Featured Links: Follow Susana on LinkedIn | Susana’s State of Product Slide Deck | Porter’s 5 Forces model | ‘What is SWOT analysis?’ piece | Buy Melissa Perri’s book ‘Escaping The Build Trap’ | Buy Marco Iansiti & Karim R. Lakhani’s book ‘Competing In The Age Of AI’ | Tools to Help Product Managers Think Strategically and Commercially
Episode transcript
Randy Silver:
Hey everyone. Lily and I are still recovering from the Mind the Product Conference in London. We had an amazing time and we recorded a live podcast on experimentation, which will be in your ears next week, and I actually got up on that stage to do a talk about the thing I’ve learned from all of these amazing chats on the podcast About the one thing no, really the one thing that differentiates the best product people from the merely good ones. And yes, there are some bad product people out there, but if you’re the kind of geek who listens to product podcasts to get better at your job, I can pretty much guarantee you’re not one of them. So this week we’re going into the archives to dig out our chat with Susanna Lopez. She’s now the director of product at Abatable. She also made her Barbican debut the other week with a great talk about dual track career ladders. You know the thing that’s making sure that there’s a path for advancement for people who want to be individual contributors as well as those who want to be managers. But we had her on the podcast a while back for a great conversation about the state of the product presentation that she used while on Fido, and that’s what we’re going to do today. So sit back, relax and we’ll be back with a new episode next week. The product experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.
Lily Smith :
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind the Product’s conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world, and online.
Randy Silver:
Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.
Lily Smith :
Hi Suzanna. Thank you so much for joining us on the product experience podcast. It’s really lovely to meet you.
Susana Lopes:
Hi, I’m so glad to be here. How are you guys?
Lily Smith :
Yeah, really good, really good, Thank you. I’m very excited to be talking to you about this topic today because I think it’s one area where there’s lots of different kind of opinions about how to do product strategy. But before we get stuck into that, let’s find out a little bit about you and if you could give us a really quick intro into who you are, your background in product and what you’re doing these days.
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so my name is Suzanna. I’ve been a product manager for about seven years or so. I’m currently a director of product at Onfido, looking after the biometrics line of business, and I got into product straight out of university I know, shocking like one of the seven to 11% of us that actually just randomly stumbled into that. And yeah, product is awesome and I’m really happy to be here to be able to share with the rest of the community. I owe a lot to this community product tank Mind the product. You know a lot of learning coming from there, so really cool to be here.
Randy Silver:
So, suzanna, one of the things that we’re talking about today is this state of product presentation that you use it on Fido, but I’m curious about how it came about in the first place. And as the company started to grow, you started with a top down strategy, I think. But this is a bottom up approach. Why is that special? What problem does that solve for you?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so you can do strategy in multiple ways. Obviously, I think the ideal way you want to do it is top down right. You want to have and Melissa Perry like outlines that beautifully in her book Well, you want to have a situation where, like your C level staff like sets out the vision for the company and then they set out like okay, what are the business challenges that we have? And then the next layer, the PMs and or the VP, products set up like what are the problems from a product point of view we can solve to enable that? And so it all cascades beautifully. But you don’t get that kind of structure in every company, particularly early on, where it’s a little bit more fluid. So for us we didn’t have that kind of setup. So it felt like we needed to go bottom up first, where the individual PMs were bringing these strategic decisions and opportunities to the C level team so that they could start to have the right conversations and the right trade-offs. So, yeah, it’s a different method and it kind of empowers the individual PMs to have strategic level conversations and it gives them an awesome seat at the table and like a huge growing opportunity as well.
Lily Smith :
So how does it work? How there’s? I’ve got so many questions Like what is it? How would you describe it? What’s its elevator pitch?
