Building an Online Marketplace

Shafiq: My name is Shafiq Shariff. I'm the SVP of consumer product over here at ShopRunner. We've been around for awhile. We have a retailer network of 150 retailers across Neimann Marcus, Saks, Bergdorf, etc, and four and a half million members. My focus is really on the consumer product and how we evolve our consumer value proposition for all of our retailers.

Suzanne: You probably arrived at “SVP” naturally, you've been in this industry a long time, but you started as a developer.

Shafiq: I did.

Suzanne: I don't know if you remember back in those days.

Shafiq: Yeah, that takes me awhile back. Yeah, I mean, I remember thinking getting into school I always loved coding as a kid, and I began with my Commodore 64 basic in Africa actually where I grew up and just writing programs and trying to figure out what all that did and just found out I was good at it. I loved inventing. I think this was always kind of a core thread that's followed my life where I love the idea of trying to create something out of nothing. Development seemed like the right place to go. It was a very exciting time. It is a very exciting time around everything happening with technology.

I remember really thinking hard about wanting to learn how to make all these great things happen. Java had just come out. The web was in the early days. I remember building things back then that would have been amazing if I had pursued them through but never really got around to it, but remember really enjoying getting deep into technology and just figuring out where it could go and playing with what was possible.

Suzanne: So you started your career as a developer, and then you kind of pivoted toward the sought after consultant title, a technical consultant sort of piece and then got into program management at Microsoft. Presumably that's when the product management journey kind of officially began?

Shafiq: That's right. I started off at Trilogy Software as a technical consultant as you mentioned. Very fancy but it was really a lot of flying around and trying to do what the clients needed to do, but a good transition though from knowing my technology in depth to really thinking about the business problem, what the client wanted, which made it the right time to move into program management over at Microsoft.

Suzanne: Right, so talk to us about ... One of the things that we surface a lot on this show is the path that people take into product management or the path that people in hindsight see led them into product management. It is common for folks to start maybe as user experience designers or researchers as marketing people. You don't see as many developers make the leap into the kind of more strategic center of product. I'm curious if you can comment on that either on behalf of developers everywhere or maybe just on your behalf of what allured you in?

Shafiq: Yeah, I think it all really starts off with the curiosity. I've always had this sense of really trying to understand the context in which things fed to really understand the why. I think what I wasn't content with just from a development perspective was just the technical challenge as opposed to the impact challenge and the why I was doing something. I think if you have that sense and you're really, really interested in product management, there are paths. You have to work at it. You’ve got to put yourself out there working potentially with our product manager or CEO in whatever context you're in to really set yourself up as the person not just who's accepting what needs to get done but being on the front lines of the consumer problem and really trying to articulate what can be possible.

I think that's sort of a clear path that got me to make that particular transition. I think otherwise, from a how to get into product management perspective, or how to beat a path there, there are a few different ways that I've seen work depending on the stage of career that somebody is at. I've seen a lot of people take the MBA route at a good MBA school and sort of have that internship be really the key milestone that gives them that entry on the resume and that initial experience that makes that happen. I've seen a lot of people from an operational background join a young and growing company, so at Groupon I saw this happen a lot.

I was with Groupon for a number of years. I saw a few folks who were really good at thinking analytically, thinking about the consumer, sort of start to become associated as a product specialist, so they'd work with the product managers in a deep way to bring in consumer feedback from either internal sales staff, customer service from the customers themselves and really become used to this idea of developing requirements, working through a product backlog, thinking about metrics, and then slowly getting a small APM position and then growing that into a full fledged product career.

Those are at least a couple of ways I've seen people make very successful transitions into product management with the right skills and foundation.

Suzanne: Right, and let me just frame up what I think you're talking about, because I've had a guest on the show talk about ... He was a hardware guy, and he got into product just by being on the customer service side, loved it, knew a lot, shows up a lot in the meetings and the conversations. I think that's what I'm hearing from you a little bit is if you're part of any team in a product company or organization, just showing up and taking interest in conversations that go beyond the scope of your job description is a good way to start to get noticed and start to get invited into more of those conversations. Is that right?

Shafiq: Absolutely. I think product management, as I'm sure a lot of listeners have kind of picked up over time, is an evolving discipline. There's always room for help. Product manager has so much on their plate, they can't possibly take care of everything, so being involved in the conversations, like you mentioned, thinking about the why and almost proactively volunteering to either bring in feedback or aligning a roadmap or detailing in some depth in a particular area will always help you gain the credibility and then the skills required for the profession.

Suzanne: I know I keep pushing you back into your past, and I do want to talk about your present, but Microsoft is a big company, and so here you are. You've pivoted away from traditional developer role into program manager. This comes up a lot. What is a program manager as opposed to a product manager?

