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Hannah Clark: In 1979, video killed the radio star, and in 2023, Brian Chesky killed the product manager. Okay, obviously that was a joke, but maybe there are some parallels there. The radio star never really died, they just eventually became a podcast host. And contrary to what some headlines would have you believe, Brian Chesky didn’t kill the product manager, but he did change what product management looks like at Airbnb—and my guest today has mixed opinions on how that’s going to pan out.
Andrea Saez is the author of The Product Momentum Gap, which takes a close look at the relationship between product strategy and business impact. Having worked in customer success, product management, and product marketing for the past 14 years, Andrea is acutely aware of how leadership can make or break the organizational alignment necessary to ensure the companies are actually building for scalable customer value. It bears noting that, at the time of recording, major leadership decisions at Airbnb and, more recently, OpenAI are major talking points in the product community, but Andrea’s insights call out a perennial issue that for many tech companies poses an existential threat. Let’s jump in.
Welcome back to the Product Manager Podcast. I’m here with Andrea Saez. She’s a product marketing leader and the author of the Product Momentum Gap.
Andrea, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today?
Andrea Saez: I am fantastic. Thank you for asking. How are you?
Hannah Clark: I’m doing good. We’re off to an interesting start.
So we always start off the podcast by asking, you can tell us a little bit about your background and how you arrived at the point you’re at in your career.
Andrea Saez: Very good question. And my answer is a lot of trial and error. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, which I found is a good thing, actually. So I never intended to, you know, even be a product marketer.
I used to work at Apple fixing computers and I was going to become an engineer and go down that path, maybe move to Silicon Valley someday, who knows? And a friend reached out and she’s like, Hey, I know someone that’s hiring for technical supported startup. Are you interested? It’s a whole new hot thing back in the day.
And I was like, yeah, I guess if I don’t like it, I can always come back. Right? And then, yeah, I mean, one thing led to another. I went from technical support to customer success to product management to now product marketing. Well, it’s been a hell of an interesting ride for sure. But I feel like I’ve learned a lot in the process. And that’s life, right? It’s all about learning.
Hannah Clark: Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s an interesting trajectory too. Like you’re building on a number of different technical skills and then communication skills and then marrying them ultimately in product marketing.
Andrea Saez: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody always asks me, Oh, how did you end up where you are? And I’m like, mistake. I asked why one day and one thing led to another and here I am.
Hannah Clark: Always starts with asking why. So today our focus is on business impact and how product leaders in particular can create more of it, which is something you talk about in your book.
So when you say business impact, generally speaking, what specifically do you mean and what does that look like to you?
Andrea Saez: So business impact is essentially how are we growing the business. But with everything that’s happened with OpenAI over the last couple of days, essentially what we’re talking about is growth and it’s commercial growth.
And there’s certainly a fine line that needs to be walked there between building for commercial impact, but also building for customer value. So when I say, or when I think about building for business impact, what I’m really saying is let’s build for customer value, which then helps us grow the business. As opposed to let’s build for commercial value, which is then when you end up with a feature factory and just building features that will just get you more money.
But you end up with a product that’s just a bunch of puzzle pieces put together that don’t really fit.
Hannah Clark: That makes a lot of sense. So you’ve worked with a lot of product teams over the years, and it sounds to me like you’ve noticed a bit of an unnerving pattern about how we steer away from customer value and become these feature factories.
So where do you think that business impact is getting lost in the sauce and what are some of the factors at play that you think are causing it?
Andrea Saez: Honestly, the more I gain experience in this, the more I realize that it’s really down to leadership. So there’s all these blog posts about good product managers, bad product managers and all these things you should do and not do.
But at the end of the day, even a great product manager is going to have a really hard time doing their job if leadership isn’t there to provide the right support, the right psychological safety, the right conditions for the team to execute the strategy, do discovery, experiments, research, all that stuff.
That is in fact important. So when you have a leadership team that it’s is constantly pushing for build, build, build and ship, ship, ship, that’s when you stop building for customer value and you just start building for the next big thing. That said, I do also understand that there are situations in which you do end up having to build that one feature for that one customer because you need the money to just get through the next few months.
But I think the important part is after you’re over that situation and that happens, it’s important to look back and reflect and go, okay, well, what do we now do with this feature? Are people actually using it? Is this something that actually provides value to other people or eventually do we need to kill it? Like, are we just collecting tech debt over time?
