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Episode 092
Join us in this episode as we chat with Chad McAllister, a renowned product management expert. Chad emphasizes the importance of continual learning in product management, touching on key aspects like strategy, portfolio management, and team dynamics. He offers advice on leveraging diverse backgrounds, transitioning into product management, and aspiring to leadership roles. Chad's insights shed light on navigating the dynamic landscape of product management for those aiming to excel in the field.
TRANSCRIPT
[0:39] I'm very excited about my guest and my conversation today. Chad McAllister is with me, and Chad is actually a past guest on Product Voices, so excited to have him back. Chad, as you probably know, is a guru of product management, been doing this for a long, long time, and I've learned from him over the years, and I'm very excited to have him. He's a product management professor, practitioner, trainer. He's the host of Product Mastery Now, a podcast I know you've heard and been around for a long time and just huge, huge amount of learnings on that vehicle as well. He's also the author, co-author of Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge, a guidebook for product innovation, training, and certification. Really, really excited to talk to Chad about that and all things product management. Chad, thanks for joining me. JJ, thank you so much. I'm so glad to be part of your podcast. And likewise, really appreciate what you've done for the product management community, the teaching you do now, the training you've done in the past, the number of companies you've helped and individual product people. So thank you, JJ. Thank you very much. It's truly rewarding, as you know, to be able to give back and make a career of helping people be great in product, I think is really the dream.
[2:00] So, you know, it's interesting. You and I have talked about this before. So, Product Development and Management Association, PDMA, it's been around for a long time. I'm going to ask you to give a little bit more on them. But interestingly, when I started my career way back, gosh, 16, 17 years ago in my career in product management, I'd been in marketing, I'd been in sales, kind of found myself in a product like we, you know, so often do. I was working for a big company and they had brought in this training program, basically, and we're allowing any product managers to be part of this. And it was the NPDP, New Product Development Professional Certification through PDMA and groups.
[2:44] So I was able to go through that fairly early in my product career, which I don't think a lot of folks, especially back then, were really able to do. I had a company that was dedicated to helping us grow. So I have always been a fan of this and I've always believed that the quicker we can support and give support and learning resources to product managers, the better they're going to be in the long run. So I love that part of your story. So tell me a little bit more about your involvement in PDMA and kind of how it's blossomed over the years. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's a good reminder that our stories intersected a little bit because as we've talked, I was involved a little bit with that
[3:26] large organization and helping them learn some of this knowledge. Knowledge uh so i the way i found pdma was just one day doing a google search right um as a someone involved in product i wore the title of project manager right but we were developing new products and i was working with customers to understand what they needed and and doing the agile sort of approach at the time and um certainly what would have been called a project manager i mean sorry a product manager if we knew that title existed right um but because i was doing project I was very involved with the PMI, the Project Management Institute, and their body of knowledge, and that helped quite a bit. But there were some things that were missing. I thought, you know, I'm not really involved with projects as much as I am with products.
[4:12] I wonder if there's a similar group for people doing product work, not knowing what that might be, right? And I just did a Google search, just uncovered PDMA, got involved with them. They have local chapters around different places.
[4:26] And there was a group of us that kind of showed up at the same time. We decided to make the local chapter better, and we put together a new board of directors for it. And we looked at each other and went, what do they really mean by product management? And maybe we should learn this body of knowledge they talk about. And they have a certification that goes along with that, as you said, the MPDP. And we thought, okay, well, let's just put together a study group. We'll study what they tell us is the body of knowledge, and we'll at least understand what they mean by that. And so we all did that, took the test, passed the test, thankfully, not trivial, as you know, too.
[5:01] And I just found so much value in that experience, as the rest of us did. We started helping other product managers do the same thing, right? Just put together a little study group, prepare, learn this body of knowledge, get the certification if you want. The things I found, so I had been doing product work for about 10 years at that point. And so I had pieces of the puzzle. But like many of us, this just came from practical experience, right? Trial and error, reading things here and there, getting our hands on a few books, right? And talking to some other people.
[5:33] Talking to other product managers was really helpful. And that was one thing the association made possible.
[5:38] But actually studying the body of knowledge connected a lot of the puzzle pieces for me. And I just remember these aha moments like, oh, that's when I should be thinking about prioritizing product features. And now that our product is launched, these are the things to kind of expect and prepare for competitors to do, take action. And it just made sense of some things that I had not thought through.