Susana Lopes:
the state of the product’s kind of approach. So a state of product is basically a communication tool. It takes shape as a meeting that happens every six months or every one year and it’s basically a summary of everything that the product manager has seen in terms of how the product has been performing so far, how the market has changed, or like what are the things that have changed since the last time you kind of did your strategy assessment and what are we going to do about it? And what are we going to do about it with our current team? And if we got additional resources, what else could we do about it? Like what is the ask that you have for the C level team of how you can, like effectively supercharge your team to achieve those goals at a faster pace? It basically forces us all to kind of take a step back and actually look at everything outside of the organization. That’s not just like our customer pains, but also go and feel like, okay, we’re actually part of this market and this is happening. Like I don’t know Apple just released some new thing, or like there’s this new technological trend, or like there’s loads of acquisitions happening right, like it’s a moment where you kind of just zoom out and look outside your firm and you go like, okay, right, so where are we actually traveling to? It’s basically setting a direction of travel for the next year, maybe two years, depending on the maturity of the work.
Randy Silver:
And what goes into it. Give us the quick guide to what is in this presentation.
Susana Lopes:
Okay, yeah. So you want to start by just defining what the product is. So originally we used to do this for every single PM, so we ended up with a lot of these. Now we kind of condense it, so each business area or each line of business does their own in groups. But you want to define, okay, what is this product that you’re building? You could do like the value prop, canvas or a way of defining why this product is valuable and what problems does it solve for the market. And then you want to say, okay, given them, that’s the thing that we’re doing right now. How well is it doing? Like do we see a really great revenue growth? Do we see like key metrics and leading and lagging metrics indicating is it doing well, is it doing really poorly? Like just take a stalk of like what is the health of your product right now? And then you take a step back and you go like okay, how is the market changing? And that’s when you do your analysis on the markets what happens before my product? What happens after my product? Am I like a technology play or am I like an end to end solution? And then you go, okay, what am I going to do about that. So that’s when you do your product strategy section and there you can do. You can use a bunch of different frameworks and we can go into detail into these ones. And once you’re done with that, you go like, okay, now that I’ve done all of this analysis, what am I going to do about it? And that’s where you start extracting themes and say, okay, for this trend that I’ve seen in the market. This is my response, this is how I’m going to make my company powerful by maximizing or minimizing my investment in certain things that are going to help us get to where we need to go. And then you say, okay, for me to execute on it. That’s when you start going into your execution area and you say, with the current team, this is what I can do, this is how fast I’m going to progress on it. And then, if you don’t have a large enough team, you might say, hey, exact team, I need a larger team, like I need to double the size of this team. And if I do that, here’s what I can do for you. Here’s how I can accelerate our journey towards this beautiful vision I’ve just painted of how we should respond to what’s happening outside the company. So yeah, so these are the overarching sections, right? Product definition, product performance. You do your market analysis, you do your strategy analysis. Then you say so what? What’s the roadmap? And then how do we execute?
Lily Smith :
Okay, so that’s a lot of content in one deck or in one kind of presentation. So how much time do you give yourself to then present this back to the business?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, that’s an excellent point. I think that’s the one thing that we keep going back and forth on. So this, as you can imagine, can get very quickly to the like 100 slide deck mark, which is really quite scary. One of my new joiners just said you know, this is like writing a book. There’s like whole chapters and I’m like yeah, it’s like the condensed knowledge of everything in our team and like what are we going to do about it? So the main piece of feedback that we always get from our chief product officer is like make it smaller. Like you don’t need a lot to make the key points. Remember who you’re presenting to this is a room of C level staff. They don’t need to need to know the details. They don’t need to know every single experiment that you’re going to do to reduce the risk of whether this is the right thing to do. Like you’re painting a broad brushstroke vision and you’re asking very precisely for like okay, I need this type of investment and these, these are the skill sets that you need to authorize in the next headcount. So that means that, in theory, if you worked really hard to I think there’s a quote about if I had more time, I would have written a shorter thing, I’m not quoting that right. But essentially you need to go wide to then go really, really small. So I’ve seen someone actually managed to do it for a relatively small area, but they did manage to do it in half an hour. But for things like our largest business lines it can take up to two hours. Mine is going to hopefully be an hour and a half, but I think if we had another week we probably could have trimmed it to an hour or maybe even half an hour for being really brave. But at that point you’re just like you know you’re not adding any value, like you already know what the recommendation is. You’re just like polishing, so you’re saving some exec like half an hour of their life. Maybe that’s not worth the trade off.
