#299 Innovate, Communicate, Lead: Tami Reiss's Guide to Product Management In Tech

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show Today. I'm very pleased to be with you today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, because I have a theory no one can do someone else better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:19 - Tami
All right, hi everybody. I am Tami Reese, also known as Tami from Miami or the product leader coach. I specialize in working with executives in product or strategy to help them be awesome, but I also help lots of other people be awesome, and I have been in technology product management of some kind for over 15 years. I have worked in-house and also as a consultant, generally in B2B companies. I have run a consultancy. I have done something called being the CTO in residence at Insight Partners. I am in the process of writing a children's book called what Do Product Managers Do, and I go around the world giving a speech called when To how Outcome Oriented Thinking Can Get you when you Need To Go. 

0:01:23 - Mehmet
That's cool. Now, maybe it's a little bit a traditional question, but what attracted you to this domain, Tami? Like what was special about product management that you said yes, I want to be in this. 

0:01:37 - Tami
So I think I was always a product manager, I just didn't know it. My first job out of school was actually as a fundraiser. So I was fundraising for Muscular Distrophy Association, but I was the person who said, hey, let's test our scripts. But I didn't know what A-B testing was at the time. And I was the person who said let's do analysis about which of our zip codes are performing best or where we should do certain kinds of fundraisers, et cetera. 

And my job after that was working for Farmers Insurance and my title was Associate Product Manager, but I was actually more of a pricing analyst than somebody who filed papers with the Department of Insurance. And it was actually there that I was tapped to be an actual product manager. But they called it Product Development Manager. And someone said you're good at math but not as good as the actuaries, and I think that you are pretty creative and you understand market and stuff like that. So how about you join our product development team? And I was like what's that? And they explained to me that they helped create the new products that got sold and they understood customers and I never looked back. I love serving customers. I love figuring out the puzzle pieces of how to serve people best, and it makes me happy. 

0:03:07 - Mehmet
That's awesome. So tell me, you know, like usually in every kind of job I would say especially in tech there are a set of things that usually we should know how to ask questions. So, for example, in sales, you know they tell the sales, the accounts, you know you have to be asking these questions. When you go, for example, to the marketing people, they have certain questions they need to also ask in order to get the answers. So what are these questions? Usually that the product manager should be asking all the time to get you know the job being done the best way. 

0:03:48 - Tami
So, first of all, no matter what question you're asking, always remember to make it open ended. 

So, if you're not familiar with the concept of open ended questions, they are the who, what, when, where, why questions, as opposed to the do you, could, you, would you questions. They are questions that cannot be answered with yes or no. When you ask a non open ended question, and you'll be restricted to often a yes or no, whereas if you ask an open ended question, you will have opened the door to many possibilities of what might come at you, and so always remember that, no matter what kind of question you're asking. I believe that you can simplify all of product management and the product mindset to three questions, and those three questions are where do you want to go, or where do we want to go, depending on what the scenario is, where are we coming from and where should we go next? The fundamental question of product manager is always answering, because we're making decisions about what to do or what not to do is where should we go next? But it's informed by where do we want to go, where is the vision, where is the target, where is the objective, what is the outcome that is desired, whether that's for the product, the business, the customer, the service, whatever it is. 

And where are we now? If we have this desire to get somewhere, what's our starting point? What do customers currently think of us? What kind of functionality do we currently have? Any other question you could ask about market segments or pricing or anything else Starts with where do you want to go? And then, where are you now? Because then you can figure out what the gap is. And once you can figure out how big that gap is, you can then decide what the best next step is. And what I love about product management is is we think about the outcome and we make a decision about what to do next. But we're very open minded in the idea that where we've chosen may not be correct and that there's another small step after that and another small step after that, but that during each step we're going to learn more and more about how to best get closer to the outcome that's desired, to the goal that's desired, to the vision, to the mission, whatever you want to call it out there. 

0:06:07 - Mehmet
Cool, you touch on a very interesting point because I know, from my humble experience dealing with product managers, you know they have a kind of, you know, tough job doing a balance between, you know, short term deliverables, like, for example, maybe the next version of the product, versus what you were mentioning, the long term version, right? So what insights you can share on how you know product leaders can effectively, you know, have this balance between you know having something which should be delivered maybe in the next sprint, which is probably maybe in two weeks, three weeks time, versus, you know, the long term mission or vision of the company for the product overall? 

