well in some cases, right. I can tell you for example for the product that I'm working on, my vision is that a new user can understand what to do in 3 seconds or less. Well they're not going to understand taxes in 3 seconds or less, right. But they need to understand what the next step is. And someone buying their coffee at Starbucks should be able to test that out pretty easily. But another case is, you know we're doing a very complex report, well we're not going to go to Starbucks and get any meaningful feedback there, right. So we do a lot of actual remote testing as well. So Starbucks works great for those purposes, but there's no replacement for either remote session or actually visiting with your client, sharing prototypes.

And what I tell my product managers, is you're not asking them what they think, I don't care what they think, I care if they can do the job, right? So you test them through the process. See if they can accomplish the task. And then find out what they think after, you know do more of the soft testing later.

Suzanne: Right.

Nacho: Did that answer the practicals?

Suzanne: Yeah, no, no. Absolutely, and I think it is an important to emphasize is there is a time for kind of qualitative insights and anecdotes. Sometimes a quick anecdote can be an important part of a persona, for example. Just that sound bite or that sentiment. But then, yeah, what I'm really trying, we're talking about sort of key results. If you say, it's funny the guy with self proclaimed ADHD also wants a tool that can quickly move me through in 3 seconds or less, but if that's the key result that we're measuring then the task scenario has to be crafted in a way where it's ... Can the user get from A to B and can that time, in that time frame.

Nacho: Yep. That's exactly right. I think a lot of us get tripped up. A lot of us, I mean product managers get tripped up in these KPIs. Because we build KPIs and metrics that will hopefully come to a certain outcome or tell a certain story. But for those of, that have been in the field for a while you start to learn that those KPIs can be as much a weapon as they can be a tool for showing what's happening, right. If you measure your KPIs wrong, sometimes you'll release a feature and you'll realize, oh it's going the wrong direction, right. Or it's indicating something different. So, it's exactly right, that experience is what teaches you based on the outcome that I want, what is, where are the data points? Where are the tests? What are the things that I'm really looking for? Because it sometimes is as much ignoring some of the data as leaning into other things you're getting.

I like to tell people that, you know, when you learn about statistics you follow the average or the norms but those outliers have a story too. Right? You need to understand when they're bringing those outliers and when those have value to the thing your building.

Suzanne: Do your customers know what's going on here? By the way.

Nacho: So, our customers are beginning to know what is going on.

Suzanne: Is that part of your job? To spread the good word?

Nacho: That's right. So almost every week we have a client visiting here in the innovation lab, we walk them around our offices and let them see our diverse group of people actually working. In an innovative space. We talk to them about our mission. We talk to them about the values and we talk to them about the new ways we do things. Actually had a really big client here earlier. We're showing them a bunch of our slides and the, your idea sucks slide, they actually asked, hey can we share that here. Can you send us a copy of that? Because we want to share that too.

So, we bring people here for a couple of reasons. One. We want them to understand that change is happening here. In fact my latest release, we actually released a video that showed shots of the office and showed people doing their work for that very specific reason. The other reason we do a lot of this is because we're in shared space, right. A lot of these organizations are going through similar problems, right. They are the Blockbusters of their world, right. So we can share similar struggles and we can align on that future vision. When we sell them on the, your ideas suck mentality, or talk about how we do innovation and it resonates with them, they're going to take actions that are going to follow that same path as well, right.

We as much learn from those clients as we try to teach them as well.

Suzanne: Speaking of teaching, we do a segment here on the show called, get the job, learn the job, love the job, and it's in service of our listeners who are thinking about making the plunge into product management. May already sort of be newly in the role and are kind of looking around going, am I doing this right? And frankly, those of us who are in senior positions' kind of look around and go, am I doing this right? So let me take you through it. First, get the job. What advice can you offer to somebody who wants to get into product management but maybe doesn't have that product manager title yet. So they just graduated maybe from a general assembly course, maybe they've been doing kind of their own guerrilla learning plan at home. But they, like you, they have passion, they're creative, they think product is the right space but they can't sell that they actually can do it.

Nacho: Yeah, and I think your touching on one of the biggest problems that faces the product market today. To be honest, there's probably really talented product people out there that are just stumbling around but they can't find the positions. And a lot of that is actually technological. They, if you don't have product manager in your resume, you don't get through the screen that then gets you to the interview. So, I mean touching on that, first it's get involved in the network. Go to the meet ups, meet the people, find out who inspired you and follow them. Reach out to them. Connect to them. Build your product network so that people know who you are and what you're doing.

