‘I started off as the product manager for Internet Explorer 4.0, so for context that was back when Apple was still a failing PC maker, and Mark Zuckerberg was 13 years old’ – Dave Wascha, Mind the Product
This interview comes from a conversation with Dave Wascha, Non Executive Director, Venture Capital Product Advisor and Product Coach.
Dave Wascha is a veteran of product management, starting his career over 20 years ago in the US before moving to the UK in 2012.
Prior to pursuing a portfolio career Dave Wascha was
- CPTO of Zoopla, the UK’s second largest property portal
- CPO of PhotoBox, an online printing company with 5 brands
- Global Product and Technology Director, Travelex, a foreign exchange company with a digital wing as well as physical stores
- CPTO of moo.com, an online print and design company
- Held multiple senior product roles at Microsoft over a period of 14 years, covering Internet Explorer, Bing, Windows Client and other key products
He took time out to share with us some of his biggest learnings and general advice for folks working in enterprise product management and B2B contexts.
He talks to us about:
- Pivotal career moments: a major mishire, and the learnings from it
- Transitioning from a functional to an executive mindset: the difference between the two mentalities
- B2B learnings: criticality of speaking to users and the importance of understanding multiple audience needs
- How to work well cross functionally: developing empathy, understanding different time horizons, and making the implicit explicit to drive alignment
- Current backlash product is experiencing in the wake of ZIRP | Zero Interest Rate Policy
Hi, I’m Dave Wascha. I’m American and I grew up in Michigan in the Midwest. I am one of you. I’m a product person. I’m in the product tribe. I’ve been doing product for longer than I’d like to admit, but certainly about 25 years.
My first job ever was at Microsoft. I drove straight across the country with my dog to Seattle after graduating university, and started there when I was 21 years old.
That was back when Microsoft was cool. Interestingly, Microsoft‘s now become cool again, but it was the first time Microsoft was a cool place to work.
One of the amazing things about Microsoft is they give you an immense amount of responsibility when you walk through the door. There’s no question of whether or not you can do it or you’re qualified or you’re trained; they just give you the job.
Within two weeks of joining the company at the age of 21, I was on the phone representing the company to the Wall Street Journal about the release of Internet Explorer 4 at the age of 21 with no PR or media training.
To give another example, when I got to my desk that first day at Microsoft, there was a plane ticket on it because I was slated to go to the largest tech conference in the world, back then called Comdex. It was held in Las Vegas.
My job was to go and demonstrate an early version of Internet Explorer 4. I had never used it. I had only just gotten my credentials to walk through the front door that day. That day was a Monday and I was flying on a Friday.
It was astounding. I have so much gratitude for the experiences that I had at Microsoft.
Later I moved to the UK because I followed an English woman who I met at Microsoft, but she decided to retrain as a veterinarian and move back home. She’s now my wife and the mother of my children.
Having moved to the UK for personal reasons I joined moo.com, which is again an amazing company. At the time it was a darling of silicon milkroundabout’s on Old Street. Really visionary founder, Richard Moross, and a cool company.
I have a lot of gratitude for the fact it was my first experience both post Microsoft, but also in the UK.
Next I moved from Moo to Travelex. Yes,Travelex, the 45 year old money changing business in airports.
But it was an amazing job because my job was to lead their new digital product development and to build that from scratch. I built it up from me on my own to a team of 140 people over the course of about 15 months. We shipped a travel money card before Revolut did. We were the second company in the country to build a bank on AWS after Monzo. We did all this amazing stuff there.
Next I moved onto PhotoBox. PhotoBox was a group of companies at the time, including Moonpig. Both are well-known brands in the UK. There were 5 different businesses under the brand and I was the chief product officer for all 5. It was an interesting experience being responsible for 5 businesses at different stages. I really feel like I took 5 times the experience away.
The management team was also the best I’ve ever worked with, led by Jody Ford, who’s now the CEO of the Trainline. I learned a lot about the value of a good management team there.
Next was Zoopla. I was going to take a year or two off, but it was too good to pass up. The role was literally to take this amazing brand, and reposition it. Redefine its value proposition and its place in the industry away from a marketplace that was the second place you looked after Rightmove when you were looking for a house, to something that was central to every phase of home ownership. From looking for a house to buy, to renovating your house, to remortgaging, to selling your house and everything in between.