[6:01] So I just found that really, really helpful for me. For me, too, was when I got into product management, and before I got into this big company, it's called First Data, now Fiserv, through some mergers, I had been in product a little bit, but very informally with a different company. And so this was my first kind of formal foray into product management. And, you know, when you get thrown into a role that is as complex and at least as dynamic as product, you do what you do. You just, you know, jump in and you realize after learning how it should be that you were doing some things right. You maybe weren't calling it the right thing or doing it exactly right, but then you were also doing some things wrong. So I love the kind of formal, you know, aspect of it while being flexible enough to say it doesn't look the same across organizations. It's never going to be the same. And you're not the same product manager that I'm going to be. And, you know, we're all going to learn from each other and take aspects from each other. And so that's one of the things that I loved about that program itself. And I've actually taken a lot of that. It took me a while.
[7:13] Through my kind of corporate career to get to where I am now, where I actually have been training and teaching and coaching. But as I got into that, I kind of looked back at that and made sure that I pulled into some of that. So I want to talk to you a little bit more about this body of knowledge.
[7:31] Again, you've on this latest version of the body of knowledge book, again, called Product Development and Management, Body of Knowledge, Guidebook for Product Innovation, innovation, training, and certification, you've put a lot of time into this with some others. So tell me a little bit about this version, you know, how the body of knowledge is organized and kind of what you've kind of enjoyed about being part of it in a formal way, not just being a learner from it, but actually being one who co-authors it.
[8:02] Tell me a little bit more about that. Sure.
[8:05] Just kind of give a little bit of the breadth of the background here. So PDMA started It started in 1976, and it started because people were doing research in product work, right? I remember we were going to a conference in 2010, and the panel that was discussing things, one of the persons they introduced themselves on the panel said, I've been doing product work for 10 years. I've been doing it before there was even a thing known as product management. Like, you know, we actually have roots back to about the 2030s at P&G, and then we have this whole association from 76. and it started because there was a group of researchers, academics primarily, some practitioners that were discovering things that were working. And they said, we need to get this information out to more practitioners because this is actually really helpful. And so the association started and like most bodies of knowledge start in the beginning, it's just a collection of available information, right? They had their own research publications that they pointed to. There were were some really good books that had been written that they pointed to, and it was a collection of things we pointed to that together we said this was the body of knowledge.
[9:12] Uh, PDMA then many years later, um, said, and, uh, I may, I don't know when this started, maybe 2014 said, why don't we take what we point to and basically make a guidebook to the body of knowledge, just like PMI did for project managers. And so that got put together. Uh, I contributed, uh, two parts of that and that was published in 2016. Then it was a great start. At least now we had one volume that we could, you know, one book you could pick up and go, We go, okay, this is what we talk about as the knowledge areas. And then they've been trying to produce a new edition PDMA every three to four years or so. So 2020, another version came out. I reviewed that one with them. And then this one now, 2024. And this one, I was asked to help out on the author team. And this is all volunteer work, right? PDMA, as you know, is a nonprofit volunteer organization. organization uh we do the best we can there's some really great people involved uh but writing the book creating this new edition was just a volunteer project by the author team and my motivation was i received a lot of benefit from it and i wanted to clarify some things that i thought were not clear in the first and second editions um and just help contribute to making it easier for other people to get their hands around yeah this is what we think about when it, creating new products or making existing products better.
[10:42] That's great. That's great. So, and of course, we'll link to the book and PDMA and all of that in the show notes. But tell me a little bit about the topics in the BOK and so folks can kind of
[10:52] get an understanding of the breadth of what's in there. Yeah, absolutely. And I have worked with really knowledgeable people that, you know, they're great product leaders, and they've gone through all the available training, right, that we could talk about that we're aware of that we, you know, training that you used to be part of, right, to do with training organizations and like. And they have commented, you know, that they don't know of a wider breadth of information than PDMA's body of knowledge. And it's going to encompass all the big pictures. There's seven knowledge areas, and each one of those dives into some collection of practices, concepts, processes, tools that make sense for us, right? So the first one, I can just talk through these, cut me off when I run out of time if we do.
[11:38] The first one, and they're not organized in a linear fashion per se, but some things we would obviously do in specific orders. But product innovation management is where the book starts. And this is really looking at kind of an introduction to the entire lifecycle process and some of the big concepts about, well, how we need to get ideas. That's part of it. We need to do some development work to make the product real. There's some tools involved in that, like we do borrow a lot from project management because we're managing a project. And then when the product gets launched, there's specific activities we expect to happen as it starts growing its market share and competitors start coming in and our growth starts plateauing a little bit. And what do we do about all that?