0:06:55 - Tami
I think your question is slightly. I'm going to alter your question so that I get where I want product people to be. I don't think any individual sprint should be producing a feature or functionality that doesn't serve the larger purpose, and so that is what we need to be saying no to. So everything we contribute should be something that moves the product closer to that vision, closer to that outcome. I was just talking with one of my coaching clients who's a CPO at a company called so safe, based in Berlin, and he has instituted for his team this mindset that every week counts and that every week should be getting them closer and closer to the end target. So what I think about is the importance of always making sure whatever it is you're doing is going to have impact and measuring it to make sure it has that impact that you intended. And there's a book called escaping the bill trap by a woman named Melissa Perry. She teaches at Harvard Business School and a variety of other places. I used to work with her. She's fantastic. And escaping the bill trap is all about saying don't make a super long plan of all the to do lists you're going to do about this for next and stick to it. You should be learning at all times. You should be always evaluating and reevaluating what is the most high impact thing I can be doing and there are lots of ways to evaluate that and sometimes it has to do with return on investment and sometimes it has to do with timing, because if it's not out by the time you have a trade show, it's not going to work for you, or you have a specific customer that needs something specific by a certain date. All of these things are things that impact how we prioritize, but nothing should be being built if it doesn't serve the higher purpose, and that is the highest order thing that we always have to be asking does this fit within our company mission, vision, etc. If it does, does it fit within our current focus areas, the things that we're trying to do right now? We have this very long term vision, but we've said the next big boulder we're going to accomplish is X. 

When I was at JustWorks, we had a whole strategic intention focus area that was let's get ready to serve California. So JustWorks is a payroll and benefits company and we serve the East Coast very well, but serving California is its own beast. There are lots of regulations there. There are lots of different health care plans there. There was lots that we needed to make sure if we were going to offer our services to companies based in California, we needed to be ready, and so when individual customers asked for things, if it didn't serve the California purpose, it probably didn't get done unless it served some other purpose. 

That was another focus area we were working on, Even if it was something that would contribute in the long term to the benefit of the company and our mission and vision. We said we can't do everything immediately, but the most important thing for us to focus on right now is getting ready to serve California and two other strategic areas. So I think that it's not a matter of what are we doing now versus what are we doing to serve the longterm. You should never really be doing anything that doesn't serve the longterm. 

0:10:41 - Mehmet
Now I want to ask you, Tami, how much the authority of the product manager will affect these decisions Like if-. 

0:10:48 - Tami
What authority? 

0:10:52 - Mehmet
This is the question, like do they have especially in large places, maybe where they don't have the finance, say, but how they can fight back if someone comes and say, hey, we need to work on this, but we don't care, you just need to do it? But the product manager knows that it should be not done now because, as you said, for the vision of the company it's better to be focusing on something else. So, again, how to overcome this challenge? Because maybe they don't have the final say in the decision, but they know that the right way is to do it in another direction. 

0:11:31 - Tami
So what's great is I don't actually know any product manager who doesn't have the final say as to what user story they write or what they give to the engineer. The only question is whether or not they fear if they don't listen to somebody else, they're going to get fired. And the reason why I said what authority is because we often say product managers have no authority, but we have to influence without authority. And so, as a product manager, you have to master the art of influence, and that involves understanding other people's incentives, building empathy for the other stakeholders involved, whether those are customers, co-workers, sales team, customer service executives. And when you build that empathy for what their goals are, what are their pain points, what are their needs, then when you have a specific idea and it may be in contrast to someone else's idea you have to bring them along as to, based on what their objectives are, how your idea will serve their objective or the larger objective. So if you can't figure out how whatever you're proposing serves the salesperson or the customer service person, or the customer or the executive, think about how what your product feature, user story, whatever you wanna call it is doing is going to serve the higher purpose. And again, if it isn't serving the higher purpose, you shouldn't be doing it simple. But if that's the case and it doesn't serve them individually, remind them that together you're trying to get to that vision, right? You're trying to get to that mission of company. You're all part of this larger organism which is this company that's marching in this direction. And so you say to them hey, what you're talking about is valuable, and I understand how it would be valuable for this segment, for these people, for these customers that we serve, for this whole new prospect area. But let's talk about the bigger picture. Where is our company trying to go? What have we established as our goals for this year? How does that ask them to defend their thing? It's like how does your idea fit in with the current focus? 

So they have to say that, and if they can't, there's a problem. 

And you then say I have an alternative idea that I think better serves this higher order of purpose of where we want to go, where to the answer to the where to question and have a discussion around together how you think you can best serve that higher order purpose, because it may actually be a combination of your two ideas. 

