Zoom’s CPO on Evolving Product Strategy in a Post-Pandemic Market

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Hannah Clark: There aren’t many companies in history that could compare their timelines to that of Zoom. We all watched as the platform went from a popular video conferencing tool to a household verb during the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to remote work brought on a massive wave of growth, followed by a tsunami of competition. But in the wake of the most turbulent period in Zoom’s history came the swell of another big wave—but this time they brought a surfboard.

My guest today is Smita Hashim, Zoom’s Chief Product Officer. Smita’s arrival at Zoom coincided with the dawn of the AI boom, which meant new opportunities for innovation, both within Zoom’s company culture and its portfolio. Smita told me what it’s been like taking the reins during a time of so many possibilities, how Zoom is taking bold strides with generative AI and what they’ve got on the not too distant horizon. Let’s jump in.

Oh, by the way, we hold conversations like this every week, so if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe? Okay, now let’s jump in.

Welcome back to the Product Manager podcast. I’m here today with Smita Hashim. She’s the CPO of Zoom.

Smita, thank you so much for making time in your busy schedule to join us today.

Smita Hashim: It is my pleasure.

Hannah Clark: So we start how we always started off. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you arrived at where you are today at Zoom?

Smita Hashim: Absolutely. So I worked in tech for a long time. I love video. I have a PhD in video from way back, and I started in research and strategy, but then I wanted to build products and I love working with people. So that’s what led to my journey. I’ve done a lot of different things, but I’m a product and video person and communication collaboration person at heart, so that’s been my journey.

I worked at Google, Microsoft variety of other companies, and now I feel very privileged to be in the position that I am in right now, building communication and collaboration products at Zoom. Which has some of the most beautiful video I’ve ever seen in the world,

Hannah Clark: we’re so honored that you’ve come to join us, and you also joined Zoom during a very significant transition period when they’re evolving from a very meetings focused company post Covid, when they became a household name.

And then things have really evolved since then. What was that environment like when you stepped into the leadership position at Zoom, and what strategic challenges did you immediately have to tackle?

Smita Hashim: Yeah, absolutely. So as Zoom powered the world during Covid days, right? And Zoom as a company, of course it grew so much and it went from 2000 to 8,000 people during that period.

So that rapid growth had happened when I joined Zoom. But that rapid growth was one aspect of it. The other aspect of it was that our founder CEOs, Eric Yuan, he had the foresight to also keep thinking about how to expand the product portfolio and how to truly evolve into an all-up communication collaboration platform.

So Zoom had many products. It was already like the Zoom working on the phone product was very strong. Contact center product was emerging. There was in the room’s. Product is very strong. This chat product. Whiteboard product. So when I came, the company had gone through this product expansion and people expansion, and now we were looking to figure out how do we scale our teams?

How do we really go from this gangly adolescent kind of age to a company where we want to keep our mojo, we want to be really innovative and fast moving and move at Zoom speed. But then how do we bring. Some more maturity, some more robustness to how we execute strategically and as a team, how do we get to the next level?

Hannah Clark: And scaling, no matter what position you’re in, scaling is just this perennial challenge that all of us see in different ways in shapes and forms, and yours was a very specifically dramatic scaling process. So what approaches did you find the most effective in scaling the product teams while maintaining the strategic focus and robustness?

Smita Hashim: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to look at it from different angles. So first of all, I think you always have to keep the end user and customer in mind. Zoom has very close relationship with customers. I have never seen the kind of customer love. I see from customers for Zoom because we love engaging with customers, talking to them, getting their feedback.

So I think really that customer point of view and really ing that and understanding that. The other part, which you have to look at, it also is from the team point of view. If you have a wide product portfolio, you have to set yourself up strategically to align to that portfolio. You want people on the team to be obsessing about specific parts of the portfolio while thinking broader platform. So that required some shifting, some realignment and thinking about how we map the team to some of those so that we can be more strategic as we go forward. Then you also have to be data driven.

You have to be platform driven. So you have to think about what are my metrics, what are my KPIs? And then when I say platform driven, you have to think about what does it look like across the platform. So it’s a new product, but you also have to think about the platform experiences such as across Zoom Workplace, which are as a communication collaboration platform.

So you bring all of these together and then you understand the culture of the company, the speed, the quality of engineering talent, which is incredible and how fast it can move. And then from, that’s how you do the evolution. I believe in evolution rather than revolution, which is the team had already so much great stuff, so how can I come and really bring out some of that and help shape it so that we can go faster, better, and and hopefully do a great job for everyone.