Randy Silver:
So you said it’s a room full of C level execs. Tell us a little bit more. Who comes to this, to this meeting, what and why are you doing it with them?
Susana Lopes:
So the first time we did it, we invited everyone with a C level title and some heads of and by that I mean that was like three years ago. The company was significantly smaller. We were about 100 to 200 people. Now we’re like almost 500, 400 to something. So originally it was everyone from the C level staff. The reason why you’re inviting all these people is that you’re going bottoms up, so it’s not like they are aligned and they’re telling everyone okay, this is where the company is going and now this is how we’re all going to like strategically execute based on what’s coming top down. So you’re trying to convince them that this vision that you’re painting is what they’re going to buy into. And the reason why you need I don’t know, the VP sales or the VP marketing there is like, if your recommendation is like large enough and bold enough, a lot of the times that has impact on, like the types of sales people you need to hire, and like the types of market you’re going to go into, and like even the types of marketing activities you’re going to do. So you need these people to put their respective hats on and go like okay, if that’s where the product is going like, what do I need to do so. We’re all aligned and the whole company is going in the same direction.
Lily Smith :
So what’s the outcome of the session? Decisions made at the end of it, or do people go away and have a think about it and then come back? How does it work after you’ve presented?
Susana Lopes:
So typically we allow for like 15 to 30 minutes of discussion. So sometimes there’s some heated debate, particularly if you’re going in with quite a pointed suggestion or like something that you haven’t already presented elsewhere in the past. But then typically it is the role of product leadership to kind of consolidate it all into what are going to be our headcount requests for the year. So when that lands in, whoever’s going to make that final approval particularly our finance team they know the story, they know why it’s important. So typically it translates into that. It translates into org design. So like, do you need to disband a team? Like maybe your recommendation is like this is a dead end, like we shouldn’t invest here anymore that was one of my first ones was like we should kill this product and like start this other thing because there’s much more opportunity there. So that’s typically the next steps is you’ve managed to get by and hopefully, and then all of that goes into your headcount planning and then that gets approved and funded eventually. Sometimes it doesn’t Like sometimes you make a really good pace and then people go like yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great. We just can’t afford to invest in this right now and then maybe a year later you need to do it again and you say, hey, since last time, and now I have even more evidence that this is now increasingly urgent. Because look at what happened with this competitor and blah, blah, blah, or like regulations have changed, like we really need to make a move on this, and suddenly that headcount looks even more justifiable, and now this time it’s going to get approved.
Randy Silver:
One of the lessons I learned working in really large companies was never go into these big presentations with C level people If you didn’t already know what the answer was supposed to be. And there were all the pre-meetings and lobbying people and making sure. So when you’re talking about things like this, where you’re talking about to make your presentation, that finance is going to make headcount decisions and investment decisions, and are you working with them ahead of time, or is this the first time they’re seeing this?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so I think, because the company is still small enough, we’re going into it primarily cold when it comes to people very far away, very far away. I’m doing air quotation marks, you can’t see me Talking to myself here yeah, so because we are still small enough, there’s not a lot of pre-meets that are necessary, unless, obviously, it’s with your engineering team, with your ML team if you’ve got one with your data team, like with the people that are really focused on the core delivery. You’ve got loads of discussions and basically it’s part of those discussions that go into the deck in the first place. But when you’re presenting something that doesn’t have a huge amount of impact beyond just the product work, we don’t really do all of those pre-meets. But I can see that in like two years, when we’re like whatever 700 people, we absolutely will need to do that. I think the level of prep is going to be proportionate to the chaos around you and so, just to square off on this, who’s involved in writing it?