If you go to the site today you’ll see a proposition called My Home, which allows house owners to get free home value estimates, book valuations and track the value of their home. Millions of homeowners in the country have now signed up for it. So amazing success and an amazing experience and really amazing investors there.
Zoopla My Home
Then at the end of 2022, my daughter was really struggling. I decided to leave Zoopla to support her. Zoopla were incredibly supportive with my decision to go home and focus on my daughter, who was subsequently diagnosed with autism.
That gave us a reason why she was struggling. I spent a bunch of time that year working with her and different specialists, my wife did the same, to support her and get her back into school.
And whilst I was doing that to keep from going insane and to pay the bills, I started a coaching and advisory business about a year ago. That has flourished into some really exciting opportunities to work with amazing companies in the UK, in the Netherlands and in Spain. And that’s what I’m doing today.
Check out Dave Wascha’s site to learn more
Pivotal career moments
Making a hiring mistake
Walk us through the pivotal moments in your career. How did you get to where you are now?
So one of the most pivotal points, certainly one that has taught me lessons that I’ve taken with me through my entire career, was one of my very earliest experiences as a people manager.
I was at Microsoft at the time, and I’d only been a manager for about 6 months.
The experience I’m going to share was the first time that I was hiring somebody new from outside the company.
At that stage of my life, I was incredibly arrogant and overly confident and thought I knew everything because I was a manager.
Microsoft is amazing at recruiting and they found some excellent candidates. I met with several, but there was one that I knew would be perfect.
We got along great in the interview; I was really impressed with his CV; he was very funny and personable and he said all the right things. And I thought, well, this guy’s going to be great. He’s the one that I’m going to hire.
I went and shared this with my manager at the time and she laughed a little and said, Really? Because he’s the lowest person on my stack-rank of people that you should hire.
I made my case and she made her case for why she felt that I was making a mistake.
But ultimately she let me make the decision on my own, which of course was that I decided to hire this gentleman.
Check out 20 Product Manager Interview Questions from Product Leaders
One of the things it’s important to mention is that I hired him and moved him and his family from Sydney, Australia to Seattle, Washington. They took their young children out of school and moved to a different hemisphere on the planet. Additionally his wife left her job in Australia to support him when he was moving to America.
Then he started the role, and it was immediately very clear to me that he wasn’t meeting expectations that I had and a lot of the assumptions that I had made about how he was going to do in the role, based on the very fancy pedigree on his CV.
I started to get concerned. I started to try and tell him things weren’t working well, and ultimately felt I was continuously sharing this feedback with him.
After about 4 or 5 months of this, it became very clear that this person wasn’t right for the role and in fact, wasn’t right for working at Microsoft.
So I made the painful decision of deciding to terminate his employment. My logic was I’ve given him all these chances, and I’ve been very clear with him about what the expectations were, and he wasn’t changing his behavior.
I was getting a lot of coaching from my manager and thankfully she was not in I told you so mode. She was genuinely trying to help me, and she was walking me through what I needed to do and how, which I thought I was executing upon step by step.
I didn’t sleep or really eat for at least 24, maybe 48 hours before I had to have the conversation with him. I was physically feeling ill about the conversation. I still get slightly ill telling this story.
We went in, and he came in and plopped down in the chair. It was a normal one to one.
And I very clumsily fumbled through the kind of rehearsed language that you’re supposed to use when you’re terminating someone’s employment.
These images are burning in my brain. I remember it like it was yesterday.
The Hustle Badger Effective Job Hunting Course
The importance of clear candid feedback
He was completely surprised. He was not expecting this conversation at all. He was shocked and he was rightly asking me When were you going to share this performance feedback with me? Why wasn’t I given a chance to correct my behavior and correct my performance?
And I said, Well, I have been giving you this feedback for the last several months. And he did not recall me doing that with him. Not once.
The reason that he didn’t recall me doing with him is while I felt I was being very clear with him about his performance. I, in fact, was not.