Shafiq: That's a really good question. Microsoft, what I loved about Microsoft is that it's, I think really initially spearheaded this idea of product management or what's grown into product management in the form of program management. I think if you read the literature, it really starts off with excel and they brought in somebody to really focus on the excel product and really make it usable from a consumer perspective and pull together all the different threads of all the different things that were happening from the engineering side of the world.

There really began this idea of very technical product management, which is how I think about program management itself. Program management, in my mind, is really about pulling together a lot of the technology, thinking about a lot of the the platforms and how they come together to solve a consumer problem. Now, at Microsoft, there was a very clear distinction between program management, which was translating a business idea into technology, and what they called product management, which was a little more of how we think about product marketing, so thinking about the market, who the consumers are, what direction the business was moving into. I think more and more as I've progressed in my career, I've loved the idea of basically bringing in those two pieces together. I think both of those in a single mind is what gets you true innovation, because you start thinking about what can technology uniquely provide that now solves a business problem and/or what new business problems are solvable by technology?

As I've thought about how to structure team, structure career paths, I've talked more about this idea of pulling together a single person who gets to know the technology as well as the business and then bringing in more junior people underneath them who maybe start off with just technology and then grow more into the business.

Suzanne: This points to another commonly asked question, which is how technical do I need to be as a product manager? I think you speak to it eloquently. There's this idea that some product managers skew heavily technical, and that can serve them very well in the context of leading a product with a really high tech focus, where explaining the technology and the value of the technology or the innovation of the technology is fundamental to the growth of the product. Then, sometimes I would imagine certainly in business to consumer context, knowing how to set up a funnel that works from start to finish, knowing how to integrate kind of acquisition techniques into the design of the product and the value propositioning is its own skill set, but I like hearing you talk about the importance of bringing those sides together.

I recently had a student in my class. We were talking about marketing, and sort of said, "Do we really have to know this as product managers?" I think you're sort of saying, "Yes."

Shafiq: Absolutely. A product manager has to wear so many different hats. I mean, the way I think about it is you're almost CEO of this product doing whatever is needed to get it out the door, so you have this jigsaw puzzle of a lot of people whose skills you can rely on, but any skill you don't have you kind of have to fill in or find a way to compensate for, so I think from that perspective, being very t-shaped is sort of a helpful thing, so having really good depth in one direction, whether it's technology or marketing or analytics or thinking about how the market works, consumer research. Then, having a really good solid foundation in the other places is, I think, one of the more important pieces to be able to really thrive as a product manager, which sets you up for continual learning, because no one's born with all those pieces.

You start off with what you're good at and then start to build in the other blocks that are important.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, hunger for knowledge is definitely on the list of qualities. You leave Microsoft, you're at Pelago, and Pelago gets acquired by Groupon in its very early days. I mean, this is a company Groupon would have been a little less than two years old, and then you go on to have multiple director level positions at Groupon for almost six years. Tell us about working at Groupon. How many employees when you started?

Shafiq: It's hard to pin down exactly strangely enough only because it made a big international acquisition, and Groupon, as you guys probably know, is very heavy in the operations side of the world, so I think we probably had maybe about 5000 and grew it eventually to 11,000.

Suzanne: Wow, man.

Shafiq: It was really strange for me, because I came from a company, Pelago, of 20 people. We were trying to find product market fit, competing with Four Square and the check in space. You know everybody at the company, and I remember coming into Groupon and asking exactly that question. "How many employees are at the company?" And literally nobody could tell me, because it was already so vast and so big.

Suzanne: Wow.

Shafiq: From year two to year six, it's just been a crazy ride. I think I enjoyed every minute of it.

Suzanne: You moved into sort of different product functions during that time. What were some of the things that you were responsible for just in kind of a summary view of your career while you were there?

Shafiq: Yeah, I'll take a quick step back and just talk just a little bit about Pelago. Pelago was coming out of Microsoft focusing on a lot of platform product management, how to build out the Xbox points platform to power what's happening at Microsoft and all different Microsoft businesses. Pelago was a really refreshing breath of air where walked into a startup, really preen product market fit in a lot of ways and started to really learn the basics of thinking about consumers from a consumer perspective, so like I mentioned, really started focusing in the location space and the check in war.

We launched with Four Square at South by Southwest in the same day. We focused more on storytelling and our purpose was to increase the possibility of human connection and adventure in your everyday life. There I had a wonderful mentor, this guy, John Kim, who currently runs a lot of the product at Home Away, and our focus there was to really bring in consumers to understand what location meant, would they be comfortable sharing their location? Why would they do that? Are they interested in seeing where their friends were on any given day, understanding what was there in their city?