Hannah Clark: Absolutely. And speaking of better, faster, and stronger, let’s talk about AI. So AI, as we know, has been the disruptor of the decade, if not much larger, and it was a huge game changer for Zoom.

It’s been a huge boon for the business. Can you walk us through your, or at least the AI revolution from your perspective and your position and how you’ve approached implementing AI in ways that deliver value while staying true to that core identity that Zoom has?

Smita Hashim: Absolutely. So I do feel like we are very blessed, Hannah these are such di amazingly dynamic times and there’s so much that’s going on.

In technology space, and I feel like flexible work, AI, all of that coming together creates unprecedented opportunities. But of course it also creates that moment where you have to really rise up and be very focused. So I think for us, Zoom has always been big in AI, whether it’s virtual backgrounds, noise, cancellations, we don’t even think of them as AI.

But this AI, which enhances our. Our work day to day, but with generative AI, it was a whole different ball game. So we approach generative AI in a very thoughtful and a very considered way. So we saw that it was a very dynamic landscape. So we said we’ll go with a federated approach where we can work across a variety of models.

So we went with that. We have been on this journey for more than two years now. We also said that we believe every user should benefit from these generative AI capabilities. They should just be a part of any SaaS application. So we made the decision, the hard decision to say we will include Zoom AI companion at no additional cost.

So customers don’t have to pick and choose that you get it and you don’t get it. Because we want everyone to have that benefit. We were very careful about. Zoom is, people have multi-party conversations. The world connects on Zoom. We said we will not use customer data for training period, for our models or any third party models we work with.

And then we give customers a control and choices so they always feel they know what’s happening to them. So I think with all of this together, we actually started a Zoom AI companion journey. We started with meeting summaries. Got them to great quality. We expanded across chat, whiteboard, phone docs, like we across a variety of our products.

Our contact center has all of that built in. And then we went for what we call a single brain solution. It connects all of the platform together into one brain, which has view across all of the services that I’m working on. So we had launched that last year, and from there we have been now progressively moving into an agent era where we are helping people actually get things done.

So it’s been quite a journey, but what I want to call out, it’s been a very considered and thoughtful journey, which is grounded in the ethos of like customer value making something which is simple and easy to use and taking it from there.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. And on the topic of customer value. So you mentioned that you’ve got some serious customer love, and I think that one thing that you see across a lot of Zoom users who are real evangelists about the product is that they just feel like this sense of it just works simplicity.

So how do you maintain that commitment to keeping the product simple to use, keeping it very user friendly in an environment that’s constantly changing, where there’s a lot of pressure to release new features and there’s always this new technologies to jump on top of?

Smita Hashim: Absolutely. And it is not easy, right?

It’s not easy, especially as you expand the platform and you add more features and more capabilities. So it’s something which we try to do a really good job with, but I also feel like, there are opportunities for us to improve and then we go back and we revisit it. But the way we do it is there are design elements which we really adhere to.

We try to have as few UX elements as possible, as few clicks and we spend a lot of time reviewing the product. So we spend time in product and UX reviews. We actually say, bring the power of Zoomie. So we try to have reviews as a group. So we try to bring all of that culturally as part of how we operate.

And then we also talk a lot to our customers and we love feedback, positive or negative, and we really try to engage with all of that feedback to see that how we can continually improve our product. We also try to bring constructs, like I talked about the single brain for Zoom, AI companion. So we try to bring those constructs in as well, because if your backend is simple, if it has a holistic view, then we can make the end user experiences also more connected and more simple.

Hannah Clark: I do wanna talk about user experience shortly, but let’s talk a little bit first about just leadership and some of the more internal workings at Zoom. As CPO, how do you help your team develop conviction around product decisions? Like you mentioned right now that you really galvanize the culture around simplicity and reviewing calls together.

What are some other kinds of tactics that you that you’ve taken to just foster some of those really trustworthy, empathetic relationships between teams?

Smita Hashim: Those empathetic relationships are trustworthy as you put it, and you put it so well. I feel like those are really inherent to the success of a company as we go forward, and if we have those, then one of the books we love is The Speed of Trust.

You speed, if we have trust, then we can move at the speed of trust with each other. There’s some things which we try to really put in practice. First of all, we really like to hear from people. While we make decisions, it’s a very open culture. We invite feedback. We have asked channels on various products our Zoom contact center, and there are thousands of Zoomies on it, and the conversations are very vibrant, so we invite a lot of feedback and discussion.