Upon reflection I was being overly polite. I was avoiding conflict. I was avoiding having real conversations. That meant I was avoiding giving him the respect he deserved of having candid and frank conversations so that he had the information to correct his performance.
We terminated him to his shock less than 6 months after he moved his family around the world to join the company. He didn’t have an American passport, just a visa based on his employment. That meant he couldn’t stay in America when he left the job.
He had to move his kids back out of school, which they had only just adjusted to and take the whole family back around to Sydney, Australia.
Like I said, to this day, it makes me slightly ill even to recount the story. It has stuck with me for nearly 3 decades and it has guided and informed everything that I’ve done since then.
Not only did I waste his time, and cause his family’s upheaval twice in a year, I also wasted months finding, recruiting, and interviewing him, and on top of that there were the 3 to 6 months that he was in the role but not really doing the job.
All because I didn’t understand the importance of how seriously you need to take the assessment process when you’re interviewing people and hiring them.
I didn’t understand how seriously you need to take giving candid feedback in very short cycles to give people the information they need to adjust their performance and their behavior to meet the expectations of the role. He got none of that from me. I thought I was doing it, but I was not.
I feel very fortunate that this experience happened to me early. Since then I’ve been so careful and invested so much in learning and practicing assessments, learning and practicing how to give feedback so that I could avoid that experience for me, but probably more so for the people who are subject to it.
I’m a big believer that people management is unfortunately one of those things where you have to learn by trial and error and the error comes at the expense of other people’s experience. The only way that I’ve learned these hard lessons has been at the expense of other people.
Check out the Hustle Badger Performance Review Template, Examples & Guide
Learning from the experience
There’s a lot to unpick there. Question one would be, what was it that your manager’s experience level or her processes in place allowed her to identify issues with this candidate that you didn’t yet have?
She had a lot more time in the saddle. A lot more reps and pattern recognition. I’ve got that now: I’ve interviewed thousands of people and I feel I’m quite efficient at assessing them.
She probably saw a few anti -patterns. She probably saw that I was confusing liking him with him being capable of doing the role. I was confusing him being me with him being a lot like me. She probably saw that I was getting overly enamored with his CV. He had an amazing pedigree: good university, computer science degree, great jobs in Australia.
I now have an appreciation for how misleading experience can be, and I barely look at CVs anymore, frankly. A CV isn’t going to tell you whether or not someone is going to be likely to be successful in the role that you’re hiring them for. I think a lot of people just get blinded by MBAs, Ivy League Universities and things like that.
I’m sure my manager saw all of those patterns. She saw me doing this, she knew it was a mistake, she knew what the outcome was going to be, and she let me go through it. And it’s one of the most pivotal and impactful experiences I’ve had in my entire career.
That leads me onto my second question, because I’m interested in what she did to coach you through that experience. How did she move you through that process?
I was always impressed. I’m grateful to this day that she didn’t take an “I told you so” attitude. She could have – and I probably would have frankly, if I were in her position.
But she didn’t, she very much was like, Okay, so you are now in this position, let’s practice getting out of it. Just like she saw me making the mistakes to get into the predicament, her perspective was This is a great opportunity to flex the muscles and learn.some skills about how you deal with these situations.
Despite him not getting the feedback from me, it was a genuine performance management situation. So the coaching was about what you do when you have someone who’s underperforming.
Are you giving them feedback? Are you being clear about what expectations are? Are you documenting your expectations? Are you starting to bring in more structure, give deadlines and things like that?
Are you being clear with them? There’s a point at which you have to say your job is now at risk because you’re underperforming, when and how are you going to have that conversation?
We role played having a lot of those conversations. She put so much time and effort into supporting me through the process.
Then we role-played how to have the last conversation as well. It’s a lot easier to do when you’re pretending to do it with your boss than it is to do with someone whose life you’ve just turned upside down.
Because she put so much time and effort into helping me it was another learning experience as a people manager. How do you coach people? How do you help people improve? How do you set expectations? How do you manage performance issues? All of those things.
What concretely do you do in a hiring process that you didn’t do then? Because we’ve all got biases but it can be hard to change.
I get asked this question a lot and I struggle because now I’ve done thousands of interviews. It’s been demonstrated time and time again that one of the hardest things to teach is something that you know how to do, but you know how to do it without thinking. It’s become kind of second nature and muscle memory for me.