We developed this really great value proposition that was about checking in, creating recommendations to people like you, see people try the things you're recommending and getting that social blip in place. Those really phenomenal, I think, building block and learning experience around what it takes to really think about outside in product management. Taking that to Groupon, jumping into Groupon, it was year two. There were, I think, there was a new clone coming up every day. It's called attack of the clones. Fastest growing business ever, and it was really a matter of survival, so at Groupon, the rhetoric at the time was whether Groupon would survive at all.

Because it was so easy to switch from one provider to the other, you had Living Social as a competitor, Amazon got into the game, Facebook, Google were all getting into the game. Yeah, the real question was would Groupon survive? I remember thinking to myself at the time that Google kind of had the same problem. Back in the day, for those of you who can remember it, it was Google versus Alta Vista versus Inktomi, and Google had exactly the same question. Would Google survive, because it was so much competition as salvage search engines with big business relationships, but google really thrived at the end of the ...

It was easier actually at the time to switch from Google to Inktomi. All you had to do was type in a very different search string into your URL bar, but Google really thrived because of the quality of the search results. I remember coming to Groupon and thinking that's what I want to do. I want to really focus the key value add I can provide here at Groupon's going to be how do we get the right products, the right deals for the right customers at the right time? That's going to be the secret to success. That's what I really came in with, and focused [inaudible 00:14:49] had this idea of demand driven supply optimization.

We started to use a lot of the data we were collecting around what customers are buying, where they were buying it, so in Chicago, what does a Lincoln Park customer act like versus somebody who's our in the 'burbs or what are they interested in that they have more massages, more nail salons, more pizza? Do they go skydiving more often? Do they do more beauty treatments versus somebody who lives in the 'burbs? We'd use that data projected out forward applying seasonality. When are pumpkin patches going to be big versus Santa photo shoots, right, and back out from that into when our sales team has to go approach the merchants, and they would take the full corpus of all the merchants that existed in the city, how good they were, what quality they were at, and marry that into what a sales rep should go focus on calling in any particular time frame, so really focused on taking the data we had, the algorithms we had, to find the right deal for the right customer at the right time.

Suzanne: I mean, first of all, I love everything about that, including the bewilderment of going from 20 people to 5000 people in between a weekend, but I'm fascinated thinking about the amount of research that you're sitting on top of in a scenario like the one you described. Can you give us a picture, especially for folks listening that are still in a 20 or 30 or 40 person type organization, maybe they don't even have data scientists on the team. How do you coordinate that kind of qualitative and quantitative research, both the gathering of it and then the analysis of if at scale like that? What does that look like?

Shafiq: It's interesting that it doesn't automatically happen on its own either. You really have to start shepherding it from scratch and really starting with the vision of what might be and then really, really backing that down into very specifically the next thing you want to be able to build. What is the MVP? What is a customer scenario? What is the sales rep looking for next and validating that with our customers. It's really gratifying to be able to have the skill sets from a data science perspective, a data engineering perspective, data collection perspective to slowly start to get that to be more and more material.

With so much data, it's really easy to get lost. It's really easy to start to focus on data for data sake. It's really easy to sort of begin pursuing research and directions that don't yield anything, so as a product manager in that skill space, it's just as important in a 20 person company as it is when you have hundreds of engineers and data scientists to really focus on thinking about what is that consume problem I'm solving and then backing into that to get to the right data science research, the right data collection to be able to get to a result that's meaningful and defining what success means.

We thought about success a lot as the lift you would see from a consumer engagement standpoint, consumer order perspective from what they had currently to what the test is that you were getting out there and really thinking about how to make that happen at scale.

Suzanne: Yeah. Any favorite? I know there are so many different ways, and we need to explore all the different ways to collect certainly qualitative customer feedback, right? When you talk about keeping the customer in mind, remembering what is the problem that we're solving or what is the need that we're fulfilling, what were some of the tactics that you and your team used just as the company was powering through growth to go out and hear from customers about the right kind of offer, that sort of obsession that you had taken on yourself?

Shafiq: When we were at scale at Groupon, it really shifted from having one on one qualitative measurement over to really using the data as a gauge. We would try experiments all the time across the website, across consumer experience, and very much across the algorithms we end up putting into place. A core part of what we end up doing is the idea of champion challenger, so we'd always have everything from what we called our smart deals engine to the product I led quantum leap on the supply side, this idea of what the baseline algorithm was that was working and that provided the current results and then we start carving off traffic onto the new challenger algorithm.