The second thing that I like to tell a lot of new people when they're trying to break into the space, is do something. Build a product, you know. You're passionate about something, scratch that itch, right. Get some friends and bring them in to work on your project. I can tell you one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest strengths of being a product manager is leading by influence. And people complain to me, but people won't do what I say, if you can't influence them, are they doing the right thing? Are you doing the right thing? Right? So, it's almost a blessing in that we have to by influence get people to do things. So, if you're going to start a passion project to make a guitar tuner app. I'm going to convince a developer to work for me for free. That's your first leading by influence project. Is finding that person, convincing them why it's worth their time, or it's worth their sacrifice and working on that in small chunks. The next biggest thing is do something.

Suzanne: Although I think the folks at guitar tuner really nailed that one.

Nacho: Yeah, they did really kill it. They did really kill it. Maybe not that problem.

Suzanne: I've used a lot of guitar tuner apps in my life and then that one came along. Should out to Guitar Tuner, sponsor of today's show, no just kidding. They're not our sponsor. No, and that speaks also to ... They say this as well in, for investors, when you talk about getting seed money and I think it's the same kind of concept. Who have you been able to convince to come along with you for the ride, right? If you haven't done anything else, do you have an advisory board of a couple legit people who have said, I'll give you some of my time and network because I think what you're doing is interesting and I think that you're credible and worth buying into. So, yeah, I mean half of it is about influence and that is such an integral part of the role anyway. I mean, again it comes up a lot but, that you have to be influencing so many people who are usually smarter than you and more senior than you to do what you want. Like, start early.

Nacho: That's right.

Suzanne: Build that up.

Nacho: Well, and the other half of that to, is once you've done that project, now you have something to talk about in the interview, right. Here's what I learned. Here's where I hit my head against the wall. Right? And so, it's both things. You've shown the path and now you can talk about like, no that, my experience, here's what I did learn and here's what I didn't learn.

Suzanne: So you're an innovative guy and this is another stumbling block that a lot of people come to me about. I'm curious about your opinion on this. What about getting in the door in the first place. So the roadblocks I'm hearing now is, there's resume scanners and readers, so if I try to design my resume a certain way it gets kicked out of the system, if I end up in a stack of paper. I mean, it's always been the problem, right. How do you sort of stand out in the stack of paper? That's practical advice for the interview. What's practical advice for, I mean aside from searching on linked in, Nacho ... and then writing you and saying, I heard your interview…

Nacho: Hey, we're hiring.

Suzanne: They are hiring, so actually do that. But how do you get known, like, stand up.

Nacho: Yeah, so, obviously networking is a big thing. So like we talked about before, going to the meetups, listening to the podcast. Commenting. Just being part of the community I think is huge. And then the second part is, yeah. I can tell you I've got 40 different versions of my resume, right. I got the resume that I actually give out. That's the real resume. And then, when you're applying for that job, you have a resume to apply for that job because sometimes, I mean, we all live in the same world. Sometimes you have to game the robo screener to get through the door. But I can tell you, product manager to product manager, I think our roles are more open to listening to outside voices than some other ones. Like if you're getting into finance it's a little harder to make a personal connection and get into finance. With product, you can make a personal connection and get in a lot easier I think because we're all curious by nature. We love passion. We're fired up by other people's passion. We feed off each other.

When you get into those networks, ask people, right. How can I learn from you? What recommendation do you have? What, how can I get better? I'm actively mentoring a few product managers now. So, often times it is that network. Just reach out to people. Make the connections, make friends. Learn from people and you'll be surprised. I can't tell you how many people I talk to now and I'm just shuffling them off to other organizations. Oh, I'm not happy where I'm at right now. What have you been hearing in the grapevine? Oh, hey there's this really cool company in, you know, whatever the thing. Have you heard about them yet? Oh no, and you connect them, and they can make that entryway.

Suzanne: Right.

Nacho: Beyond networking, I think that's your biggest-

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, it's true. I get a lot of product people, senior product people who come to me and say, do you know anyone? I'm like, I know a lot of people, I'm sort of between the funnel I guess on both sides, but it always reminds me that when you think about problem solution, right. There's always another side to the problem that you're experiencing and if the problem you're experiencing is you need a job, well there is somebody on the other end of that job opportunity that is desperate for the right person. So it's like, how do you crack that?