The other thing about the senior position that I’m in now is that by the time I speak to somebody, they have been tested and evaluated on their functional skills to the nth degree.
They’ve also been tested on their collaboration skills, based on how we structure interview loops of the companies that I’ve worked in. So a lot of the things that you would need to cover in an assessment process had been done by people that I trained and trusted.
Therefore I knew that I didn’t need to cover those things. I am testing for a few core personality traits. I’m testing for resilience. I’m testing for integrity. I’m testing for conscientiousness. I’m testing for curiosity. All things that I value and I’ve seen to be core character traits of the best employees in any business, in any function.
Sometimes people are surprised because we very rarely talk about the functional aspects of the role. I talk about their life and job experiences and why they made decisions and what their motivations were and what the logic was behind what they did.
I ask a lot of Tell me about a time when questions. Then I don’t just take the first answer. There’s always more to a story. I do the Five whys. Why did you do that? Why was that important? What was your logic behind that decision?
You can very quickly get a sense for whether they have some of these core traits.
Then I just try to get to know them on a personal level. I think people that are successful in their jobs have a diverse set of interests and a lot going on outside of work.
So just getting to know what they do, what motivates them, what demotivates them.
Transitioning to an executive mindset
What was another pivotal moment in your career?
Much to my chagrin, but I will happily bare my soul for the benefit of others, was that I spent a lot of my early career railing against the business. The business doesn’t understand anything and they’re just making decisions based on their own self interest, they don’t get what the customer wants. That sort of thing.
I spent a lot of time being passive aggressive, aggressive aggressive, petulant, difficult, obstructive to other parts of the businesses that I worked in.
The other parts of the business were often trying to do the right thing. They were trying to help the business perform and grow, and I was very good at playing the victim and debating everything for the sake of it. Can we do this? No. Can we try this? No. Can we talk to this partner? No.
There came a time, at Zoopla, the last full -time job that I had, where I realized what I was doing. That was where I had a mindset shift from being a functional leader at a director or a VP level to an executive mentality.
I work with a lot of people that are either directors or VPs wanting to become a C level person, and with Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer titles.
I always say that the biggest mindset shift in being an executive is that you move from evaluating your job performance as I’m doing my stuff well, the product stuff is fine, it’s the tech stuff that screwed up or it’s the commercial stuff that screwed up.
The mindset shift is to move from that to, I am now one of the handful of people that is responsible for the success of this business. I need to have my house in order, it’s part of my job and my obligation to my peers and the employees, but if there’s a problem in another area, I need to go and help.
That’s the biggest shift because if you see one of your peers struggling or underperforming, you have to go and lean in and figure out how to support them or how to help them solve the problem.
When I look back and reflect upon my behavior: I had always had the self -righteousness of having my house in order, but I’d been really unhelpful to other functional peers or passive aggressive and unhelpful to the bosses that I had.
I learned that lesson, quite viscerally when I was being now subject to the same behavior from people that worked for me. Only then did I realize how I had been behaving for all of those years.
Now when I work with people who are aspiring to move up the career ladder towards functional leadership, I try to help them understand that mindset shift quite early.
What would you say was your lightbulb moment? And then the second one would be, how do you help people?
I don’t know that I had a light bulb moment per se, or realization just dawned over time.
I was very fortunate to have a coach. I remember listening to myself one day as I was complaining to her about how I was right and everyone else was wrong.
And I just thought, My God, this is boring and I just sound like a whiny dick. I’ve been saying this to her for months and this isn’t helpful to anybody. In fact the person that’s suffering the most from my behavior is me. I am actually obstructing myself by behaving this way.
My wife always says you should behave in a way that you’re proud to tell your children about. I really like that bar for behavior and it has instructed how I think about leadership. Full stop is how you model the behaviors that you want to see in an organization or you model the behaviors that you want to see in your children.
It was that moment on the call with my coach where I was just like, man, this is boring and I’m tired of hearing myself do this.
I coach a lot of people at a lot of different stages of their careers. I try to bring my experience to the discussion, particularly if I’m identifying that they’re behaving in that manner.