[12:25] Uh, so it's a nice introduction to everything else that follows in the book. So it kind of sets the stage in some way. And we have, as an author team, we debated back and forth. Is it, should we do it in the beginning kind of as introduction to everything else? Or does it really better at the end kind of as a wrap up? Like, okay, you know, all the pieces now let's bring them together. Um, it used to be in the second edition at the end, we thought it worked better in the beginning and we made some changes to that as well to make things more clear. So, and then really where I think about our work begins as product people is strategy. And that's the second knowledge area. And strategy is important to us because we want to align the work that we do, trying to create value for our customers, to what the organization is caring about. And anyone in product who has ever had the situation where they can't get support for their ideas, that they think something's really valuable to the customer, or they have a great idea for a new product, and they just can't get support for it. They've probably ran up against this wall of not being aligned with the organization strategy.
[13:27] And once we understand what the organization's objectives are and what is important right now to the senior leaders and to the growth of the organization, if we align our work with that, everyone wins. We make the organization more successful. We help our customers more. Everyone wins. So understanding strategy is important and how that organization strategy impacts our work in our product innovation strategies, too.
[13:52] And then the next knowledge area is portfolio management. And a lot of product managers I work with don't really get into, they don't see a lot of aspects of portfolio management. Product VPs that we work with certainly are more involved in this. But portfolio management does impact us at an important level as product people. Because when we do portfolio management, we're really just looking at what are the right projects to do, right? Of all the ways that we can serve our customers and help our organization grow, we have limited resources in any organization, doesn't matter how big it is, but there are limited resources and what should we be working on? So it's really about the, what are the right projects? And as product people, that comes back to, you know, fundamentally, how does one project get selected over another one? And if you have something that you are supporting, pushing, you want to see get done, understanding how projects get selected, how they get prioritized, how they get resourced is pretty important. So you can position your work to be part of that collection, right?
[14:56] I think that's actually, just to jump in here, I think that's a really, really important point that it also, to me, ties back to strategy, at least in the kind of real world workings of an organization is that, especially in certain organizations that are, you know, doing a lot of projects at once, they're a little bit more on the, I'll use this term just because I think it clarifies in people's minds, the waterfall process. And I don't mean that in the literal term, but just a little bit more of, you know, they're assigning resources.
[15:28] It's very much driven by portfolio view of all of the things that we're going to do. It's budget driven, all of that kind of culture and aspect. And if we're product managers who first don't understand how our products that we believe are important in our world, in our purview, align to that strategy. But then to your point, we don't understand how that whole thing looks from a big picture perspective, right? Because the people who are approving and putting resources to projects and to new modules, new products, whatever, they're looking at the bigger picture. And it's not that we have to have the entire purview, but we need to look to see, okay, mine's not getting approved because it's big and dynamic and risky. And we've already got too many of those in the portfolio or whatever it may be, right? It's not aligning there. So I agree with you. I don't know a lot of individual contributor product managers that truly have a responsibility for portfolio management, but the knowledge of what's going on in your organization is very important. Yeah, exactly. You say that very well. And a question for our listeners, do you feel like you have enough resources in the organization for the number of projects that you're doing?
[16:46] When I've asked that question to people that could respond, I haven't got a yes yet. It's like, we're working on way too many things, right? Yeah. Um, that's really paralyzing a lot of organizations. And so we need strong portfolio management because the reality is we, we look at opportunities we have, and maybe we, if we ranked them on a scale of one to 10, 10 being like, these are fantastic. We've got a lot of nines. Well, sure. We want to do those, but we better tackle our tens first. And, um, I was working for an organization where the average time for, uh, product managers to get things out of the whole cycle was approaching about 18 months.
[17:27] And things that we know could have literally been done in two weeks were being stretched out many months just because of process and lack of resources, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[17:38] Okay, so product innovation management, strategy, portfolio management, the first three areas. Okay, continue on with fourth through seventh. Then we're on with process, which is probably what a lot of us think about. This is making it real, right? It's what process do we use to take the idea, develop that into a concept, validate that, that we're coming up with a solution that does create value for the customers, something customers actually want. We're choosing the right features to implement and then sending that through whatever appropriate development lifecycle. If that's software, we're making the software real, testing that. If it's manufacturing, we're getting ready for those processes. A lot of the companies I end up working with are doing software and hardware, you know, integrated sort of platforms. But the interesting thing about everything we're talking about so far works across all industries, right? And I've personally worked with beverage companies, food service, you know, it's the processes and everything else fits the industry, which is just amazing for us. One thing that means is we have a lot of transportability, right? If we get bored with what we're doing, we can work somewhere else pretty easily usually.