Randy Silver:
You talked about the fact that you’re doing it with your product team for the state of product that you’re doing this week, but do you get your head of engineering and your peers involved in writing the deck as well, or are they coming at a later date, towards the end of it?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so they’re involved in all the discussions around. Okay, sometimes you need to make a trade-off around. Okay, can we invest in this thing at the same time as this one? Actually, there’s no capacity in the team to paralyze this too, so there’s a lot of collaboration in coming up with an execution strategy. Less about the overarching strategy. That tends to be done more by the PMs. And maybe, if you’ve got a business analyst function or a strategy function, or sometimes the finance team also helps provide revenue data and things like that. So it’s primarily driven by the PMs. But all the other functions come in and help with certain parts. During the presentation itself, we sometimes have engineering present. Okay, given all of this right at the end in the execution part. This is what we suggest the new reporting lines should be. Or this is how we suggest. Hey, you just said you need a whole new set of mobile engineers. Like are they going to report into the line of business or are they going to report into some mobile specialists? Like, what is the consequences for the rest of the organization? So very collaborative, but primarily driven by the PMs.
Lily Smith :
And do the PMs work together to have alignment across that bottom-up strategy? So everyone’s presenting a consistent message or a consistent direction from the bottom-up.
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so that’s the role of the Chief Product Officer in our company. So he will present like it starts to be a little bit more top-down now, but he will do like an overarching, I mean, with us. It’s on Fido, identity Verification Platform or Identity Platform, and then we will work off that. So we should all more or less be on message. But sometimes one team will be like I really disagree with the top-level strategy and I really think we should do X, y and Z and I’m going to use this airwave time to like make that case. And obviously they’ll run it past the CPO and say like I don’t agree with what we’re doing, like this is what I’m going to present, and they’ll be like OK, great, like make that point and then let’s see how people react. But generally, yeah, there’s a lot of cross talk and make sure we tell a cohesive story, particularly when there’s dependencies between, like, horizontal teams and vertical teams. Yeah, as we scale, that’s becoming more of a challenge.
Randy Silver:
Hey Lily, you’re a senior product leader.
Lily Smith :
Why yes, randy, how kind of you to notice I may have led just a few product teams in my time.
Randy Silver:
So you know how important it is to hear stories and get insights from other product leaders facing similar challenges.
Lily Smith :
Oh my golly gosh. Super important and, to be honest, not so easy to find that these days. So much has changed in the past couple of years.
Randy Silver:
Oh God, I hear you. Well, the reason I bring it up is because Mind the Product have just released a series of brand new case studies from senior product leaders, all without leading product teams through change.
Lily Smith :
Tell me more.
Randy Silver:
Well, in this brand new and totally free resource, mind the Product, explore the stories of five product leaders who have effectively navigated change near current and past positions, unveiling crucial lessons and sharing the principles you need to embrace in order to tackle challenges in your role as a product leader.
Lily Smith :
Very interesting. So who are these product leaders?
Randy Silver:
Well, they’ve got some goodies. There’s Dave Walsh, who is the former CPTO at Zupa, kate Lido, who’s an amazing product leadership executive coach, and Navya Rahani Gupa, cpto at Peak, for starters, and there’s even a bonus tip section on how to look after yourself as a product leader and oodles more further reading suggestions.
Lily Smith :
This sounds amazing. How do I get my hands on it?
Randy Silver:
Oh, that’s the easy part Just sign up at mindtheproductcom. Leading through change. So there’s a lot of different sections in here. As you said, it was definition and performance, market analysis, strategy roadmap and even into execution and risks and unknowns.
Susana Lopes:
And.
Randy Silver:
I’m only saying that so fast because I have notes in front of me so I can read it off, but that’s a lot of different stuff. And most product people I know are strong in some of these areas, but not necessarily all of them. You’ve been doing this for a few years now. Have you seen yourself become more well rounded? Are you seeing some people are strong at one part and not the other. How did that work?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, that’s an excellent question, I mean to me. The first time I did this I was so terrified. I was like, how, like where am I going to? One, find the time, and two, like this is a mammoth, mammoth task and because of that it’s also incredibly empowering. Right, suddenly, you’re in charge of a fairly large task that’s going to have a huge influence on what the company is going to do. So, like, personally, the areas where I felt stronger at was like what I considered the easy bits, like I come from an engineering background, so that means that for me, hey, let’s do some charts and performance analysis and like numbers and metrics, like that’s all great, and I massively overspend time on that section, because that was the one that felt the most comfortable and because I come from engineering, I don’t have a background in strategy, so anything in the strategy section, which is actually the most important, I was just like, oh, I’m really tentative.