I ask questions. What are you trying to achieve? They’ll say, I’m going to go do this. I’m going to go tell them that they’re wrong. I’ll just say, Well, what are you trying to achieve by that? The person pauses. They’ll say, Well, I’m going to go tell him this and show them that I’m right.
And I’ll say, Well, what are you trying to achieve? What outcome are you going for by doing that? And they will pause and reflect and then they’ll just start to laugh because they realize that it’s only for their own satisfaction.
There’s absolutely no mature outcome that would come from them doing what they say. It’s purely ego and vanity and all the things that we all have to deal with as human beings. But it’s a simple question. What are you hoping to achieve?
I’m lucky to work with some people who really want to invest in themselves. They just start laughing and they realize that’s their light bulb moment.
I try to help them see that their behavior is not consistent with their values. Their behavior is not consistent with them achieving their stated objectives.
If you want to help a business grow, create a new product line, have a big exit, whatever your objective is, is you squabbling with the chief commercial officer all the time about feature requests from customers meeting that objective? It is certainly not.
Talking B2B
Importance of understanding multiple audiences
Switching topic, we particularly wanted to discuss B2B with you. What learnings can you share?
One of my most visceral learnings in the B2B context, and in this case, in more of a B2B enterprise context, came very early in my career.
It was when I was at Microsoft. Microsoft at the time was really struggling with its enterprise sales.
A lot of companies, big companies, were spending a hundred million pound plus money with Microsoft, but they were really struggling to implement and use the technology they’d bought.
It was a very difficult situation. Enterprise businesses at the time might have dozens or hundreds of different pieces of software running internally, some of which they wrote themselves, others of which they bought. Every time you upgraded an operating system, all those things would break and all the internal processes would break. They were just terrified, frankly, of upgrading.
To make matters worse Microsoft was getting a lot slower at providing upgrades. The whole value of these enterprise contracts was you get all of the upgrades for free.
Well, if there aren’t any upgrades coming and you don’t even want them for fear of breaking your business, then you’ve got a real problem with your customer proposition.
Steve Ballmer was the CEO of Microsoft at the time and he would review the top 10 customer complaints every week.
This problem accounted for 4 out of the 10 complaints, consistently. Microsoft is a global business in every sector and industry, and this problem accounted for 40% of the problems.
To put a price tag on it, it was at the time an $8 billion business for the company, and due to the complaints we had a clear line of sight into that business line turning into a $1 or $2 billion business within 2 or 3 years.
I was one of the people whose job it was to solve that problem.
I immediately went about trying to understand the problem and the user.
In my mind, the user was the IT department within the business who had to deal with these upgrades, and associated issues like how to test the internal software, how to roll out and test the upgrades, how to make sure that all the hardware that everyone had was compatible, all of those challenges.
So I thought, How do we automate it? We had a lot of internal tools at Microsoft to do just that. I found them and productized them and made them a part of the contract offering.
With that we went a long way towards addressing the functional needs people had when dealing with these very large contracts. And I thought, my job here is done and I’ll be on my way now.
Then just for whatever reason, an accident, I found myself talking to the chief procurement officer of a FTSE 100 business. And she started crying while I was talking to her.
I don’t know why she was so candid with me, frankly, I didn’t deserve it. She started crying because she was worried she was going to get fired because she was the person that justified the business case for renewing the enterprise contract with Microsoft to the tune of over a hundred million pounds. And it was very clear that the value of that contract was, I’m not exaggerating, likely to be zero pounds. In fact, negative because they had to spend a lot of money to even do it.
That was going to keep her and the company in the future from buying or renewing these enterprise contracts. And as I later learned, other companies too.
I was incredibly focused on the end user of the offering and their functional requirements. What I only learned by accident was that the entire problem was going to perpetuate if I didn’t understand that there were also people who were the purchase decision makers.
In a B2B context, there’s the people whose budgets the money comes out of to make the purchase and the people who compare products and then decide the purchase, and they’re often not the people who use the product.
A lot of product managers make these mistakes which is they don’t understand that they have multiple audiences in the B2B context that they need to serve in order to be successful in creating value.