[18:48] But so process is that we look at a traditional stage gate, which is still used in some form, a percent of Fortune 500, right? Fast stage, agile stage gates, same sort of thing.
[19:01] And there's a number of processes that we should be aware of and use the right
[19:05] one for the right problem. And then after process building kind of on that is an area called design and development. Development and there's not a hard line between the two but design is really thinking about what is involved in creating that capability for the customer in a way that they'll resonate with that seems approachable seems attractive to them seems easy to use right it's the design elements that we want and us understanding as people who have to actually build that right as part of the product team, the tire product team, the developers and engineers and the like, what is involved in that? And so at some point, we move from design concepts into specifications, and that takes us more into the world of development. And if we're developing something real, we want our engineers and our manufacturing engineers to understand concretely what that is. And so we need specifications that make sense for them. And again, depending on your environment, there's different tools that make sense for us to use, and that knowledge area just presents a lot of those tools, and some are more appropriate, like if we're developing cars in the automotive industry, and some we would see in software and other places.
[20:21] And then next is market research. And, you know, sometimes I find we get wrapped around the, we just get tied up too much. And, you know, what does market research mean in the first place?
[20:34] I like to think of it always starts with customer research, right? We're trying to just identify literally individuals that we're solving a problem from. And then we're trying to identify what's in common with people who have that problem and that leverages into a market, right? Right. And clearly, we need to be developing products for more than just one person, typically. But I think we sometimes lose sight when we just focus on market research and not specific consumer research, too. But this is my most favorite area, personally, which is just understanding what is that problem, right?
[21:10] Doing the ideation work to understand the customer's problem. them. I've been able, I stumbled into this completely without knowing what ethnographic research was, but I found user observations just being part of, in the midst of people with the problem and watching how they try to solve it now and what tools they're using and what tensions and headaches you run into, doing those user observations and then maybe following that up with some interviews
[21:35] to fill in some missing information, right? Like I noticed you wrote wrote this post-it note in the middle of trying to enter information into your software program there. And you stuck that on the monitor and you came back to it later. What was that about? Right. And, you know, so market research, this is a collection of tools and processes for us to learn what the customer wants and start to validate ideas for a solution with them. Again, we're on the right track to create value for them.
[22:06] And then the final knowledge area is culture and teams.
[22:11] And we didn't put leadership in the title, but it certainly belongs there because that's what we're talking about. And so these are concepts that underpin everything that we do in product work because we're working with other people, right? And so we want to be aware of organizational culture. It kind of ties us back to strategy a little bit to understand the mission and vision where we're going as an organization. And then on individual groups and product teams, kind of what their culture or climate is like and what's important to them and what they value and how do we create psychological safety and have a team that is productive and effective and rewarding for each other.
[22:50] And then teams also covers team structures. structures, and when I have the opportunity to train companies on this and train their product people on this, this is one area that often people say, oh, I didn't realize we actually could have different team structures, that they're kind of just used to one way of doing things. And we probably want to look at the risk profile of the project and some other characteristics, like what's the deadline and what's our available resources and the like, and pick the right team structure for the problem and not always just default to whatever the matrix that we use in a lot of organizations, you know, is probably doesn't always serve us as well as it should based on the actual project. So culture of teams is real important, how people show up and how we build our teams and work together and try to be a high-performing work group. Yeah, I love it.
[23:49] Speaking on that, a couple of thoughts on the Teams aspect. I know a few companies that actually allow their kind of.
[24:00] Product teams, if you will, to organize themselves for the most part, right? Obviously that's, that's one of the kind of core tenants of, of Agile, but, but literally organize, you know, and structure themselves differently. And so every, you know, or at least within different, you know, units, they look different because their problem is different because they need to be different. And, and you know, if you've got an organization that, that, that fits in and that, that that makes a lot of sense.