And so I like to say, a lot of product management is balancing hubris and humility, and so you have to have hubris, which is overconfidence, because you have to actually be overconfident that you can solve a problem no one else has solved previously. And at the same point, you have to have humility that your ideas aren't the best ideas, that there are engineers on your team with ideas, there are designers on your team with ideas, there are customer service people who are answering the phone every day who have ideas, and those ideas may be better than yours and you could think of the best idea and have the validated your hypothesis, and then it goes to market and the customer still don't like it because you missed something. So you have to have humility that you're going to be wrong, but hubris to do it anyways. 

0:15:10 - Mehmet
That's really. It's a nice approach, I think, not only for product managers, it might fit for many other roles as well. I like this. You have this overconfidence, but at the same time, you're ready to accept that other people, they have also great ideas. Now you just touched on something which is for people who doesn't know about product management and all this. So, as you mentioned, Tami, they have to deal with a lot of stakeholders, whether it's designers, engineering team, customers. 

0:15:42 - Tami
Same people, partners, customers customers implementations managers, you name it. We talk to everybody. 

0:15:49 - Mehmet
Exactly now, how much is important that product managers have extremely phenomenal communication skills and if they don't have it, what are some of the tips usually you give to enhance these skills? 

0:16:06 - Tami
So I believe the two most core skills for product management are prioritization and communication. So I believe communication, as you noted, is incredibly key to being a successful product manager. Certain product managers are better at written communication. Certain product managers are better at verbal communication. You have to figure out what your strengths are and then try to advance the weaknesses. This is also how the where to where from questions can help you and your personal career. So if you know where to, is that you want to be a fantastic product manager or product leader, you know you're going to have to be good at communication skills. So then you can evaluate where are we coming from, where from, and what are my current strengths, what are my current weaknesses, and then where next, what do I need to improve? Do I need to join a Toastmasters class? Do I need to improve my writing? 

Possibly only in English, because I'm fantastic at writing in my native language, but now I'm part of a company that bases everything in English or Spanish or something else, and so thinking about that as the capability gaps of you as a product, right Cause I believe everything is a product, including you, and so if you did an assessment of yourself, what is missing? 

That's getting in your way, from getting to your outcome, from getting from your desired goals, from your desired objectives, and that, I believe, will answer the communication question. And, in reality, product management can open lots and lots of doors. And so if the communication side isn't your strength, it's possible that you should go into product operations, which is more data driven and more process focused. Or you might choose to become an engineer or a designer or an implementation manager or anything else, cause there are so many different ways to scratch the itch of problem solving that product managers have and engineers have and designers have. Like everyone wants to solve problems. And so if you're that kind of person and communication, whether verbal or written, isn't your strong suit and you've tried to advance it and it's still, you feel like you're hitting a wall Look for other opportunities, cause if you have the product mindset and you have this mindset of trying to solve problems, there are lots of different paths to doing that. 

0:18:38 - Mehmet
That's fantastic. Now, mentioning about again the communication, one of the things that I am sure, because they have to talk to a lot of people they would be faced by people who would not accept their opinion. They would be maybe sometime faced by different opinions fighting in front of them, but at the end they need to manage these conflicts and decision making processes. So usually, how do you advise product leaders to manage these stakeholders from that perspective Conflict management and decision making? 

0:19:17 - Tami
So one of my mentors at some point mentioned this concept to me, which is that any initiative is success, like the percentage is going to be successful is dependent on the product. Meaning like multiplication product of the percentage right the idea is and the percentage buy-in you have from the people who are working on it. And so if you're a hundred percent right but you only get 10% buy-in, you're not gonna be successful. But if you're 70% right and you have 80% buy-in, you have much more chance of being successful. And so getting buy-in from those other people needs to be your where to. That needs to be your objective, the outcome you desire from that meeting where there's this conflict, that you need to understand that without consensus and not necessarily consensus that everyone fully agrees with the idea, but there's this concept that Amazon disagree and commit, so disagree, but then everyone is committed to the idea that everyone agrees upon. That is how success happens. You commit together, and so the objective that you, as a product manager, are trying to achieve is that everyone is committed to the idea that is being moved forward, and therefore what you need to be working on is how do you get other people on the same page? I believe a lot of that starts with getting everyone onto the same page about where we're all trying to go together, right, where is the company trying to go together, and when you can get people on that, and that we're all on one team trying to get there. And then you say, okay, what is our part of that puzzle, what is our slice of the pie on helping the whole company get there and you get consensus on that. And then you say, okay, we've got a few different approaches here that help us get there. Let's talk about why each of these ideas is good and what we think the impact would be. And then we can talk about what we think the shortcomings are or otherwise, and then choose together which idea we think is going to have the highest impact, with the least shortcomings, with the least issues or the least risk, and is the right combination, and then commit to that. But it's easier to get people to commit to that when they've already agreed that we're all on the same team, that we all have the same objectives, that we all are trying to serve this higher purpose, and thank you for watching. 