Hannah Clark: Yeah, we had a conversation with Radhika Dutt a little while ago about something along those lines of this sort of relationship between vision debt and kind of vision versus survival and having to sometimes build features that take you a little bit further away from the vision in service of surviving as a business.
But then there’s always that piece of, you know, how do you reconcile that vision debt at the end? And I think that’s what you’re pointing at.
Andrea Saez: Yeah. I mean, it would be really unfair of me to say, never do that. You must avoid that because the reality is you might have to at some point. And I get it.
I understand that product is not perfect. Leadership isn’t perfect either. And we learn and we grow as we make these mistakes. But the important part is to look back and go, okay, was this really the right thing to do? And what do we do with it now that we have it?
Hannah Clark: So this kind of calls to mind when we’re talking about leadership in a product context, some of the stuff that’s going on with Brian Chesky and Airbnb and the decision to marry products with marketing and kind of the confusion or controversy around that.
It’s a bit of a hot topic. So what’s your take on the changes at Airbnb? And what do you kind of predict that we’re going to see come from those kinds of changes?
Andrea Saez: Yeah. So I think there’s a lot going on there that is good, possibly not so good, misunderstood. So I want to break that down a little bit because there is a lot going on and I think people are freaking out because they don’t fully understand because there’s a lot of scary words being like dropped.
And the first is this idea that product managers have been given product marketing focus. I don’t know if this is an unpopular thing that I’m about to say, but product marketing is not marketing, right? Marketing is something else. Product marketing is about strategy. Product marketing is also about understanding commercial impact of the things that you’re building.
And it’s also like communicating those things. And working with sales and marketing and CS and all these other teams to be able to communicate those things and sell value, essentially. But product marketing and product management do have a lot of things in common. So when Brian Chesky is saying, okay, we’re giving product managers more product marketing responsibility.
What I think he’s really saying is just having a little bit more of commercial context. So thinking about things like, how are we impacting the business? Are the things that we’re building of value actually then impacting our business OKRs? Are we moving the needle forward? Are we thinking through things like, how are we going to package things?
Who are we building things for? That’s so important. I’ve worked with teams where my first question is, cool, who is this for? And they can’t really answer me. Or even worse, how are we going to package this? And they’re like, Oh, we’ll just figure it out later. Like, how are you building a whole feature without thinking about who it’s for and how are you going to package it?
Because obviously, when you’re building something, if you have a PLG motion, those needs are going to be very different than those of an enterprise motion, you know, different needs, different pain points, different ways of adopting things. So it’s mind boggling to me that product managers are not thinking through those things.
Or even worse, after the thing is built, after the solution is built, then looking back and going, okay, how are we moving the needle? How is this impacting our OKRs? How is this impacting some of those lacking metrics, ARR, MRR, conversion rates, all of those things. And all those things, they serve part of that context that product marketers need to think about because we do, right?
So it’s really important to understand that this product marketing focus doesn’t mean, Oh, well now you’re responsible for marketing because that’s not what it means at all. It also does not mean the product marketers are going away because there’s a whole other set of responsibilities that have nothing to do with products.
It doesn’t mean the product managers are going away. It’s just giving them more commercial context. And that is a good thing. You should know how you’re impacting the business at the end of the day. We are selling things. That’s the whole point. Right? So I think people are freaking out, but this isn’t a change.
This isn’t somebody, I can’t remember who it was, but somebody wrote something like, Oh, product managers, they’ve been demoted to product marketers. And I’m like, first of all, that’s incredibly insulting. And you do not understand what product marketers do. But they have not been demoted in any way, right?
They’ve just been given a different context, and that context is actually good. It’s a good thing that this is happening. The second part to that is the whole Brian Chesky is now the sole decision maker of all things. That I do foresee being a problem.
Hannah Clark: Yes, the global company is one guy.
Andrea Saez: Exactly. So he is acting as a bottleneck for all decisions in a global company with people all over the world in different time zones. How is he going to do that effectively? Right? That is the part that worries me. We call that founder led developments in the book, and we do caution against it. But from an empathetic point of view, I do also understand why he feels the need to have to do this.