Nacho: Yep. And we're on the opposite side of that too, right. As much as we want to find good talent and track good talent, people aren't looking at ADP as a sexy company and so-

Suzanne: Yet.

Nacho: Yet. That's, that is precisely right. What do we do to bring those people, and to let people know about the opportunity that we have here at ADP. So part of that is this. We're actually reaching out, we actually host events here as well.

Suzanne: Yeah. We're going to do one.

Nacho: Yeah. We'll have something here up on the stage here. It will be amazing. So, yeah, a lot of this is going to be staying connected and reaching out. Look, you're a product person. If you're not going to take the next step to do something dramatic, nobody else will. Right and so if you want to get that job at a local software company somewhere. Reach out to that person on twitter and send a direct message, right? Or send that email, like, if someone's going to be bold, it's you. So go be bold and reach out.

Suzanne: What about the hard stuff? I mean all of that is well and good and inspirational on the inside. When do people fall down in this role that you see or that you have done?

Nacho: So that's a great question. I think, you know, the biggest problem we all face is getting over our own biases. I mention that first because, we talked about passion earlier, something you can't build in. But there are things that, there are skills that are foundational that you need to learn. One of those is listening, active listening is one of the most important things a product manager can know by far. I can't tell you how many interviews I sit in and they'll ask me a question and don't hear feedback. Oh, did that answer your question? Or, you know what I mean, they've gone through this long diatribe, when we don't know where we ended up from where we started. So, listening is huge. Along with that is a self awareness. Where am I strong and where am I weak? I think those are foundational. Once you have those foundational things, then you're looking at what are the leaders in my space doing? You follow Marty Kagan and you get the books. You belong to the communities. You ask for advice.

I think what not enough of product people do is actually look at lessons from the marketplace. So I work in a tax product. Super boring, super specific, but we're still doing the same work as everybody else. We still have tasks that need to get done. We still have users that needed to get added to the system. We still have buy decisions even though I'm not buying anything. These are all common practices and so we need to look out at other products and go, okay why did Spotify do it that way? Why did Netflix do it that way? Find out who those influencers are and then find out what those influencers do. I can tell you that's where my reading list starts, right. I think practically, if you can get that listening and self awareness and then you just start following your passion and start learning from these other groups. You're going to find a rabbit hole that will give you those hard skills. The books that will help move you to the next level.

Suzanne: What about just your favorite thing about being in product?

Nacho: So, my favorite thing about being in product is saying no without saying no. So this is a skill, if you've been in product for a while, you know, right. You're in a meeting with a great stakeholder, sometimes the CEO of the company, sometimes a large client, and they have a very strong opinion of what needs to be done. My favorite thing is to be able to say, is to be able to listen and then pivot that into what the vision, what we've already sort of come up with is. Again, that's working on the assumption the vision is correct. The idea is that when you have, you can listen to somebody, say, reflect that back. Did I hear that correctly? Oh, okay, so if I understand this lines up to our vision this way, is that right? Oh, if it lines up then don't you think that ... right. There's a very logical path you can take people down and I think it's almost more of a teaching ability than it is a negotiation tactic. Right. It's listening, making sure they know they're heard, reflecting it back and then being able to line them up on the vision that's there.

Suzanne: I think if it doesn't work out for you here at ADP, you could start a career as a couple's counselor by the way, with all the active listening, that's a big thing that comes up in couples counseling, right. Because actually though, it is phenomenal, you know, because our brain, the synapses fire and then you say something and I've already filtered it through my insecurities, all of my other assumptions, all of my irritation or whatever thing I'm feeling. It's like I've just distorted so badly the thing that I heard just now in front of me, let alone give it a few days or weeks to sort of make it's way around the office. So actually just stopping to say, before I go ahead and respond to the dirtied up version of what I think I heard, maybe I should just practice saying, is this the thing you meant?

Nacho: Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Suzanne: Phenomenal.

Nacho: Reflect that back. I think it's interesting because ... listening is that foundational skill, right. Like you said, we like to think ahead and come up with our answers but we don't spend enough time sort of marinating in the space, right. Or sort of appropriating that learning. One advice I like to give to a lot of junior people is, you can learn from every interaction or every product. It doesn't matter what it is, right. A product person made that decision, or CEO made that decision, or engineer made that decision. Why? Or you had an interaction with somebody and you went, oh man that was horrible, that's the worst conversation I've ever had. Well that can probably teach you something too, right? There's a conversation there, that, you can say, well I'll never start by telling people that joke about my name anymore, that went horribly. There's always something you can learn from an interaction. I think beyond that listening, the next piece is you're always learning, right? What can you learn from things that are already there and all the interactions you have all day long.