[24:31] I'm a big fan of that because again, you shouldn't try to fit a structure in just because it's something that another team does or another organization does, or it's what we've known in the past or what have you. So I think that's part of, of one thing. So, you know, again, I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, growing pains in that, that type of thing, but I think it's a really cool thing. And then on the market research, I, I love that, that this is one of them and it just, it just has to be obviously in product management, but I've actually started teaching a class at Johns Hopkins that we just introduced a couple semesters ago called customer discovery and problem analysis. And it's, it's literally just that, like one of the things that I tell the students in the first class is the hardest thing that this semester, well, the hardest thing for you this semester will be for you not to solution, because I am not asking you to, to come up with a solution for whatever problem we're working on. It is just an, a way way for you to build your muscles in market research and customer discovery, and then analyzing a problem before you jump in to trying to solution. And, and that's hard. That's hard for any of us, because we want to solve as soon as we get an inkling for a problem for a consumer or customer, it's human nature. Yeah, right. And so, you know, it's, it's a forcing function to say, okay, you know, you don't have to overdo it, but you've got to get to a point where you understand the problem enough to your, you're going to come up with some really good solutions. So also, you know, I think it's you made a really big, a really good point earlier that's important to bring back up is that.
[26:00] These are how the book, any kind of book or content piece is organized in a certain way. It doesn't mean that we do them all in this order. Sometimes they go back and forth and you're constantly kind of cycling. You're doing research all the time. You're going back and forth to some of these, which I'm sure is part of the difficulty in product management for a lot of folks because a lot of our brains work in a linear way. But I think that's an important point as well that I'm sure the authors thought about is how you organized it but also how you balance to the fact that sometimes it's not as organized. Yeah, absolutely.
[26:43] And two things that came to mind as you were talking about that, one is just the number of tools in here, processes, concepts. I often use the analogy of the all-you-can-eat food buffet, right? We walk into the all-you-can-eat food buffet and go, wow, look at all those amazing things if it's a good food buffet. But you can't possibly consume all of them, right? You can't even try all of them, right? You pick out your favorites that you want at that time. And that's very much what this body of knowledge is like, is no one company would use all of these tools. It doesn't make any sense. But being aware of them is pretty important to us as professional product people. We should be aware of them and know what to use, right? Yeah.
[27:23] And the other thing, as you were talking, that came up for me is like the organization that has the self-managing teams, right? And so they reflect that.
[27:32] A lot of us are in organizations where there's processes in place and we know how to follow the process. What I've gotten feedback on people doing the body of knowledge, like when you were at First Data, you know, that was such a great story. Frankly this just it empowered me as a product person to know that this large organization was making a commitment to we need people in this company that understand how to create products so you know go learn this and i saw that at uh praxair as well they're the company company uh they got acquired by a i think it's a french right it's company i forget the name now but they do air right they do gases so medical gases manufacturing gases oxygen and the like and for I think five years I don't know what they're doing now because I lost track of them after they went through the merger thing but there was a guy there that would take the as part of the onboarding process their new product people product managers that were new to the field or moving over into that role through the MPDP knowledge at least once maybe twice a year right as new people came on and what he told me was you know Chad we have our processes but we know how to follow them, but it's only by going through this body of knowledge do we understand why we do those things. And then that does empower you to say, oh, our team structure needs to be different for this. We can be self-managed, but here's the things that should be important to us on this project.
[29:01] This is why we need to think about doing our process differently. You understand the why behind things a lot more by digging into a body of knowledge more deeply.
[29:11] Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And, you know, brings up some ideas of some of my corporate clients that, you know, when I revisit things with them or just talking with them and they say, well, you know, we've tweaked your framework a little bit here.
[29:27] That's a sign of progress and success, right? Yeah, I've heard it. You know, if somebody's exactly, if somebody says, well, we, we still follow your, your template, your framework, your blah, blah, blah, exactly the same way, you know, on its surface, you might think, oh, that's great. You're no, it's really not because there's no way that my, the way that I thought of it and the way that I kind of put it together based on my experience is exactly what you need. Right. And so the whole idea is that here's a, here's a framework, a, a, a mind map of how to think through what you need to think through and then move forward. Right. And so there's always some tweaks that we should be making. And it's, it's one of the great things about products. It's also frustrating that we're never quite there. We're always improving. We're always changing. We're always figuring out ways that, that it can be better. But it, it should never look just exactly like somebody else's because your environment, your team, even if it's a sister team, a peer your team, my sibling team, you know, it's going to be a little bit different. So, so I love that. That's great. So what, you know, one thing that, that you and I both work on, and especially now that my career has kind of melded into academia and, and, and, and corporate, you know, more like yours, yours has been as well.