So in the early days, obviously they had a lot of success. We all loved Airbnb at one point, and then things started getting a little bit out of control. And he would set stuff himself, he’d turn on the TV and he’s like, oh my god, we’ve been kicked out of New York, like, what is happening? So his first thought is, well, when I was involved before, then things went right, so maybe I should be involved again.
So I get why he thinks that’s going to work, and maybe it might work in the very, very short term to make very quick strategic changes. But in the long term, I am curious to see how that scales, because I really don’t believe it will.
Hannah Clark: And this kind of calls back to this idea of the product momentum gap. Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean by the product momentum gap and how that kind of tends to play out?
Andrea Saez: So it’s literally this. It’s that point when you start losing product market fit. You start having longer sales cycles. There’s a ton of support requests. Your support team is overwhelmed.
Your CS team is overwhelmed. Everybody’s overwhelmed. You’re trying to figure out features to build. And it’s incredibly normal. It’s a part of the growth stage. And when the founder then comes along and says, well, I’m going to get involved because clearly when I was making the decisions, everything was going right.
But that’s dangerous because the reality is that when you’re in leadership, you’re removed from the customer. You are. You’re not speaking to customers every day. The people that are speaking to customers every day, support, sales, customer success, hopefully product managers or product marketers as much as possible, right?
They’re the ones that are listening to these problems and can understand these problems better. So often what happens is then through this founder led developments, they’re thinking of problems they had 2, 3, 5, 10 years ago that may not even exist. Markets change, people change, problems change.
So it’s important to continuously be treating product market fit as a dynamic thing. It’s not a yes or no, but it evolves and it changes as time goes by. So the product momentum gap is essentially that gap that you have when things are not working out anymore and you’re not quite sure why.
So what we provide is essentially an exercise, a set of templates, let’s call them, to get you out of that and start thinking instead about customer value. So what is valuable to the customer? How do those values potentially sink back to our objectives? So it brings together your product strategy and your OKRs through user behaviors.
So we’re looking at which behaviors can we scale? How are they repeatable over time? And how do they provide value? Because if you have a user behavior, and you will, because all products change, create, modify behaviors in some way. And if you can scale them, make them repeatable over time, then people are going to pay more money to do that, right?
It’s like ChatGPT, that’s why it’s become so huge. It allows me to do something repeatable over time, and I’m more than happy to pay for it. It saves you time, right?
Hannah Clark: Plenty.
Andrea Saez: Plenty of time.
Hannah Clark: And so speaking of ChatGPT, do you feel that there’s a product momentum gap happening there, or do you think that there is something altogether and different happening at the leadership level at that company?
Andrea Saez: I think that is an organizational misalignment that’s happening from, I guess, all the news that we’ve heard over the last couple of days. I think that there’s a mix of ethics and technology moving really fast and communication and misalignments and how the company potentially wants to move forward.
What’s the direction? What’s the intention? How do we do this? And they think, you know, from what I’ve learned, from what I know, that that was the problem. And that’s part of what we touch on in the book is organizational alignment, right? It’s super important for not just the product team to be aligned, but it’s product with leadership and leadership with the board because they have to report back to the board.
And that’s literally what happened is things just broke down.
Hannah Clark: Yeah. I think maybe it’s a good time to step away from sort of like organizations that are operating at the scale of OpenAI and Airbnb. And if we look at you know, most of us are working for startups or smaller organizations that are maybe aspired to be at that level, but maybe have more of an opportunity to nip some of those concerns in the bud.
So for a business that’s a little bit on a smaller scale, what would you propose as a remedy if we’re sensing that there is some misalignment in the organization that is going to lead us towards becoming a feature factory?
Andrea Saez: It’s a great question. The first issue that I usually see is a misalignment around who? So who are we building things for? And I had the situation when I walked into a company recently and they had seven different markets, each with like various user personas, buyer personas, ICPs and everything. They wanted to recreate their website with all seven markets and I’m like, that is insane. I’m like, what are you doing?
And I remember speaking to the product team and they’re like, yeah, we have no idea who we’re building for, like none. We don’t know how to create these workflows, these journeys, these experiences. So really important to align around the who, first and foremost. And if you’re trying to scale, I would say be very careful and very mindful of how you’re scaling into different markets, because what tends to happen, and I love this, Dave, my co-author, tends to use this example.