Had I only solved the functional problems, the problem would have perpetuated and I would have been absolutely perplexed. Well, I fixed this. Why is this still a problem? Why are people not buying this anymore? Because I didn’t understand the needs of the purchase decision maker.
We ended up interviewing very quickly, like urgently, a bunch of Chief Procurement Officers and Directors of Procurement and CFOs to understand the needs of the purchase decision maker.
We worked to create a model and a set of templates for them to plug in all the numbers associated with the deal, including the costs to be able show a positive ROI to their stakeholders. Only if it was a genuine positive ROI. It wasn’t fixed.
Then we also worked with Gartner, which is a big consulting advisory firm globally for enterprise software. They’re kind of the standard of quality. If Gartner says it’s good, then it’s good. So we had Gartner put their stamp of approval on what was effectively some macros in Excel, such that when a Chief Procurement Officer or CFO had to go to the CEO or the board and justify the decision, they had all the numbers, a clear ROI and it was really nice looking and Gartner had their back in the decision to make the purchase.
I say that tongue in cheek, but at the end of the day, sometimes it’s really important that you give someone something that makes them look impressive.
The key was to address the needs, the emotional and social and psychological needs of the purchase decision maker. The thing that unlocked the problem wasn’t addressing the functional needs of the end user.
Talking to customers
Do you have any advice for product managers when it comes to speaking to users in a B2B context?
My advice to product managers about speaking to users is really, really funny, which is go speak to users.
Every so often I will be in a meeting or chatting with a product manager at a company I worked at and I’ll say, Well, what did you hear from a customer? When’s the last time you spoke to a customer?
That often turns into red faces and a bit of, you know, chagrin, Maybe six months, maybe a year.
I always find it shocking, you know, that you kind of tick the box. I’ve talked to users, I’m now done with that part of the job and I can go on and do the rest of the job.
I’ve always made a habit of it and insisted with people that I’ve worked with that we go talk to users. So much so that when I started at Zoopla, I showed up, I got my badge, I introduced myself to the team, and then I left for two weeks.
I was literally not in the building for the first two weeks because I was out in cars. Driving around with estate agents, in their offices, in the living room of people that they were doing surveys for.
I did that because I wanted to better understand our users in that business and because I wanted to show everyone else in the business that this is how important this is.
So my advice about talking to users is talk to users.
I think people overcomplicate it. They think that there’s a lot more friction than there actually has to be. They think that they need to go through these elaborate processes and panels and survey mechanics and agencies. Well, we can’t talk to users because the UXR team is doing something else or We don’t have a UXR team or I don’t have time to do it because I’m too busy chasing JIRA tickets.
Easy for me to say, like everyone’s got a lot of work to do, but you know, if we’re not the people who understand the customer’s problems, what is our job as product people? I don’t know. And you can’t understand the customer’s problems without talking to customers.
I’ve literally gone to conferences and grabbed people. We’ve gone on the street and given people £10 Starbucks gift cards to chat with us for 15 minutes. You don’t need to overthink it. Just do it.
Then people are going to come back and say, We have a limited number of customers in the B2B context and the commercial people won’t let me speak to them.
You need to find a way to speak to them. Ways of doing that is an interesting topic – you can do it by creating customer advisory boards or finding customer champions or finding a salesperson who is willing to support those kinds of efforts or going and sitting with customer support.
One of the things that I did when I was CPO at PhotoBox was for 1 hour a week, I would go and sit with customer support and I would take calls and listen to the things that people were frustrated and angry about.
If I am prioritizing it as one of the things I need to do in the week, then no one else in the business should have the excuse to not do it.
So the short version is don’t overthink it, just go do it. You’ll be way better. It’s a way better use of an hour than, you know, trying to find a better tool for, you know, whatever, like visualizing org charts.
Dave Wascha evangelizes speaking to users on the Mind the Product stage
Working well cross functionally
How do you access customers if commercial people block you?
This is another war story, I suppose. It goes back to that Microsoft example.
Despite it being a project sponsored by the CEO of the business, which was the largest software company in the world at the time, at the outset of that project I really struggled to get the salespeople to let me speak to customers.