[30:44] I spend a lot of time trying to, to help newer product managers or aspiring product managers get into the field. Some of them through other channels. So they're going through their career and they want to move into product management. And of course, a lot of folks now, which is a little bit different, probably over the last five or six years, maybe we've got people coming straight out of school wanting to be product managers. That wasn't a thing back in the day when we started. So, or very, very rare anyway.
[31:15] Tell me your advice when When you have someone, again, I know folks come to you all the time, someone wanting to get into product management, what advice do you have for those folks? It's a great question with not a simple answer. We'll try to make this as simple as we can. So my personal experience with the body of knowledge, it is positioned in some groups as learn these things. I also feel that that's overwhelming, and I haven't had great success, frankly, with that. at, right? My, you know, PDMA officially says you need to have two years of product experience, and an understanding of this body of knowledge before you can receive the certification, the MPDP.
[32:02] I find, you know, I personally usually say, you know, if you have three years of experience, then it makes sense for you to dive into this. That's my perspective and my experience, right? The, and so what do you do ahead of time, right? So the, you know, we both provide a podcast. I think podcasts are great places to hear kind of what does it mean to be a product person and start hearing about some of the ideas. And you hear in the words of others, right, that this is, you know, kind of like going to that local chapter meeting, going to some meetup with other product people. Those are really super valuable. And podcasts are a great way to hear from others, talk about, you know, some of the things that are important. And you start getting an appreciation, kind of how product people should be thinking. Right. Because you have to get into that. And that's can be a bit challenging. I personally learn really well from books. And so I think there's some good books that we should, you know, you should get your hands on. And there's a good list that you can Google and find for product people. And that's a great way to start.
[33:05] Ideally, if you can be in some setting, if you're thinking like a product role you're interested in, we need to find people that are doing that and talk to them and follow them. And whether that's a local meetup that you can be a part of, something virtual that you can join, or you're in an organization where there are product people, gosh, you take them to lunch or have the virtual lunch and talk about what they do, why they're interested in that. Most people are glad to talk about the work that they do and how they got interested in all that.
[33:41] We need to be engaged with people to talk about those things. The one other piece I will add, as you're thinking about a product role, So a lot of, it's interesting, this is not my business, so please don't email me or call me, but people have reached out in the past, and I don't do this officially, but saying, you know, I want to get into product and I just, it seemed like a big leap, how do I do that? And in every instance when we talk about what they're doing now there's clear connections and you need to take inventory of what you do now and understand like through these knowledge areas this is helpful right these knowledge areas okay these are the things that product people need to do you listen to your to your podcast jj listen to mine listen to others you know in a few episodes you have a pretty good understanding of you know kind of some of the big buckets of things we have have to do. And you take inventory of what you've done before and how that relates to product things. And there's, you have some experience that probably aligns, right? And that's important to recognize and tap into.
[34:48] If we have time, I can give you an example if you want. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. So, and this was a friend, so I went a little bit above for this friend, but But she was in a nonprofit situation. I have to get her on my podcast to share the story because it's a great story. It's been several years now. But she was in a nonprofit organization. And there was actually someone that she had met through these nonprofit fundraising events had told her, you know, you really need to apply for this product role in my organization. And she looked at that and it just felt like a huge leap, right? It's like, why, why would he suggest that? And, you know, it's just it was a global director of product, something or another. Right. So seemed like a really big leap. And we talked through that. I gave her some specific episodes of my podcast to listen to based on the job description. I said, okay, this will help you understand the language, right? So listen to these six episodes. Great.
[35:49] And then we talked through her experience a little bit and said, well, what is it that you do? So the thing that she's really good at is putting together these big events for fundraising that are raising millions of dollars for this nonprofit organization. We would all recognize the name. Um, and you know, and she would do all the work leading up to this launch the event, right? Receive the revenue at the event for the organization and have this big success. It's like, okay, let's break that down. What are you doing from the very beginning? Where does that idea come from? Okay, well, how, what steps are you going through to, you know, prepare for that event? That sounds like you're developing a service basically, right? Right. It's going to be a one day sort of event thing, but you're developing a service. OK, then what do you do to launch? How do you get the word out? How do you attract people to this?