As soon as we'd see in a sustained basis the lift, and there's a lot that goes into it about how you think about statistical significant, statistical power, how long you should run your results for, how many tests you can run at the same time, and as soon as you saw something provide substantial statistically supported lift over the prior algorithm, you'd make that the baseline and then start running other experiments with other hypothesis you had in place. That became the primary method of collection. What I did miss at Groupon, to be honest, which is what I did a lot at Pelago, was the very qualitative one on one customer feedback that we started to bring in here at Shoprunner.

Just last week, we had eight different customers across different segments come in, and what I think you get from that is a very different sense of the needs and wants and internal desire of a customer that you really can't get from the data. That is very valuable when you think about new hypotheses, new product directions you want to be able to move into versus the data driven approach, which is relay, really handy when you're in a place where the core product is understood, you have product market fit, and you're focusing more on optimization.

Suzanne: Right, yeah, so this idea of leveraging customers for feedback is an interesting one I think in that it parallels what you spoke about earlier, which is if you're an employee of a company that wants to get more involved in product, show some interest, participate in discussions, and you'll be invited into the room. I do think that there's an impression for a lot of people that customers don't want to be in the room and in the conversation, but that's not true. You have people that are willingly coming here just for what? What motivates them in your opinion to want to participate at this qualitative level?

Shafiq: Everyone really, I think, wants to be heard. Everyone has an opinion, and they want to feel like their opinions are valued and they matter. Once you have customers of your product, you'll have the range. You'll have the ones who are really passionate about your product, the ones who are using it because it's just what they do, and the ones who may have tried it once and gone away. All of those classes of customers are going to be really engaged and want to give you their two cents, because they spent their time and energy engaging with your product.

They want to be able to give you that direct feedback about what matters. What I find about consumer feedback is it's really interesting. It's the thing that everyone knows you should do, but there's this weird internal resistance sometimes to really wanting to go and bring it in. I think that's because we're all afraid of being wrong. We're all afraid of our ideas not really standing the test of what's real out there. If you read a lot of these failed startup stories, you almost consistently get this idea of we wish we had shipped something earlier. We had something out there that nobody really wanted, but we thought was really great. We asked consumers, and they all agreed with us. Then, we realized it was wrong.

There's sort of an art to the kind of feedback you get, but I'd say as a product manager, as a product leader, your primary responsibility to the organization is that you get out there and make that hard choice to get out there and bring the consumers. It's almost like exercising. You should get out there and run your x miles every day or go to the gym y times a week, and it's really hard to do, but you know at the end of the day it's going to be a great thing. As you talk to consumers, you talk to them one at a time or bring them in or run your surveys, on a daily basis, you won't feel the impact, but it'll change the vocabulary that's used inside the organization. It'll give you conviction about your hypotheses in a way that you never thought you had before.

Ultimately, you'll find yourself just making a lot of impulsive decisions. You'll find your organization making a lot of impulsive decisions that are the right actions for your consumers which then lead to consumer value and lead to value that you can capture, so I'd say yeah, there's really no substitutes for really making that step no matter how hard it feels like at the time to start to bring consumers into your process.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, candidly, I've failed multiple times from that exact reason. I think this also speaks to the fact that even though we as product people, seasoned product people know what we need to do, it shows how easy it is to kind of relapse into the wrong behavior, right, or over complicate it. Certainly, the more you know how to design product, the more you know how to build product, the more likely you are to spend time going straight to solution without stopping to say, "Wait a minute, is this the right solution?" In a way, if you've never done it, you have an advantage because you have to learn everything anyway, like how does software get designed? How does it get built? What's the right order? Who are the right partners?"

The more you close those gaps, the more you can close your eyes, think of a problem, and then later that afternoon have a working prototype, which tends to skip over that customer research piece that we're talking about. The expression that I like is embracing a mindset of maybe. Maybe this is a good product, but maybe not. Let's go see, and you do have to be okay with getting told no, which is easier if you come from maybe than I know.

Shafiq: Exactly. I love the idea of just options. I think that, to me, is one of the defining things that let's your organization be one that is a learning organization versus one that thinks it has all the answers and has only one shot really at a win or a loss. I love the idea of thinking about the customer and framing out what the problem space is, what the need space is, and then leaving that open to ideation on what solutions will be able to fit that particular question. Then, once you have a number of different types of solutions, you can then think about what is the MVP for each of the solutions that you're going to test out? What are the hypotheses we have, and how do we start to use those hypotheses to chart apart forward and to really accelerate the learning of the organization?

Suzanne: Right, so talk to us about Shoprunner. That's where you are now. For folks listening who maybe haven't heard of it, it's a startup, right? Is that fair to say?