I would arrive in their market, they’d often pick me up at the airport and occasionally they’d even take me back to their house for lunch or something like that. And they had amazing, amazing houses. These are salespeople that made millions of pounds, or dollars a year because they handled huge accounts.
I got to know them a little. I’d be in all kinds of different countries, jet lagged and inevitably we’d go out for a drink or have dinner and some of them would, you know, open up a little bit. It became really, really clear to me that in many cases, you know, whether or not this deal closed meant going on a holiday or not, or being able to pay for their kids’ tuition or not.
In a few cases, you know, some of the salespeople shared with me that if they didn’t make the bonus on the sale, given that they would work on one sale with one customer for an entire year, they wouldn’t be able to pay their mortgage next year.
Once again I had this visceral education in understanding the motivations behind why I was getting so much resistance.
It’s because they’re not willing to let some young punk come in and screw up something that might mean they can’t pay their mortgage or they can’t send their kids to that private school they wanted to send them to.
Developing empathy
I’ve been lucky to take a sense of empathy for other actors in the business away and take that into account when I’m having these conversations.
Everyone has their own pressures, their fears and their motivations. Some of it’s obvious. Commercial people are focused on the in year sales and product people might be tasked with long term growth. Sometimes those things are at odds with each other.
Sometimes it’s a lot more subtle. The CEO is under pressure from the chairman. The chairman’s under pressure from the board. The CTO had a really embarrassing cybersecurity incident.
And so they become incredibly risk averse and basically won’t let anything new happen in the business. There’s all kinds of reasons why tension exists.
Whether it’s a company that I’m working in or somebody that I’m coaching I always try to understand their worldview and motivations and the fears and the pressures that the other person is under.
I’m a believer that people don’t come to work with the intention of being difficult. I believe that everyone wants the same thing. You may just not agree on what the right thing to do to get there. The first step is developing empathy.
Time horizons
The second thing is understanding that different functions – and this was a big aha moment for me a few years ago – different functions work on different time horizons and timelines.
To give an example, marketing might be tracking paid ad performance on a daily or weekly basis for bidding purposes. Sales is tracking against an annual number and they’re looking at it monthly and quarterly. Product people might be looking ahead a quarter or at most a few quarters, but they may also have responsibility for new product lines and new paths to growth for the company that don’t exist today.
Then technology organizations might need to make multi-year investments in really complicated technology choices like authentication technologies, things that are boring but important and take a long time to implement or a lot of thinking to implement properly.
So I think a lot of times all these functions get together to try and make a decision and the marketing folks are thinking about tomorrow, the sales folks are thinking about next month, the product people are thinking about next year, and the tech people are thinking about next year or into the future. There’s no way that they’re going to arrive at the same decision about what to do next in that context.
Making the implicit explicit
So the next thing I do, especially when I’m working with teams, is to try and make the implicit explicit. There are implicit reasons why people are making the decisions or the suggestions that they are.
I really encourage people to make that explicit by explaining it: Explain why you think that is the right thing to do? Don’t sit there fighting over whether or not it is the right thing to do; explain your motivations, your logic, your reasoning.
If you make the implicit explicit and everyone shares their reasoning: Well, gosh, of course. I now understand why you’re suggesting that because you’re worried about this and you’re motivated by that. And I get it now. That goes 80% of the way to solving a lot of these problems.
I think the obvious thing that everyone goes to is you have incentives that are in conflict. Yes, that happens.
In one of the businesses that I’ve mentioned here, the Chief Commercial Officer and I stopped having individual one to ones with the CEO. We went in one day together and we said, we’re only having meetings with you when the two of us are together so that you can’t tell us different things.
We did that for the rest of the time that I was there because we were being given explicitly conflicting priorities and marching orders.
That’s an easy one to point to. It’s always easy to say that the commercial people don’t get it. I think the reality is when you put a group of humans together that have different sets of fears, different sets of logic, different sets of motivations, and different sets of objectives there’s no way you’re ever going to be aligned.
But the most important thing is to create alignment across the functions and focus.
I would take an under-funded, under-experienced, lesser performing team that was aligned over an overfunded team of rock stars with all the resources they could possibly ask for that wasn’t aligned. I would take it every single time. I have seen the impact of misalignment. It is the biggest generator of waste in the universe. Who knows how many billions and trillions of pounds have been wasted because teams have not been aligned.