[36:42] And then you're actually launching, you're executing, making this available to people. Right. And then on the back end, you're probably measuring some metrics about how you did. Huh. You just built a product. It sounds like you're developing a product. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And in this case, it came down to 30 people that they interviewed for the job. Only three were external to the company, and she got the job. And since then has done amazing things for this company. So she's brilliant, which does help, right? But she's just making that connection between what you've done and how product people think. I think a lot of us do have things in the background. Another quick story, I'll do much less detail.
[37:30] A guy was a product marketer and said, I really want to get into product management. I'm like, but you're a product marketer. Yeah, I know. I just, I don't know how to bridge that at all. Okay, let's talk through that, right? Because if you have the title of product marketer, I'm pretty sure. And in his head, he was thinking about, well, all I do is I make products better, right? I take what we do now and make products better. I want to work on the new thing that we haven't done yet.
[37:58] Yeah, but everything you do will fit that same new thing, right? We just have to make the connections. Yeah, I love that advice, and I think it's spot on. And I think for folks who have experience in anything, I mean, really, there are examples of nurses and teachers and, you know, everything we can think of that on its surface, they go, there's no connection there. It's always a connection. And product management is complex. It's dynamic. and not everybody loves it and not everybody can do it.
[38:29] But it's not rocket science, meaning there are so many aspects of what we do that other roles do as well. And there are connections. They do it differently. There's always a different context, but there are connections and tying those into your story, right? Selling yourself is key there. So I love that. So, so final question for you is, is just the next step on that,
[38:57] that kind of conversation. So folks have been in product management for a while, and a lot of folks are very, very happy to be individual contributors and just kind of move up the product manager ladder and, you know, senior product manager group, whatever, and not really be a leader. But then there's a lot of folks, of course, who want to take the next step and become, you know, heads of product or whatever whatever it would be. So what would your advice be to those folks who want to kind of stay in product, but move up into leadership roles and even executive roles?
[39:33] Yeah, absolutely. I do think this body of knowledge works really well for that case, right? So, when I frame who is this for, it really is for the professional product managers, the person who says, this is my role, this is my career, I may be in other roles in the future, but I want to take this seriously, right? And get better at that. that probably about, I don't know what it is now, but I know a lot of people that listen to my podcast are product VPs, right? They're listening to, they have a different level of influence in the organization and they're filling in some, you know, maybe gaps in their knowledge or just hearing from a different perspective, right? At times. And oddly enough, the people that reach out to me for help often are on the order of like 10 years of experience and product. And they're thinking about, you know, I'm moving into leadership now and I need to make sure I have the boxes checked and the puzzle pieces put together and something a little bit more concrete. And maybe it's just because I want to make sure I'm not missing anything, right? It's like, I think I'm good, but let's make sure.
[40:38] And the body knowledge does really help with that to get you grounded. And just to extend this a little bit further, just as product people in general, I think we should be destined for the senior leadership roles in organizations, right? There are product people who are become CEOs and we're unique. If I love bragging on us, right. And you get this and hopefully the listeners do too. We are unique in organizations. If I, if I want to find out what's going on inside an organization, I'm going to be unique. The product person is going to have the best view of that because we work so cross-functionally and we're wired a little bit differently often because a lot of people will say you know stay in your lane you're in that function you know stay in the silo so to speak right, um that's what you do you're in marketing you do that stuff as product people we have the opportunity and hopefully the pleasure of working across all the functions and integrating that that knowledge in the work we do. We just have to. And so because of that, we have a unique perspective on the organization, and we should be moving up over time into senior leadership roles. Yeah, I agree completely. It's such a unique role in that you bring so many.
[41:53] Different skills and qualities together, and it's a very, very balanced and well-rounded role. And that's part of the reason why it's difficult for folks in the beginning is they're strong in some areas and not so much in others. In some roles, that's great and actually required. And in our role, you kind of have to be a jack of all trades and in many, in many trades, maybe not, maybe not all, but you definitely have to be, be well balanced. And so in, in, in, and often in, in seemingly contrary ways. Chad, thank you so much for joining me today and telling us all about the body of knowledge and also just sharing your wisdom. It's been a great conversation and I thank you for being here. I am so glad to be here. JJ, thanks so much for giving me this opportunity. It's great to talk with you again too. Talk with your listeners. Yes, you bet, you bet. We'll have to do another one. We have a fun conversation every time we get together. So thank you again, Chad McAllister and thank you all for joining us on Product Voices.
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