Amy Mitchell on Adding Value as a Product Manager

Alex Smith:  Where product meets design is brought to you by Fuego UX, a UX research strategy and design consultancy. Hey, Amy, thanks so much for joining the show today. 

Amy Mitchell: Hey, good to meet you again, Alex. 

Alex Smith: Yeah, for sure. And as we get started, can you give the audience some context in your journey in product? 

Amy Mitchell: Yes, that's a great question. I started out in software development. And as I progressed in the software development, moving into management, I had the opportunity to move over into product management. So I moved from developing my product over to being the product manager of it. That was at Alcatel several years ago. Since then, I've been at a couple of startups doing product management as well as I worked at Cisco HPE and now I'm at Dell Technologies doing product management.

Alex Smith: Very nice. I love it. It sounds like you have a ton of experience across multiple different companies of various sizes and various tech industries. So that's awesome and super relevant. Are you ready to hop into the lightning round? 

Amy Mitchell: Yes I am. 

Alex Smith: All right. Let's start with this one. What's a common myth about product management?

Amy Mitchell:  Yeah. One of the myths I hear the most is that product management is just a wall between engineering and sales. And that's just silly because product managers are adding so much value between the sales team and engineering. On the engineering front, they're consolidating a lot of requirements. And prioritizing so engineers don't have to go through as much detail on the sales side. They're helping close sales, helping direct sales and customers to a specific aspect of their product. So they aren't a wall at all. 

Alex Smith: Makes a lot of sense. What's the most important lesson you've learned?

Amy Mitchell: Well, the lesson I've learned is to provide hope and optimism. At first, I was a little bit negative and pessimistic, and people really want to come to credit commanders to get problems solved, find solutions to complex situations. And get answers, they don't want to hear about the negative, they want to have hope and get something done. 

‍Alex Smith: What's one thing about product that no one agrees with you about?

Amy Mitchell: I think a lot of people avoid conflict to the point that they can't make progress. So I embrace criticism, I think getting diversity of opinion. Finding out where you might have flaws is the right way to go. You don't want to get out there with a product that nobody wants. So for me, I seek out conflict and if you get good results, who cares if you had a couple of naysayers along the way. Yeah. So it's results that really matter. A little bit of rustled feathers, no one's going to remember.

Alex Smith: Lean into the confrontation. Yeah, I like that. 

Amy Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. 

‍Alex Smith: What's an underrated or indispensable tool for, for the job of product? 

Amy Mitchell: For me, what I found is building relationships all across the product team. At first I thought just work hard and everything will take care of it, but you really need to build those relationships. You might have a problem that you need to escalate and you don't want to escalate when you don't even have a relationship. The other part about building relationships is you can understand how your other teammates' performance is getting measured. And what are their motivations? It helps you really work through the conflicts and escalations by establishing those relationships before you're in a bad situation.

Alex Smith: What's one piece of advice you would give to someone who's starting out in product? 

Amy Mitchell: That's a good question. And for me, I believe you should have a point of view on these complex topics that we deal with in product management, and especially when you're starting out or you're in a new product management role, there's just so much to learn. And the best way to build on that is form your own point of view. Go find the root cause. Or for example, maybe you come into a new situation and all you're hearing about is our orders are behind. Then you can dig into why are they behind? What caused this? And that gives you a lot more focus to getting started by asking those questions of yourself and forming a point of view. People want to know what you think. They don't want to hear, Oh, hey, why do you think our orders are behind? Well, I don't know. I'm new. It's better to have your own perspective and even assert your perspective. That's what product managers are, a go to people. They have a point of view. 

Alex Smith: Yeah. I like that. Just like come in with a point of view, do your research and have an opinion. What do you think is kind of key to having success in a career as in a B2B kind of product space? 

Amy Mitchell: Yeah. And the B2B is. It's different because usually your customers are not the end customer. Yeah. And there's a different set of concerns. So a lot of that is being able to have the perspective of the customer and knowing that your customer probably has their own customers they're dealing with. It bleeds into everything in the product management, into pricing, into requirements, into what makes best sense on the UI for the customer. So that's my main observation. Of course, another bit is when you're in B2B it is like high availability, redundancy, because an outage can affect so many customers, so many people, whereas in B2C, an outage could just affect one customer. 

Alex Smith: Tell me, tell me a little bit about adding value as a PM. That's something that I know you, you write a lot about.

Amy Mitchell: I just hate it when I see a product manager that's passing the buck. The product manager needs to add value and you don't add value by doing somebody else's job. One thing we discussed is a frustrating thing I know from when I was in engineering. And for designers is when you have a product manager coming in telling you how to architect the system or how should you design the UI. When what we really need product managers to do is synthesize the customer's perspective and take us on the customer journey, help us understand the customer without having to go out and talk to 20 of them. That's what product managers are doing. So communicate the customer perspective. Use those customer journey maps to communicate the intent of your requirements. It's a lot more effective than calling in how to design. 

Alex Smith: A lot of product managers I talked to, you know, say what you say, hey, like we gotta be the voice of the user. We have to, you know, know the personas and all that, and then UX might also feel like they, they respond, are responsible for that, or they've been tasked with research. So I think it's really important to bridge that gap when, frankly, both those groups should be talking to users as much as they can, but I feel like sometimes it can be a point of  contention. 

Amy Mitchell: They should. And my belief is that the designers and UX and the engineers, they should feel willing and able, they have customer relationships, talk to the customers, gather information. However, a lot of times they don't know them. And a product manager can help bridge that gap and I welcome bringing in designers, architects, engineers with the customer and help set it up, have those open ended questions so they can hear straight from the horse's mouth what's going on. Get a screen share going on and let the customer tell the engineers in their own words. Here's the effect of the way it's designed and let them show the engineers. How are they using the product? 

‍Alex Smith: Tell me a little bit about what you're up to with your, with your newsletter as well. 

Amy Mitchell: Yeah. And you're one of my new subscribers. I was so happy to see you sign up. I write product management in the real world or product management IRL. And I talk about my experiences over the past few years in product management. A lot of the stories are based on conflicts or issues I'm working through in my real job. And I work through it, I think about it, I go see how other people are handling similar problems and then I write about it. I have both free subscribers where I talk about what I've learned and then the paid subscribers get to hear the backstory about what happened when I ate my own dog food. That's what we do a lot in product management, we get to be the, the first alpha testers of new products. So. I go try out my ideas and then I write about the paint subscript. So it was a nice outlet to improve on my job and then share what I learned with other people. I really like helping others and bumbled around in product management when I first moved over till I found some great mentors that felt for me and I'd hate for someone else to go through that. I just like helping other people . It's in Substack, it's amymitchell.substack.com. Hopefully we'll put it in the show notes. I've got the other subscribers and we have a lot of commentary and direct messages. So it'd be great if a few more people want to join. 

Alex Smith: Awesome.  Hell yeah. Definitely. We can share that out. And Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Amy Mitchell: Thank you. It's great talking with you, Alex.