In the closing keynote talk for our Pendomonium + #mtpcon roadshow event in Berlin, Ken Chin, Spark Network’s Chief Product Officer (CPO), shared insights on navigating a career in product.
Chin has had a long career in product management, development, and leadership. He’s lived and worked in five countries and has been a CPO twice. While he reminds the audience, ‘I’m not smarter than any of you, I’m just older,’ his advice is distilled from years of experience in industries like online retail to employment staffing.
In his closing keynote, he gave the audience five key takeaways for effectively growing a career in product leadership, touching on the lessons he wished he’d known earlier.
1. You’re not as competent as you think
Individual contributors, Chin says, spend all their time learning the craft. While this is typically the first step in product management, he emphasizes learning about the ‘why’ behind the ‘how’. At some point, he says, you’ll have to explain to a manager why you build roadmaps, perform discovery, and establish OKRs, and take into account any feedback.
The best feedback has always been a little bit painful.
—Ken Chin
Understanding the whys is important for growth. It helps product managers (PMs) reach the point in their careers where they can coach other PMs. Chin says that a PM’s goal should be ‘ultimate knowledge of the craft,’ and encourages the audience to ‘optimize your career for learning,’ saying the speed of learning directly correlates to career progression.
2. Get commercial
The transition from product manager to product leader requires PMs to step outside their product bubble and consider the big-picture revenue strategy.
Thinking beyond product management requires a keen understanding of your company’s revenue model. Chin points out how director-level product people face many pressures beyond creating a great product—they’re also beholden to commercial pressures.
‘When you’re a PM, every problem looks like it can be fixed by fixing the product,’ Chin says. Unfortunately, not all problems are product-only issues.
True product leaders think about all the other dimensions where they compete. To Chin, it’s important to learn the ‘rules of the game.’ To compete as a product, CPOs have to consider how their company competes on all business levels.
3. Be strategic
Chin’s the first to admit that he struggled with strategy for much of his early career, mainly because he lacked an understanding of what product strategy was. “Most companies think of strategy as planning,” but it’s not, he says.
Chin defines strategy as having a thesis that comes from answering two questions:
- Where do we play?
- How do we win?
He reminds the product audience that company strategy goes beyond a product strategy. When companies consider their competitive strategy, they compete in other dimensions beyond the product: talent, customer service, getting acquired, or for capital. Understanding how the product strategy sits within the larger company strategy is critical.
4. Your product is the organization
Chin advises aspiring product leaders to gain a clear understanding of human behavior. Once you become a manager or leader, your peers change. Instead of peers being part of your department, they might be leaders in other departments across the organization. Sometimes, it’s important to seek camaraderie outside your organization to find other product leaders to bounce ideas off of.
Become a student of human behavior—start with yourself.
—Ken Chin
Pointing out that leaders are responsible for having a well-functioning organization, Chin references the commonly used phrase, ‘All problems are people problems, and all people problems are leadership problems.’ For a product leader, this means constantly focusing on the people who work for you. Chin says it takes a keen understanding of human behavior to be productive in your role.
He recommends Marty Cagen’s book Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model as a resource and starting point for aspiring product leaders.
5. You’re only a leader if others follow
When you’re a leader, Chin says, your team looks for clarity and direction. Getting your team to follow requires constant, clear communication. Sometimes, this means a fair amount of repetition, many meetings, and compromise, but it’s worth it to provide the information your team needs.
Emotional maturity and building trust with your team are crucial. Chin points out that building trust often happens when your team watches your reaction to others, like standing up to stakeholders and fighting for what your team needs.
He acknowledges how tough it can be to become a manager of managers. Your path as a product leader will continue to evolve at each stage, as do the accompanying challenges.
Chin closes out by reading Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech, The Man in the Arena:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Chin always refers back to this when he makes a mistake. Being a critic is easy until you’re the one ‘in the arena.’ He also encourages more product people to plan to become product leaders.
“If you have a bit of ambition, a bit of drive, a small dose of talent, I want you to think about what it takes to become a product leader and start moving in that direction. Learn those hard lessons because it’s amazing how much impact you have in the world and how much good you can do.”