So imagine that you’re building a marketing software for coffee shops, right? And then retailers come along and they’re like, Oh, we love your software. We’d love to use it. So they start giving you feature requests and feedback and all that stuff. So you start building for them as well cause you’re like, Oh, that’s a great opportunity.
But now you stop building for coffee shops. They’re not seeing the value anymore. Right? So somebody else is going to come along. They’re going to build for coffee shops and they’re going to take your market, because you’ve been trying to build a thing for two different markets. That makes no sense. When what you could have done is go, okay, so we have all the solutions, these benefits for coffee shops, and then maybe restaurants come along and you’re like, Hey, there’s these use cases that I can replicate.
Right? Instead of going completely off field, I can maybe focus on these use cases. So focusing on use cases and these behaviors that may be repeatable over time is so much better when you’re scaling than trying to go, Oh, well, a new market, new market, new market. Because what you might actually have to do, and of course, this is a decision that a company needs to decide is you might have a portfolio of products as opposed to trying to create one product for seven different markets in this case.
So focus on your use cases, focus on those behaviors. But before we even get there, just align around who, right? That’s the most important part, who? Who are you building for? What are the use cases that you can solve? What are the challenges and opportunities that the market potentially have?
And see if you can align around those. And I can guarantee you that the majority of teams are going to have a really hard time aligning just around the first one.
Hannah Clark: So how does this connect to the product value pyramid?
Andrea Saez: Yeah, so the product value pyramid is one of the little templates that we offer in the book that’s part of the product value creation plan.
That’s the whole framework, right? Framework has like seven or eight different templates that you can use. You don’t have to use all of them awarding. This is not like a hard guide and you must follow all these steps. But what this does is it takes all of the key elements after you’ve done this whole exercise and looks at one, two, three, four, five of kind of the key things that you want to communicate to the rest of your team, which is who, which as I said, very difficult to align around, what are the problems that the market is having?
So what are the opportunities and challenges that you potentially have to be able to solve? What is the importance to the customer? And that’s a really key one. Because often what happens is the company has, let’s say, I don’t know if vision is the right word, but a perception of what is valuable to the customer and what they’re building for, whereas the customer is going to have a different perception of what they see as valuable.
And it’s that in between that matters, it’s where those two meet. That’s where you’re creating value. So that’s why it’s really important to constantly be talking to customers and doing a lot of market research. The last two are what experiences do we want to create and what behaviors do we want to promote?
So hopefully once you align around all of those, you’re going to be able to build a kick ass product.
Hannah Clark: That’s always the goal. And I’m wondering if one of the threats to achieving some of this is, like, we think about shiny object syndrome. Do you think that this is a real risk that a lot of startups end up falling into that really derails this idea of building for the right who and aligning around what customers actually want?
Andrea Saez: Absolutely. I just consulted with a company over the summer and like, oh, you know, we feel like we have some issues with like product market fit and everything. So I come in and I see their website and I was like, okay, first of all, I don’t understand anything your website says. And the sales team is like, yeah, you’re not the only one.
Turns out all the people we’re trying to talk to, none of them understand what’s going on. But when I speak to the tech team, they’re like, oh yeah, they totally do. They totally do. And I’m like, okay, clear disconnect here. Why is the tech team telling me that everybody should know? It’s a DevOps tool for context.
So tech team was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They totally know we’re building the right stuff. And the sales and the CS team, they’re like, they have no idea. Like we’re not communicating the right things. So I tried this little exercise of trying to ask who are we building things for? What are the behaviors we want to create?
And what one part of the team said versus what another part of the team said were completely disconnected, completely disconnected. And then on top of that, I did a study and what I found out from that study is that the majority of people that went on the website understood the words that were on it, but they didn’t really understand what the product is.
They didn’t see, they didn’t understand the value because it wasn’t being communicated. And then on top of that, on an empathy scale, they ranked, I think like 3.7, 3.8 out of five, which is not particularly good. So I’m sitting there and going, okay, so clearly we need to think about our product strategy here.
Who are we building things for? What are we doing? Et cetera. And so I presented this back and the CEO said, ah, all we need to do is reach feature parity with competitor X. And I’m going, Oh. So not only did they not understand who they were building for, but they just thought all they needed to do was recreate all the features that the other competitor had and they would be golden.
And that was it. That was what was missing.