Suzanne: What about resources, you alluded to it in your last response, sort of stumbling upon the thought leaders. Are there any thought leaders, authors, industry folks that you think are, they know what they're talking about?

Nacho: Absolutely. Every new product person, I always have him read Marty Kagan's Inspired, How To Make Products Customers Love. I think that's a phenomenal starting point. Moving from there, I usually get people onto Hooked. I think probably a lot of these are already in your library.

Suzanne: A couple of them.

Nacho: I also love Basecamp or the 37signals. Yeah.

Suzanne: Yeah. Getting real.

Nacho: Yeah. Their book is phenomenal. Because it talks about, it's funny because it doesn't talk about, it's like a picture in a paragraph, right. Their book is more about the start up experience, but that's very much the same as the product experience, right. Things will change, be flexible, all that stuff rings true. And then beyond that it's digging in, right. Digging into your market, digging into the piece you have there. And knowing what you can learn from everything.

I was driving home the other day and this guy cuts me off, which you know, happens in L.A. occasionally. You kind of have a choice on how you react at that point, right. It's like, you mother fucker, you know, I'm going to run you down, this is horrible. Or the other thing is to think, you know, hey that guy might be rushing home because his child needs to be rushed to the hospital, right? And so, I bring it back to that because I think it's that nature, that mentality of learning is something you're not going to get from a book but is going to take you farther than almost anything else, right ... Is learning that whatever happens, I'm going to take that as a learning and then I'm going to move to the next thing I need to learn or the next challenge.

Suzanne: What was very, and I wrestled for a moment because that was so beautiful that I almost wanted to end on that note. But then, I was like I'm going to ruin it by having the last word.

Nacho: Fix it in post.

Suzanne: But what you just described is another quintessential skill of being a product person, which is empathy, right. And that ability to see the world from somebody else's perspective, even if that perspective is as you described in the case of being cut off, in direct conflict with what your needs and interests are. How can I see this differently?

Nacho: That's exactly right, and that's again, I mean to tie it back to the diversity. Our product is used, our persona is female. 90 percent of our users are female. And actually I'm doing poorly on diversity because only 50 percent of my product managers are female, you know what I mean. If you think about it, we should be skewed the other way around. It should be like 90 percent female product and 10 percent men kind of mucking it up. But ... when I tell a lot of our product managers when they go on their first customer visit. I tell them, they're only there to empathize. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about customer testing. Don't worry about showing well. Don't worry about PowerPoint presentations. Just focus on empathy, right, because if you can empathize you can understand their struggle. You're going to go a lot farther. And it's the same thing going back to your ideas suck, right. The problem is, we naturally lose that empathy, our natural vices will always keep back in. I have to constantly remind people in this office, like, hey, the problem you're trying to solve isn't your problem, right.

Suzanne: Right.

Nacho: It's Betsy's problem or whatever the name of the persona is, right.

Suzanne: What are the names of some of your persona's?

Nacho: We have a lot of different names for our personas. You probably have to walk around the walls, you'll see them. Mine is Betsy though.

Suzanne: Yours is Betsy.

Nacho: That's what I use, Betsy. I mean like, if you think about our space, we work with a lot of HR professionals and these are women, usually older, you know 45 and older. Sometimes parts of the country where they don't even have internet at home, right. So when you talk about these small start ups that are just young men, right. You're not going to be able to. You're so world apart right, from the mom who is at home and probably doesn't even own a computer. She might have an iPad and she checks Facebook and she has an iPhone, but her primary computer is at work and so, they have such a hard time getting to that point. It's almost more of a limitation. That helps, it's going to circle the conversation, right. It's about the diversity, it's about the learning mentality, it's about the empathy because you fundamentally, right, you have to listen and understand the problem and just solve the problem. That's it. That's all you do.

Suzanne: That's great. Nacho, thank you so much for making ADP innovation center our home for this episode of the podcast, for just sharing so much of your insights, from all of the years you have been doing it. We're greater for having had you here today.

Nacho: Thanks for having me. Anytime.