Randy Silver:
I don’t really know how to do this.
Susana Lopes:
And so in the first time I did it, like my CPO like was literally hand holding, like trying to pull teeth out of me. So, okay, what are you going to do about it? Like you’ve just made a really good point with your amazing graph. Like what so? What? Like tell me what we should do. And I’m like, oh, I don’t know it’s to be all these options and the risks and let mitigate. And I’m like, no, make a statement like, be bold, like where, where is the line of business going? So, um, develop mentally, if that’s a word. This has been like one of the biggest things in terms of accelerating my career and like how zoomed out I think about stuff. Like now it’s been three years since the first time I did this, but like my brain kind of accelerates faster. To the strategy section. Now, like I don’t spend so much time on the other sections, particularly because I’ve been in the same domain in the same company. So you do get some economies of scale, but, yeah, it’s, it forces you to be more round, particularly if you’re doing this early on, where there’s not a lot of other PMs in your area and you’re just like a one person show. But as soon as you have a larger team, then you can start specializing and all that kind of stuff. But it forces you.
Randy Silver:
I’m guessing you’re not rewriting it from scratch each time either now.
Susana Lopes:
No, no. So that’s why. Um, so, the first time we did it, we actually did it, uh, twice in the same year, because the first time was really foundational, and then the second time we were slightly bolder with our recommendations. And now we do it once a year and primarily, it’s almost like a recap. It’s like hey, these were the market turns last time, this is the delta since last time. Right, Like we’re not going. Oh, and then the product does this and these are the key metrics and this is the needs of the market. You’re mostly doing a delta on the previous year.
Lily Smith :
What kind of feedback do you get from the C level execs, Like how do they, how do they respond to the sessions?
Susana Lopes:
Generally, they’re they’re really happy to be informed and really happy to have visibility on the thought process and I think it gives them a sense of comfort that we’re not just like making stuff up, that is all ground and in data and like careful analysis. I think the feedback is always it’s too much, like this is a lot, like I don’t know if we need all of this. I think us as a team we need to go through this whole thing. I think we need to iterate on how we present it and that’s why I was so excited when you asked me like how long do you need? Like the first time I saw it done in half an hour, I was like, oh my God, that’s the future. Like we need to all be present in less than half an hour. If you’ve got the clarity of spirit that you can make that really crisp argument, you’ve got all the data, you’ve done the one hour and a half work but you’ve just managed to like concisely present it in a way that’s really compelling, really rememberable, and that everybody’s gonna leave that room going. I’m definitely approving this headcount. That’s when you’ve, I think, hit nirvana of state of product and communicating with execs. But it’s a journey. We’ll get there, maybe next year.
Randy Silver:
And does each group do it at the same time a year or are you staggering them throughout the year?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so we all do it at the same time, more or less within the same time. So the way that our CPO likes to schedule it is we do it just before the business strategy session, so like the company now has a business strategy process, which we didn’t have so formally when we first started doing this. So this forms as an input in terms of like okay, the product is going in this direction, what does that mean in terms of execution and blah blah. And then we do it one a week. So the CPO will do one for the whole product platform and then we’ll do one for each of the lines of businesses and then one for the horizontal teams that are supporting so components rather than products people pay for.