It’s one of the hardest things to do. I’m not saying it’s easy.
Often, when I’m talking or working with Chief Product Officers, I say, you know, your job is actually to be the chief alignment officer. A lot of people assume that’s the role of the CEO, but the CPO is often the person where all the misalignment lands at their desk.
The commercial people are coming with one set of things and the tech people are coming with another and the CEO is coming with another and the board’s coming with another and the marketing team’s coming with another.
If there’s misalignment, it lands at the CPO’s desk and it’s the cause of all of the frustration and all of the conversations that product people have when they’re whining about their jobs at the pub.
So alignment, right? Having that empathy for the people that you work with to understand where they’re coming from and their motivations and their fears and their priorities. And then making implicit assumptions that everyone has explicit so that you can understand where everyone’s coming from and get everything on the table.
Driving that alignment is key. I would take that over anything else in a business that I was trying to run.
Current backlash product is experiencing
Where do you stand on measuring product management impact, linking it to commercial outcomes?
This is a tough one, particularly in today’s capital markets. I think there’s a backlash or a reckoning that we’re experiencing now in product. I said There’s a reckoning coming at a conference recently and that resonated with a lot of people.
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For too long, I think product people for some good reasons and some bad reasons have avoided direct accountability for commercial outcomes. They’ve done that in some cases for the right reasons, which is it’s difficult to have the right risk appetite and the right attitude about new product development and growth if you’re also being held to a level of precision around predictability that isn’t possible. The result of that recipe is a fail. It’s small incremental growth.
For a lot of product people that leaves a bad taste in their mouth and they’re left with a lot of scars.
I remember having this discussion actually with the chairman of the board and the CFO of one of the businesses that I mentioned and they’re like, Why can’t you tell us when this is going to be delivered? What’s the ROI we need to know so that we can tell our lead partners, the lead partners of our investors? It’s where the investors get their money.
And I said, Let me just be clear. So you are asking me to tell you when a product that doesn’t exist today, built by people that we have yet to even hire into the business is going to yield on a specific month and day?
When I put it that way, they couldn’t do anything but laugh.
If you try to apply mature business performance metrics and commercial accountability to a nascent emerging business, you’re going to asphyxiate that nascent emerging business.
Similarly if you try to avoid commercial accountability around growth based on the outcomes of your work and your hypothesis in a mature business, then that’s just irresponsible. I think for someone in the business to have no accountability for how well your decisions are resulting in the outcomes that you said they would that’s not ok either.
Where people run into trouble is where you try to apply the playbook from mature to an emerging or from an emerging to mature. That’s when all the trouble happens.
When you have a mature business, people should be held accountable for conversion rate growth and optimization and some level of predictability around the growth of the business and the impact of certain features and decisions on customer acquisition, customer churn, all those things. There has to be some level of connection and accountability there.
But equally, you need to not have a risk appetite that is too small for someone whose job it is to go and create a new business. The best businesses have multiple bets, some of which are mature, some of which are emerging. They have different approaches for holding people accountable for the quality of their decisions.
I think that’s the best way of doing it. I think the appetite on the part of businesses for product people who are shirking or avoiding this accountability is going to zero very, very fast.
At the end of the day I think product people, presumably, are making decisions around what consumers value and what will consumers or users or buyers value and what will cause them to choose their product over an alternative. If they’re not doing that well, then they should probably let someone else do that job.
That might sound a bit harsh, but I do think product people have been avoiding accountability for too long and people aren’t going to put up with it anymore.
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Who is Dave Wascha?
Dave Wascha is a CPTO, Non Executive Director, Venture Capital Advisor and a Product Coach. He started off working on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4 over 20 years ago, staying with the company for 14 years before relocating from the USA to the UK. In the UK he worked for Travelex, moo.com as CPTO, PhotoBox as CPO and Zoopla as CPTO. Currently he is pursuing a portfolio career to have more time for family.
What can you learn from Dave Wascha about product management?
Some of his key principles include: think like an owner, remember to monetize the product, avoid incremental thinking, speak to users and do the right thing for your user’s needs, rather than what they say they want.