The other part for me, this is something which I’ve practiced for a long time, when I talk to the team. I want to hear what they can, what we or they can do better rather than what another team can do better than their opportunities for another team to do better. Then I would like to have those conversations jointly.

So we really encourage the practice of self-reflection and daily self-reflection and thinking about what we can do better. I think if we do that and if we need more help from someone, I want people to really figure out their world and offer to help them. So I think as leaders, if we can put those kind of practices in place, then the culture or the environment, I feel like it becomes more helpful.

But it also sets up those practices where we are really being curious and understanding each other and showing up from a place where we can be empathetic and we can trust each other and move forward as well.

Hannah Clark: I really like this approach because we’ve talked in the past with other product leaders about how there’s this consistent gripe that a lot of leaders run into where they’ve got team members who come to them with complaints but not solutions. So I feel like this kind of a behavior kind of ingraining it at a cultural level and making self-reflection and seeing yourself as a part of the solution, as a good practice to combat some of that. So that’s very interesting.

Talking a little bit more about cross-functional relationships, do you have any other kinds of tips or tactics as a CPO to foster some stronger cross-functional collaboration between teams beyond just not accusing people of other things, but collaborating better to build?

Smita Hashim: As a product manager, it’s actually a very privileged role.

I feel like it’s a service role because as a product manager, you’re really sitting in the middle of so much on one side, you’re sitting with engineers, you’re sitting with designers, you’re building the product, you’re creating the product. On the other side, you are working with sales, you are talking to customers, and you are having those conversations and you’re bringing them together.

So in a way, you are a hub. You are an access. Of course you have so much help and they have leaders on both sides. But as product managers, I encourage product managers to wear both of those hats, right? To think about, build as well as the kind of get the feedback requirement, but also help your sales partners be successful.

So I think when we think about relationships, if we span those relationships in ways that is effective and there are times you work more with a lot more with engineering design, but then your priorities getting to launch, and then you have to work very closely with sales, understanding that your sales counterpart.

Be good to them people. It’s not easy to sell, give good products to sell which are with clear use cases. So I think those are the things if you keep in mind, then you have to nurture relationships on both of those sides in order to be effective and really get the kind of ROI your colleagues deserve from their work.

Hannah Clark: Okay, so we can move back into our other most important stakeholder are customers. So Zoom is very much in the public eye. It has been for a number of years now. Hopefully it always will be. So when you received negative feedback on social media, you mentioned that you engaged directly with users, which is not an approach that every company takes.

So how has this approach shaped your product development process and also what’s the origin of it? Why did you start to do that?

Smita Hashim: Our CEO, Eric Yuan, he’s very customer oriented. He loves talking to customers. He engages with customers. So I think it’s part of the culture is customer care and customer care is at the forefront of it.

So that is something which has been engaging with customers is a practice at Zoom and listening to customers is a practice at Zoom. Honestly, Anna, we are blessed. We have such great customers. I have customers who will talk to me from the couch on a Friday evening giving me ideas on a product, and that is so incredibly valuable that they’re giving us that kind of time.

It’s amazing. But coming back to social media, of course in social media, social media has its own culture. If there’s a negative comment, it can feel very intimidating and you can start seeing a lot of people get on it. But having said that, if we reach out to the person who posted it and really dig in, first of all, it feels uncomfortable, but it also is very educational because when we talk to the posters who are customers, right?

They are users, they’re using the product in some way. Almost always, they’re very gracious. They’re willing to spend a lot of time with us discussing the issue that they are facing. And we have such a wide service area. We have so many platforms, APIs, integrations. We find issues that we can fix and then we, our engineers are fantastic.

They can fix issues so fast and customers love that. So it ends up creating, I think, positivity for the product. But customers also feel like they have been listened to when they have expressed their frustration, which is, almost always it is valid when they express that. So I think it’s a good practice and the more we do it, the more product managers get comfortable doing it and doing that outreach and then it builds on itself.

There was a customer I’ve talked to recently, I just want to say Sunday morning, and he must have talked to me like six different times to help me debug the issue because we were working the issue. Then finally, when we figured it out, I said, okay, now I’ll send you updates, but you don’t have to respond to me because I don’t want to destroy your Sunday morning anymore.

But he engaged with us to that level, which is something to be very grateful for.