Shafiq: Absolutely. We're definitely in the startup stages thinking about how we start to build out our next consumer value proposition, so Shoprunner has been around for some years. We've built out our retailer network like mentioned before of 150 retailers, so we have retailers of all shapes and sizes, everything from Neimann Marcus, Sacs, Bloomingdale's, Express, Bonobos, over to Theory and a number of really small boutique designers that exist in our network. On the consumer side, we have four and a half million members. Members pay $80 a year to get free two day shipping across our full network of retailers, so what we do effectively is this make it really fast and easy to shop at these retailers.

When we do that, we get a couple of different effects. One is customers start to think more and more only about shopping within the network, because they have this super power of free two day shipping. The second thing they start to do is they start to buy more, because they're able to get the free two day shipping. We also have free returns, which I didn't mention before, which is actually on par with free shipping, because it removes a lot of the risk of buying online, so we have customers who actively source out product in our networks because they get the free shipping, free returns. Then, they tend to buy more often, because the risk is reduced and keep more product because they tend to find that they're able to experiment more with trying out new things and keep things they really like.

Suzanne: One of the things that is a pattern of your career, or at least sort of the last decade of it, is this b2b2c component to your product management role, so it's really sort of beautiful, at least as we framed it up in this conversation, because you started at Microsoft where the two worlds were separate. Then, you went on to work in companies where that integration was not just a part of your day to day but sort of essential to the business model, right? I want to talk about, or I want to hear from you about how this shapes the work, because in Shoprunner and in Groupon one side of it is we have all of these vendor partners, right, the b2b side. How do we create value for our retailers as an example? Then, there's the b2c side, which is how do we make sure that all these strategic partnerships we're leveraging over on the b2b side actually translate to one or several compelling value propositions for the consumer?

I know I'm not really framing it in any specific question, but I just love for you to talk a little bit about what that looks like as a product manager in that space.

Shafiq: That's a really good observation, because you're right. At Microsoft, it was definitely more b2b. We were building platforms inside for the Microsoft businesses. At Pelago, really focused purely on consumer, what is the consumer value proper sharing location? I think what's happened since then at both Groupon and now at Shoprunner is we're real focused on marketplaces. Marketplaces are really, really interesting beasts. I guess I really like them because they're probably twice as complex as any of the business, as if any business wasn't complex enough.

I love thinking about value and the transfer of value from one party to the other and how we can facilitate that. Marketplaces have been really interesting because really have to focus a, on the supply side. It's really helpful in a marketplace to think about supply and then demand as opposed to our really mixing up the two, so at Groupon as an example, when I was focusing on how do we bring in the right merchants, how do we bring in the right density of merchants in a particular area? It was very much supply driven. At Groupon, when I transferred over to Groupon Good where I headed product across logistics merchant and the consumer experience really start thinking holistically about what is the value you give the merchant, and how do you build up the merchant funnel? How do you bring up merchant density?

How do you get to the point where you have enough product in all the different categories you want at the right density that consumers will now change their behavior and think about your marketplace as the destination to be able to conduct transactions in? I think what's really interesting about market space in the consumer side of the world then is you need to become this very trusted layer on top of a fragmented base supply. That's where the marketplaces work best, where you have fragmented supply, where you have everyone who wants to offer a service and you become a place they can get them very quick demand and make it really easy to provide supply into that marketplace. On the consumer side, you're able to take a lot of the fragmented demand and really provide a layer of trust and assurance, returns, feedback, convenience, where they can come to one place and shop across a range of other merchants.

Yeah, product management I think is twice as complex. You really got to think about the funnel on the merchant side and in building that up first, and then sort of get the fly wheel spinning to get the consumer side to increasingly trust the marketplace and to see that they have the supply in which you need. What I think about a lot there is this idea of almost building a fire using a chimney. If you've ever barbecued with a charcoal fire before, you can't just throw a match into the charcoal and hope it'll catch. You really have to focus on aggregating a lot of coal into one small area, pull in kind of this device called a chimney that makes things super hot in a very small area. Then, as that starts to catch, you can then start to expand that fire and have it grow.

You saw the same thing happen at Facebook where Facebook focused on college campuses. Tinder did a very similar thing, kind of focusing on college campuses. If you read about a lot of what happened in Uber, you learn they kind of go city by city seeding the demand. It's a very similar thing we did at Groupon where we launched a city by city. First signing up a lot of the merchants in a particular city and then started to send out the deal of the day to our customers in that city and really sort of building out a critical mass, which then starts to grow as the fire of demand, as the fire of the marketplace starts to scratch.

Very interesting challenges, very interesting learnings, very interesting approaches as you start to think about marketplace product management.

