CRAP Talks 20 - Emmanuel Neret: Surfing the Recession Wave as a Product Manager

Chapters

1. Introduction and Personal Background

   EN

   Emmanuel Neret0:15

   Hi everyone, my name is Emmanuel, I'm a product manager. I work for Hoppin. That's where I meet Bhav and I've been working there for a year and a half. And so when I was chatting to Bhav about doing the talk, it was also a time where I was reflecting a little bit on how much my job has changed as a PM at hopping over the last year and obviously trying to understand why it's a lot due to the change in economic climate and what's happening with tech startup at the minute. And so that's why I decided to do that talk about how as a PM you can surf the recession wave. So the agenda for today, pretty simple. I'm going to do a quick intro, talk about the change in context and what it means for a PM and then try and give a bit of a few tips on what I think is good to do as a PM in those kind of times and then we'll do conclusion questions if you have time. I don't know when that work but bit about me. I'm from France, moved to London 10 years ago. I started as a software engineer, then did a lot of different things in supporting roles and then landed in product management over probably six, six years ago. Now I currently work for Hopin as a, as PM said, in the the video platform team. So let's talk about the change a little bit. So I don't know if some of you have done some surfing in the past or if you know anybody that has, but a lot of what people talk about when they talk about surfing, they talk about the conditions or the forecast, they obsess over it. And that's probably because surfing is one of those pools that super dependent on and probably just dependent on the external conditions, right? They define whether you'll find wave on a given day, whether the waves are going to be big, small, whether they're going to be constant or erratic. And I find that product management is quite similar. Like your role is very different depending on where you are, what company you work for, the maturity of your product department, the people you're surrounded with. But once you settle in, things get quite constant. And it's similar with I think surfing. But sometimes, although you're quite settled when you surf, you have something like that that can happen to you where a big set comes out of nowhere and changes completely the context you operate in. And I think that's what's happening today for us in the tech industry. There's a huge change and we're all Moving from hyper growth, growth at all costs to more of a profitability mindset. And so that's, that's why, that's what I want to talk to you about today. So if you've done, I don't know, product management for the last 10 years, it probably looked a bit like that. Not that it was easy, but a bit, a bit smooth. Smooth ride. There was a lot of talk about, you know, lots of funding, lots of hiring. Obviously that means a lot of support functions around you. Probably all the charts that you were seeing were probably on the high and, you know, not an easy job, but probably quite smooth. And so what does it mean? What did it mean day to day? I think what it meant was that there was a huge focus on outcome and output. If I guess the department or company was quite mature, you're probably more talking about outcome. So, you know, like talking about how to increase the revenue via your product, how to increase retention rate with your customer, decrease the time that they take to do something, generate some sort of value. If you're a bit less, like in a less mature environment, you're probably talking more about output. You know, like how many features are you releasing, how often are you releasing? Are you doing an integration with this cool new startup? Are you acquiring anyone? But what the elephant in the room was often cost. Not a lot of companies or leadership was talking about cost. It was always, you know, whatever it costs, let's make sure we get this out, let's grow and we'll see later. And so this is great, but it creates, in my opinion, two problems. One is you become a bit like this cat, where you think you can, you can and should buy everything. You don't think too much about, you know, where you should invest. It also creates, especially in software. That's what obviously our hopping does. But it creates a culture where the company or the stakeholders don't really understand the value of the product that you're pushing in terms of costs. But if you start looking at your cost in AWS and Google Cloud or whatever you're using, you'll see that it's actually quite expensive and it's often quite hidden. And the other problem is that in my opinion what we're seeing today is the financial problem, which this is obviously a stupid graph, but when your revenue starts to drop, your costs will probably take longer to drop than your revenue. So you hit a problem where your costs are way more visible all of a sudden, which is, I think, what we are all seeing at a minute. If we are working in the tech industry. And also you don't need a lot to do for your revenue to drop, but for your cost to drop, you have to do a lot of effort for that to happen. And very often the quickest way to get your cost to drop is to get rid of your humans. So what has changed? I was talking