Hannah Clark: Absolutely. It reminds me of this old adage, I’m not sure if you’ve heard it before, but the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And I think this is a very good example of if you have someone who’s willing to engage with you, even in a negative way, that’s engagement, it still means that they have some kind of investment. So it’s, I think, good to reframe it. It’s not as an attack, but as an opportunity and an invitation to collaborate.

Let’s talk a little bit about culture within the organization. So you’ve talked a little bit about Enculturating Zoom with a sense of ownership of self-reflection. That’s a really beautiful thing. How do you build a culture of belonging and openness within the team, and how does that culture translate to the products?

Smita Hashim: Belonging and openness comes from making sure that people have a voice. Anyone can give feedback on the product we do have or like on the decisions. But of course then decisions also have to be made that, decisions cannot be completely consensus driven.

So we do like to move with speed, but that openness and trying to really hear from the room what different people are thinking, that is built in as a practice into Zoom. I think our products also help us. So one product, which I’m going to make a plug for a Zoom AI companion, but in meeting questions, so you’re having these heated debate in the meeting because you’re going through some difficult UX experiences or product discussions or what have you.

You can bring it up and you can say, what did we agree on? What have we disagreed on? And now you have this neutral AI, which is telling you what is happening or not happening. So we are bringing that a lot into a decision making and discussions, which is helping. But the culture of belonging really comes from making sure that a voice.

We have the futures, we, you can raise your hand. The audio quality is great. You are always heard. We have sharing multiple people can share at the same time. So we also continue to, we have whiteboard built in, so we have a lot of ways to work together collaboratively. The meeting chats are great, but I think it’s that culture which comes together.

And then in terms of how does it show up in the product itself, I think it definitely, it makes better products. As we actually have that voice and we look at it, and then we look at it from different angles, but it’s not just the internal discussions, it’s also the discussions with customers. We have many industry councils and we talk to those customers.

We talk to our customer advisory councils, and even on those, we have great discussions. Sometimes our customers will. Start discussing amongst themselves where one set of customers may say something, another one, something else. And it’s great to watch the debate and be part of it. So I think those are the ones which come into play on how we can do better.

Hannah Clark: Absolutely. Oh, that’s very cool to hear.

So looking ahead, let’s talk a little bit about the future. Very exciting. So we are all very familiar with some of Zoom’s past. It’s been quite a journey and the journey continues. What excites you most about the future of Zoom and what challenges do are you anticipating in this current climate?

Smita Hashim: So I think from a Zoom point of view, first of all, we have been expanding our product portfolio. So we have Zoom Workplace, which is for collaboration and communication and productivity. So this is really for your employees and it expands all personas. It’s open. Our AI companion actually connects to Microsoft and Google Mail.

And calendar and drive and those products, and it includes all of that at no additional cost. So we are very much into this open collaboration platform. So that’s part of the portfolio. But if you think about the adjacencies like contact center, we are talking to customers or webinars. Our products for sales to engage with customers.

We also go do build industries like healthcare education. So I think if you think about it, like that’s the portfolio which we have and we are making great progress on it. So that’s a journey which we are on. I’m super, super excited to continue to see the growth on these products and where they go. The other part, which I’m super excited about is just how AI can really transform the experiences across these in ways that it actually benefits us.

So one of the things which we talk a lot about is from an AI point of view, we wanted to not just AI for AI’s sake, but we want AI to be able to do really useful things for you. And we really believe what matters above everything is like connection and collaboration. So freeing up the time so you can have those creative discussions, you can have those strategic discussions and that’s what we have been investing in.

That’s a journey we have been on and I actually think for myself, I feel. I can start to think again because I use so much the AI companion, including the meeting example I told you, or using it in various products like catching up on chats or even like creating documents. So I think that’s the journey which we are on, and I could give you hundreds of examples of how it’s beginning to help and how it will do more. But those are the things which we are working on. And obviously it’s a fast moving market, so we have to continue to move with speed while being really focused on delivering value to our customers.

Hannah Clark: Speaking of speed, I know that you’ve got many things to do, so I won’t keep too long. So thank you first of all for joining us. It was such an honor that you’ve made time to be on our show. Where can listeners connect with you online?

Smita Hashim: I’m active on my LinkedIn so people can always reach out and I try to respond to as many as I can, so that’s where I would point, your wonderful listeners to. So yeah, I look forward to hearing from them.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to the Product Manager wherever you get your podcasts.