Suzanne: Yeah, I think that's a really great articulation of the importance of market segmentation, especially early on, but one of the things to go back to this challenge of basically building out two businesses at once, right? There's these two sides and they need their own special considerations. How does one ... Please explain to us immediately how it can create success in marketplaces? No, how does one focus on ... Is it moving both sides forward at the same time? This is the challenge of a marketplace. If you don't have enough of the vendors, then the customers don't want to be there, because you haven't really created sufficient value. If you don't have enough customers saying, "We're here and ready to buy," then it becomes difficult to leverage vendor support.

Is there a right sort of focus or how would you go about that in a simplified explanation?

Shafiq: I'd say you're exactly right, that it's like building two businesses at the same time. Like any product management for a V1 product, for an [inaudible 00:33:21] product where you're finding product market fit, you want to find a small segment of customers who will love you and start with that, who are willing to take a chance on you, who you're able to build a relationship with, who you're going out of your way to do things that don't scale. I'd say from a marketplace perspective, you definitely want to start with supply. You want to find those early suppliers, those early merchants who are willing to take a chance on you just because.

Maybe you'll be wild and they'll be one of the first ones that benefit from your success. Really start to gather that small group of merchants, that small group of suppliers and work with them to build a really compelling value proposition. Then, the same exact thing on the consumer side where you start to get to early adopters who are very attracted to that very small group of suppliers who are offering something very unique. You really want to segment, segment, segment down to a powerful merchant value proposition that appeals to a very small segment of consumers. Make that work really, really well.

If you can get that flywheel spinning, you can then expand out to other markets, other verticals, other segments.

Suzanne: There's this other theme emerging, which is this starting with why. It relates to empathy, which is something that we talk a lot about on the show, but I think you've used this term, value proposition, a number of times. I think as you just framed it there, getting down to what is going to motivate this person? If you look at it abstractly like I framed the argument, like why would vendors want to be in this marketplace when no one's on it? You're still kind of looking at it, I think, from 39,000 feet up above. You have to almost zoom in and say, "Why would Neimann Marcus, at this time and stage in their business, and what unique challenges are facing them." You almost have to kind of go person by person or segment by segment in a way and just get really into, "Hey, what's going to motivate you here?"

Shafiq: That's exactly right. As I mentioned before, organisms are basically learning organizations, right? The reason you bring in the customers for the qualitative feedback is so that you can start to almost hear what they're saying and hear what's behind what they're saying to find that deep unmet need, whether they know they have it or not. Then, use that as your why to start to build that customer by customer, a sense of what's possible and what solutions will help that unmet need. A customer base is only really a collection of individual customers, so you need to find a need that's deep enough that you can start to play with and provide a solution for that you, in some ways, hope is wide enough that you'll be able to get that to be a mass market product.

At the end of the day, all your customers are individuals with their own hopes and dreams and desire and life situations. If you can solve it for one person, then for 100, then for 1000, then for a million, this is how you really get to that master market. Nothing appears immediately and works.

Suzanne: You talked about when you left Pelago. Not left, but when you essentially transitioned from the Pelago startup environment to Groupon, you have a very specific idea of the impact that you wanted to make as part of your journey there. Do you have a new idea of the impact that you want to make either here at Shoprunner or just as a forward looking statement for your own kind of long and colored career?

Shafiq: I think every step in the journey is interestingly taken off after the last one. When I was at Microsoft, I remember writing a paper for Bill Gates' think week. Bill Gates goes off on a week every summer and just reads everything that comes into him from the company to inspire new ideas. I wrote a paper back when MSN messenger was a thing. I'm not sure if you guys remember MSN messenger.

Suzanne: I used it.

Shafiq: I wrote up this thing of before the iPhone, you know, how do you use the Microsoft phones and potentially create a location based service where people could discover each other and find each other? Somehow, completely unrelated ended up at Pelago and that theme was very resonant. At Pelago it was all about the customer experience and when Groupon bought us actually in 2011, it was all about location and location discovery, which worked really well with what Groupon was thinking about. Now, at Shoprunner, I'm really excited a, to build kind of a team that consolidates a lot of the lessons I've learned over the many years that I've been doing product and then taking this idea of a scaled value proposition and really working on optimizing this idea of free two day shipping and what value we can get to customers.

At the same time, going back to my roots at Pelago, of what is that next value proposition? Is it about apparel and discovery? Is it about convenience? How do we start thinking about retail and revolutionizing what to do next in that space? How do you provide a lot of our brands and retailers almost an alternative where they can work with Amazon and with a different marketplace. Yeah, there are a lot of ideas in place, and I'm really excited to bring sort of both those experiences together, that V1 what is a new value prop and how do you scale and optimize that in existing business?

Suzanne: Yeah. I mean, fashion I think is fashion and retail is an exciting place to be playing in right now, because with exception of what Amazon was doing in terms of discontinuous innovation many years ago, the industry as a whole was sort of slow to wake up. Most recently in the news there's been a lot of talks about big retailers struggling, and I think it just speaks to everyone's got to start catching up. It's not just about the creativity of the industry, which is of course an important thread, but how do we leverage technology?