about the change in forecast, the change in, well, the change in general. Costs have become way more central now and the new rule is not growth at all. Cost is about profitability or path to profitability. And in my opinion, it's a hard change, but it kind of makes more sense because it's just like, I guess, Economics 101. You want to make sure that you spend less than what you get and if you spend more to start with, you have a plan to get profitable eventually. So the rules are clearer. But I think it doesn't make it easier for product people, anyone, really, because you have to operate a cultural shift. You know, you have to have the hot conversation with stakeholders about the value, the value of software, the value of your product. In my opinion, there is a big transparency shift when you start having economical problems in a business. You, you know, it's quite easy to be super transparent when everything goes well, but when you start having problems, transparency tends to fade away. Access to data can be tricky because of the way I think we've been operating in the past, like five, 10 years where we've been releasing a lot of features, we've been contracting with different providers and very often all of that was probably rushed. And so access to data is a problem. And then you have to deal with low morale because very often people, people get cut. And, you know, no one really likes to work on cost saving problems. And it's, it's just nicer to work when all the charts are showing a high trajectory. So the tips that I want to give there are things that I found that works quite well. I'm sure you'll know some of them and I'm sure, you know, it's nothing revolutionary, but let's start with dashboard on the side. This is just a, I guess a silly way to say make sure you track basic metrics about your product and make sure you invest time in building something that you can share and use when you talk to people, because a lot of time I talk to PM and they're like, yeah, of course, I know, I know, I know my metrics, I know what I should track. And then it takes them a lot of time to actually talk about it. Like invest the time in building Your own, I don't know, like Excel sheet where you have everything that you can show and obsess over them. Like it doesn't have to be a huge amount of them, but as long as you have something that shows what are your cost, how much does your product cost and what are your revenue, but any other proxy metrics for value that, that do it. Observability. Do not release anything major without tracking whether it does anything to your metrics. Even if people are pushing hard on you, like the stuff I've done in the past and don't understand that you have to take more time to do it. Just don't say you're doing it, just say that you're gonna be late in delivery and just take the time to do it. And why you are doing this, I think it's for this one, which is win your argument and you'll make your decision. With data. I find that a lot of time when you have arguments with stakeholders about what you should invest in, what should be next on the roadmap, it's a lot about opinions, it's not a lot about data. So if you have all of that and you can show, you'll be, you'll be quite strong in your argument. And I think, I think that's. And you will be seen as someone who is, you know, legit and has the information like that is needed to make the decisions. Set reminders. This one is, is quite operational and easy. It's very easy when you release something to think that it's going to do something, whether it's going to drop your cost, increase your revenue. But it's also very easy to never check that it actually did what you thought it would do. So put, put a reminder in your calendar two weeks after you release something to actually check your metrics and make sure that it's done what you thought it would do. Network and over communicate. This is about the transparency problems I was talking about. As it is, I find increasing like transparency tends to fade away. Go and speak to your, the people in your work, talk to the finance people, talk to the marketing people, talk to legal people to get a good pulse of how the company is doing. Because I find that when leadership or yet start talking about problems and cost saving, it's often too late. And so try and get a pulse. If you can't get it from your leaders, get it somewhere else. And I think that's one. It's quite important and then motivate. Obviously, I think as a pm, a lot of what you do is about motivating the teams around you, motivating the engineers that you work with. I find harder in times like this where we hear about job cuts and you work on problems that are about cost savings. But again, if you do your job with monitoring your features and dashboarding, you can clearly show there's value in decreasing costs for a business. And as long as you carry that message, I think that helps quite a lot. To conclude the speech, the talk, in my opinion, the shift that we're seeing is just a change in conditions, like as PMs or as product people. You're like those surfers. You still know what a wave is. You still have your surfboard, your skills. You just need to, I guess, I think, stop for a while, understand the new conditions that you operate in, and just ride the wave. So, yeah, that's it.