Lily Smith :
So you mentioned earlier that you have a kind of product strategy section within this deck. What does that cover?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so that’s the section where you’re essentially trying to use whatever frameworks you find useful to make sense of everything that you’ve seen before in the deck. So make sense of the market and then make sense of your position in the market. So the tools are really varied and if people on the podcast, on the call, if people listening, come from a strategy background maybe you’ve been a consultant or something like this this section is going to be easy peasy and you’ll recognize a lot of it. So, like SWOT analysis strengths, opportunities and threats that’s a really common framework to help you assess, like, what are the things that you’ve got that are really strong and what are the things that are weaknesses that you could improve on. And like what’s happening externally that are opportunities for you to take advantage of or things that have changed that are now a threat to your existence. Some people like to use, like Porter’s Five Forces, which is another one around, like the different threats than what’s happening around the firm. We always include a competitive assessment. There’s this PM VP product at Procore, azenay Udezwe. She said something amazing at Mind the Product last year. She said market research is an act of empathy. You need to understand what options and choices your prospects have to make. So I love that, and that’s like a thing that really drives me when I’m doing the competitive assessment, so like just putting yourselves in the shoes of a buyer and going like, ooh, how am I going to make this decision? Like what are the buying factors? And like how am I going to compare the company that you work for with all the other ones? And then my new favorite strategic analysis tool that I think has not really made it into the product community as much as it’s made it into the strategy community, is like strategic network analysis, which is basically like looking at how businesses that rely on data build strategic modes of protection, cause it’s really easy to just copy each other, like everybody affords developers these days. So how do you make it really hard for other people to enter into your turf? So this is like super pointed to help you do that.
Randy Silver:
Dez, I was really hoping you were gonna talk about that one, but that was one of the terms that you used in the presentation that I hadn’t heard so much before, so do you have any advice on how to go about doing that? Is there anything you’ve learned from your experience now?
Susana Lopes:
Yeah, so this is actually from a book that’s called competing in the age of AI, if people wanna look it up, and there’s like one chapter which is all about a strategy for AI companies. But you don’t need it to be an AI company for it to be relevant for you. It’s just you need to be like a modern software or software as a service company that uses data to make decisions and build products. And yeah, so this is basically you’re analyzing what are the things that you want to increase and what are the things that you wanna decrease to create these strategic modes. So there’s five things that they analyze. So one of them you’re probably familiar with is network effects. So like, how valuable is your product and does it increase with the number of users? So like an example of that would be if I have a bed, like the value of the bed to me is only dependent on the bed. Like it doesn’t matter how many other people in the world have beds, I don’t care, the bed has a finite available value. But if I have a fax machine or a phone, the value of that is gonna increase if there’s more people that have phones, because now I can call more people, right? So this is like really critical because if you’ve got a product with really strong network effects, it becomes really hard for the next person to come in because the product is not gonna be valuable or as valuable as yours until there’s like loads of people on it. So that’s like a typical example of that is like Facebook. If there’s no people on Facebook, that’s not valuable at all. So they’ve got really really strong network effects and that’s really hard to copy. You can’t just hire developers to like, okay, put people on your platform. So one of the things you wanna do is like okay, does my product have network effects? And if it doesn’t, how do I introduce them? And if it does have them, how do I maximize that? So it’s really hard for other people to compete with me. Another one is like learning effects. So does your product generate like hard to obtain data that makes your product really good? So that one the classic example is Google. Right, Like Google gets really really good because it knows what you’re searching for and that data you can’t really acquire or buy on the internet. You just get it through usage. Same thing with Netflix like really strong learning effects there. So if you were to launch a new Google tomorrow. Like where do you start? Like you need the data to make it good, so you can’t compete. So you create that really big distance with your competition. So those are things you want to maximize. And then on, the bits that you want to minimize are like multi-homing and de-zint remediation. So multi-homing is like whether someone is using your product and also an alternative. So an example of that would be like an Uber driver. Like they’re trying to maximize how much time they spend driving and maximize how much money they receive out of it, and if your product is not very good, then they