Shafiq: Exactly. I think so much of it is based on the idea of creativity. If you look at where Amazon has done really well, it's really on the massive selection and on a real focus on costs. They haven't yet made major dents in sort of luxury fashion. They're definitely working in that space, and I think there's a level of the experience there that's less about the transaction about efficiency. It's really more about this idea of an emotional connection using both the heart and your mind. I think that's a really wide open space in retail generally that I'm excited to think about. The more we talk to people, the more we look at how bloggers are influencing fashion trends, you realize that fashion and design and apparel aren't just about the purchase.

They're really about a form of communication. It's a really social angle, this idea of how people shop for and consumer fashion. I think it's a whole new area. There are new habits, new behaviors, and just really ecstatic to explore the underlying needs and how technology's evolving, how people think about that space.

Suzanne: We do a segment called get the job, learn the job, love the job. It's about advice for folks up and coming. You spoke earlier in the conversation about a couple of different paths you can take if you want to get into product, so I want to sort of anchor it a little bit more and say, "Okay, you're a senior person. You've been a senior person for a long time. I'm new. I'm going by the title junior product manager, but that's just to give myself a title. I have no product management experience on my resume.

About leveragable skills, how do I get hired by somebody like you? What are you looking for from me to get in the door?"

Shafiq: Yeah, from a product perspective, there's more than just the experiences you've had. There's sort of a mentality and a way of thinking about the world that's really, really important. That's where when I talked about earlier this idea of associating yourself with a product organization as a product specialist or someone who's helping product. It's really meaningful that you're thinking a lot about the whys. You're thinking a lot about impact. You're thinking a lot about consumers and customers. You kind of have this sense of how do I pursue the hypotheses?

I think that mental model is a really important first step in having the right conversations and providing the right feedback for being positioned to move into that pathway. Then, beyond that, I think there are a couple of branches in the road that really matter. I've benefited a lot from really going smaller, really getting into small companies where the problems are there for the taking as opposed to there being really clear organizations and fit in to approach those problems. At smaller companies, it's easy to stretch across whatever isn't taken and take a hold of it and make an impact there, which then gives you that experience and credibility when you then look for the next job for things you can say you've done exactly even though they may not have been part of your direct job description.

I think that's probably a pretty powerful area. Either go smaller or find opportunities in larger organization to start to think about either data from an analytics perspective, consumer feedback from a qualitative and quantitative perspective, and then thinking a lot about the business and the whys. I think there's a different aspects that you can then start to parlay to move into a product role. One other fourth pillar I think is this idea of getting things done, so really thinking about project management and/or back log grooming, working with developers to shepherd requirements through.

Yeah, so focusing, I think, any of those four areas and starting to build out accomplishments in that space will at least set you apart as having one of the powers that you need from a product management perspective and a willingness to learn and sort of pick up the other building blocks of the product profession.

Suzanne: Yeah, you're hinting to this idea that I speak a lot about, which is that product management above all else is about thinking differently. Given that that's conceptual, my next question for you is where have you seen product managers struggle to succeed or really understand the job once they're in it because they did all the right, they followed your advice, they got in the door, and then they had to actually embrace this new way of thinking, assimilate that information. How can that be challenging?

Shafiq: I think it's really easy as a product manager to forget some of the essentials and sort of fall back on the skills you know, depending on the direction you come in from. I've seen a lot of product managers sort of struggle to ... Product managers I think are wired to get things done sometimes, which is an amazing skill and an essential skill, and to ship product. I think sometimes it's easy to get into the level of focusing only on the shipping as opposed to the direction. I think that's really what starts to separate product managers who are in the profession at the junior or intermediate levels from those who are more at the senior levels where you're less about just the execution, and you're able to manage the weird duality of needing to get things done but also stepping back and thinking about the direction and where you want to be able to go and almost having that seemingly, or feelingly impossible challenge of managing in same minds the idea of we can do a lot of different things.

It's not a distraction to think about options and possibilities, but we still have to utilize the time and effort and resources we have in an efficient way to get the job done. I think that's a really important and meaningful thing is for product managers to really kind for have the awareness of direction, going back to the consumer, challenging the status quo and not just getting done what's being asked for or being a request taker and being a machine of execution but also one of vision and direction.

Suzanne: Yeah, Jason Merizman, one of the guests we had on this show, has this great term for it, which he calls telescoping. He talks about this need for a product manager to always sort of be moving between that long term, mid term, and short term what am I doing right now? I would echo your sentiment. I think people get stuck, and usually they get stuck in tactical, because that's where most of us start. We start at the tactical level. We graduate to strategic. I'm curious for somebody like yourself, who has been in more director level positions now for a number of years, does that work in reverse where you can kind of get really comfortable in the direction part and get a little rusty in the get stuff done part?