Hannah Clark: So this is interesting because we’ve mentioned a little bit on the Product Manager, the jobs to be done framework. And I feel like this is a golden area where, that using that framework can really make a difference with aligning everybody about, you know, like, I don’t understand how the tech team can have such a different view versus the people who are talking to customers.
How does that even happen?
Andrea Saez: Do you want to hear the funniest part is they had done a jobs to be done exercise and they did a ton of research and I thought their research was really solid. But part of the problem is it hadn’t been communicated to everybody else. So there was a huge lack of communication on the team.
But on top of that, I kind of go back to the who, right? Yes, you have jobs to be done, but did you think about the who thoroughly? Did you confirm it? Did you research it? And just because you did jobs to be done eight months ago, it doesn’t mean that it’s still relevant now. Things change very, very quickly.
So they’re basing all of their work on something they did 8 months ago, 10 months ago, and they haven’t done any research since. So I come in, I do new research and I’m like, Hey, we’re not communicating the value very well. The website shouldn’t be written as a bunch of jobs to be done. There needs to be a little bit of like human empathy there.
Communicate the benefits, communicate the value. Let’s not just go job one, job two, job three, right? People need empathy. People, they want a human connection there. And that was just overall really hard to do because when they were building, they were trying to build for feature parity, not for humans. They weren’t thinking about those outcomes.
They weren’t thinking about those user behaviors. They just thought, well, we just need to recreate what our competitors have and it’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.
Hannah Clark: So is there a non or not very painful way to back up and punt in a situation like that? Or how much of a loss does this end up being when you’ve put that much investment into something that ends up being for nobody?
Andrea Saez: I mean, it’s dangerous. I do wish them the best. I hope they managed to figure it out. Obviously, more context around this particular situation is there was no CPO. There was no product lead, no marketing lead. So they were a pure tech team just building things and then passing that on to sales. So there was this missing element of product, product marketing, marketing, to fill that empathetic, logical, strategic part of the business that did not exist.
So I think the CEO going, Oh, we need a feature parody is that shiny object syndrome of, Oh, that’s all I need. But there was that gap, the strategic gap that was missing.
Hannah Clark: Okay, well, this is fair warning that we all need to be on top of our user research, no matter what the competition is doing.
Andrea Saez: I mean, this just goes to show that product management is not dying. You need that strategic part. You need product managers to help you understand who you’re building things for. Why? What problems are we solving? How is this valuable? How do we know this is valuable? And then, of course, all the other stuff, right?
Which is how are we impacting the business? How are we moving those metrics? Like all that stuff matters, but we need to start with who and what problems are we solving?
Hannah Clark: So what you’re saying is product management is not dead.
Andrea Saez: Absolutely not. I think product management has gotten through a growth spurt.
God, I have a lot of thoughts on this. I agree with Brian Chesky when he said Agile killed the product manager. Agile is a fantastic way of building things. It is, right? Move quickly, iterate, understand, research, all of that. I am all for that. But it does not take into account strategy and execution of strategy.
And what it does is it takes into account building and building quickly and pivoting. And all of those are great and fantastic things to do, but it unfortunately, bad agile positioned the product manager in a project management perspective and a project management hats. And I think that is where things started to go downhill for a very long time.
And so now we’re going back to, Hey, product managers should be thinking about business impact and business value. So don’t fear the product management is dying or changing or somebody called it devolving or demoting. None of those things are true. Product management is so incredibly valuable to think about how to take those strategic steps, how we’re growing the business, how we’re impacting the business, how we’re impacting our teams.
So we should be proud. And I include product marketing in this, be proud of the strategic-ness that you bring regardless of whether it’s Agile or not Agile, whatever you want to call it, this is really about thinking through and asking those hard questions. Because I can assure you that asking those questions is going to save the business so much trouble, so much money.
Our product management at the end of the day is really about thinking about those risks and it’s a tough job to do to manage all of that.
Hannah Clark: Well, Andrea, thank you so much for being so candid with your comments and such amazing pieces of advice. Where can people follow you online and where can they find your book?
Andrea Saez: Sure. So the book is on Amazon. It’s available on Kindle. You can also order a physical copy and also on Audible. We are working on Apple Books. So for all of those that have asked or will ask, we’re working on it and you can follow me on LinkedIn.
Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, hope to have you back soon.
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