might also use Lyft at the same time. So they’re multi-homing. They’ve got two homes, but because now this Uber driver is in two homes, the value to the person asking for an Uber driver is actually decreased because suddenly there’s less Uber drivers on the road. So you want to reduce multi-homing. You want to make sure that all those Uber drivers stay within Uber. You make it really easy for them to get paid. You give them insurance, like you create all of these incentives so that platform is really really strong and it’s really hard for a new Uber to start because they need all of those people within there to provide value. And then the other one you want to minimize is disintermediation, so that one is about being bypassed. So this is really a problem from two-sided marketplaces sometimes. So I’ve got a cat and I need a cat sitter, so I’m going to hire a cat sitter through like flatten a cat or something like that. And then the next time I need that cat sitter I’m actually just going to like WhatsApp her, I don’t need to book through the flat. So I’m disintermediating cat in a flat and then suddenly, like they’re not getting any revenue anymore, so they’ve just lost that platform effect. Like, so what can they do? Like they can offer insurance or something like that. That forces me to find the interacting with her more valuable than interacting without her, because suddenly the value of the platform is lost. And then the last one is bridging opportunities. Like what do you have that’s valuable to another network, to another company? So, like, maybe it’s your data, it’s your assets. Your Uber drivers are also helpful to deliver food. Look, you can enter a new market. But yeah, it’s a fascinating tool and really cool book. I recommend people read at least the strategy chapter. The rest is a little bit. Some of it is to help companies that are not data driven become data driven. So a lot of it might be a little bit too known, but this analysis stuff I found really helpful.
Randy Silver:
That’s fantastic. I love the example of the cat sitting one. It’s actually one of our very first episodes was with a guy named Christopher new who was looking after I’ll get him forgetting the name of the company now, but it’s an Australian company that was specifically looking at dog sitting and things like that, and he told us a very similar story and how they overcame that. So if you want to learn how to overcome it, you have to go back into our archives. But we did want to ask you one last question, Suzanne. This has been fantastic, but this is a lot and, as you said, you’ve learned a lot over the years as you’ve redone it and gotten more experience with it. So for someone who’s going to try and take this into their company and do it for the first time, I’m curious what kind of mistakes do you see people make when they come into on Fido and try it for the first time? What’s the thing to watch out for to make sure you’re getting some value out of this?
Susana Lopes:
There’s two questions there. One is when people come into on Fido what did they struggle? With Maybe the one is how the hell do you introduce this elsewhere?
Randy Silver:
Yeah, Very different questions. One of them you have experience with.
Susana Lopes:
Yeah. So when people join on Fido, I think they do what I did right they’re going to more easily spend time on the sections that they found easiest and then they’re going to shy away from doing more work on the ones that they find more difficult. So when you’re doing a firm strategy, you’re probably going to be all over the strategy section and then you might neglect the data analysis and the market analysis and all that kind of stuff. So that’s where I’ve seen patterns in myself and others within the company. When it comes to bringing this to another organization, I would say don’t try to do the whole thing to start with. Literally pick one thing. Can you do a market analysis? Can you do a strategic network analysis? Can you do a swap? Start with that one thing and then present it to your peers and then go like, hey, we’re not really talking about strategy. Should we get together and do a small thing, Find your minimum viable state of product before you try to invite all the execs into a room and go like, right, you’re not leaving, You’ve got two hours, Grab some snacks and go some strategy to present to you. I think getting buy-in at a smaller level would be my number one piece of advice.
Randy Silver:
That’s absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a really enjoyable conversation. I learned a lot from this one.
Susana Lopes:
Awesome. Well, it was great being here. The slides are available. I know this was a lot of content and I think people will need some time to digest, so feel free to reach out via Twitter or something like that. I’m always happy to help.
Randy Silver:
We’ll have a link in the show notes, in the article, to your Twitter, to the slides, to everything and definitely worth catching up on.
Susana Lopes:
Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for joining us, Susanna.
Lily Smith :
The product experience is the first. And the best the podcast from Mind, the Product. Our hosts are me, lily Smith.
Randy Silver:
And me, Randy Silver.
Lily Smith :
Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver:
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based band POW. That’s PAU Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank. Other free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith :
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Forward slash product tank.
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