Shafiq: Yeah, I worry about that almost every single day. I guess it's a healthy paranoia which helps me at least try to stay away from that trap. Yeah, I think that's absolutely possible, where it becomes hard to visualize what it takes to get right back in the weeds of running a roadmap and a back log and prioritizing and detailing the requirements for story or viewing a UX and thinking really critically about what's going to make that right versus just overarching sweeping ideas and trying to throw that out and expecting them to get done right away. I think that's one of the reasons, honestly, that I have made a lot of the changes in my career, gone from big to small to big to small.

I'm actually really afraid of not being able to, myself, get things one and navigate an organization in the right way. Yeah, it's interesting you point that out, because-

Suzanne: You're disrupting yourself basically.

Shafiq: Exactly, kind of walking back, right back in the next challenge of saying, "What don't I know? Can I do it again?" And seeing if I really can.

Suzanne: Yeah, it's awesome. What about what makes you tick? Why do you love this job so much?

Shafiq: It's the idea of creating. I mean, I did the technical consulting you mentioned awhile back. It was just not for me. It was this idea of getting in, solving somebody else's problem, and walking away. I'm a builder by nature. I love being able to create something, nurture it, see it get its first legs, thrive, survive, and I almost want to have something that outlasts me. Maybe it's this word of leverage, right? I feel like I'm here for so long, and I want to be able to create the clocks that sort of outlast me. Yeah, that's really this underlying idea that keeps me going inside. You have leverage, of creating something that lasts.

Suzanne: Do you have any recommended resources that you would like us to throw up on our website? We have, at 100productmanagers.com/resources, this growing list of recommends that all of our guests contribute to: vlogs, podcasts, books. Doesn't have to be product management specific, but just things you think you have to read this. You have to know this. You have to get excited about this that you would like to share?

Shafiq: I think for a lot of people starting off in product, I always point them over to Dan Olson's book, 'The Lean Product Playbook'. He takes a lot of the concepts, everything across the chasm, outside in product management, lean product management, puts them together into a book that's less about just the ideas. Does his best to translate that into practical advice that you can take or not take. I think that's a really great starting guide. From there, I transition over to a lot of the lean product management ideas with Ash Moria. He has a book called 'Running Lean'-

Suzanne: And 'Scaling Lean'.

Shafiq: -and 'Scaling Lean'. I love 'Scaling Lean'. There's a book I read a long time ago called 'The Goal' by Goldrat. It's just a really fun read around how he optimizes a factory floor and talks about optimizing the whole. I remember light bulbs going off in my head. I love how Ash takes 'Scaling Lean' and applies the idea of theory of constraints, optimizing the whole, to the customer development journey, so how you think about visitors as raw material entering your factory and the finished product being paid customers and how you take each of those stages and optimize them but don't make each step as efficient as possible. Think about optimizing the whole, so I've loved both of those a ton.

I think a couple of other quick resources, Nick Colenda does a really great job assembling a lot of psychological studies in a very actionable way, so everything from price perception, color perception, how to make virality happen in very practical guides. He is an essential resource for me. Then, I recently came across this idea of the opportunity solution tree from Teresa Torres as producttalk.org. Those have been all really great things that just jump up to mind as if you're doing products, at least understand these. Hopefully you've come across them before, but if you haven't, they'll be just great tools in your toolbox.

Suzanne: Wow, those are all awesome recommends. Thank you. Last question for you. Is there a personal or professional mantra, side of the mug quote, poster on the wall kind of sentiment that you use either to guide yourself personally or professionally or both that you want to leave us with?

Shafiq: What I think is interesting is I have less quotes than sort of a couple of images in mind. One is I've always had this idea of heartbeat in a circulatory system. I think about myself as wanting to be that for an organization that I'm a part of. Really providing and radiating a lot of that context, getting information, kind of bringing it back and kind of being that idea of this central circulatory system, making sure all the different parts of the organization have the energy and oxygen they need so they can do the right thing for the good of the overall organization.

Then, another's probably this idea of almost kind of, you know, a plane landing where you have the idea matching reality. You want to make sure that you bring those into contact as soon as possible so that you can sort of submit them to being the right landing, the softest landing you can get to.

Suzanne: Great. How grounded of you. Shafiq, thank you so much for being on the show. We're so richer for having heard all of your insights. Really appreciate it. It was great to meet you.

Shafiq: Yeah, thanks Suzanne. It's been a lot of fun. Great conversation.