Something you haven't asked yet but comes up a lot in product management is once you disagree and commit. How do you get people who have theoretically committed but then bring up their idea later? Yeah, like to be quiet, and so I have this like secret power question that I share with all of my coaching clients, because I work with a lot of VPs and CPOs and very often the CEO comes to them with the same idea that they've already had a conversation about two or three times, if not many more times, around, like why we aren't doing that right now. And so the super power question is what has changed since the last time we discussed this? That makes you think we should reevaluate our priorities or reevaluate the order of things. And so here's why this is a fantastic question. First of all, you remind them that we've already talked about this. Second of all, you're giving them respect. You're saying I believe, if you're bringing this to me, there's a reason why we might consider changing our priorities. Please share with me why you want me to consider changing what we've all already agreed to. And if they say, oh, you know what nothing's changed or this has changed, you can say, oh, the market conditions changed. 

Great, tell me how that informs that this is more important than this other thing that we all agreed to, and then you can have a very respectful conversation around how priorities are set, reminding them about how you all chose the order of things, why something was considered more important or higher impact, and whether or not this fits in now, because something has changed more than other things that were on your to-do list. 

And that is what escaping the build trap is about that you're flexible enough to say, hey, it's possible, something changed and that we learned something new, and that this is now more important than it previously was thought of, that the cost of delay is too high, or whatever it may be. And that's an opportunity to then regroup with your stakeholders and say, hey, previously we were all in a room together, we were all marching towards this direction together. We all agreed to commit on a particular plan so and so whether they're the CEO or a customer service representative, the idea can come from anywhere has brought to our attention something important. That means we should potentially reevaluate what we committed to. Some has proposed that we should do this instead of that. What do other people think about that idea in terms of whether or not it helps us reach our objective? And then you can have a constructive conversation, reminding people of the context, of where you're trying to go, where to, while then discussing the options that are available. 

0:25:20 - Mehmet
I have a question here, Tami. This came to my mind when you said you asked the CEO. But what if you have and I know maybe there's not much people like that, but if you have a CEO who has the same personality like Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs was very famous. When Proact people used to come to him, he used to shout, he used to be having this. So is it okay? Does it depend also on the personality of the CEO or the founders? Maybe if there's more than one person? 

0:25:54 - Tami
I think that all CEOs want to be successful and so some of them have more, you know aggressive personalities and more get angrier, faster or shorter tempered. But they all want to be successful and they've all chosen a particular product, mission company that's supposed to be successful and they're trying to solve problems and it serves a particular market or multiple markets and multiple products. And if you have an idea, like I was talking about earlier, you have to frame it within their context, their incentives, what makes them happy, what they're trying to grow or shrink. And so you say to them hey, I know this is a priority for you. Oh yeah, that's totally a priority for me. We currently have two or three things that are playing towards that priority. Yep, those are the things I already agree to. 

I have an idea of something that can make us even more successful. Would you, are you open to hearing it? Oh yeah, we totally love to hear about how we can have higher impact and be more successful. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. Here's what I see as the current problem out there. Here's what I'd like to suggest as a solution. 

And then this is again one of those power questions you say what would you suggest, because you have more context than I do to make my idea better or higher impact. What adjustments would you make to it? Because then again, you've got this hubris, humility playing right. You have the hubris that you're going to the CEO with an idea that wasn't already there, but you're humble enough to say you have context, that I don't have right and I'm open to the idea of adjusting or adding, because my goal is to be successful, just like yours is right, and I think this is potentially going to help us get successful. But I'm not married to my idea being the best 100% idea. I'm willing to learn and iterate and change to make it better, because I don't care about me being right. I care about the success we're trying to reach together. 

0:28:08 - Mehmet
Yeah, so again to your point. It seems to me I'm not the product manager, but they have to do a lot of filling the gap job. It looks to me right. So they keep filling these gaps. So is there something that they can do so they can do this better from your experience? 

0:28:33 - Tami
One of the things I recommend a lot of product people to improve their skills on is storytelling. We tell lots and lots and lots of stories. We tell the stories of our customers. We tell the stories of our prospects. We tell the stories of how something is being built or why it's being built. The better you can get at telling a story, the better you will be as a product manager. 

This arc of a story generally is you've got a problem and then frustration builds, it gets some climax and then there's a hero and things calm down because the hero saves the day. You want to be that hero. You want your idea to be that hero. Therefore, you have to be good at explaining the context and the problem and why it's only going to get worse for customers or the market or your company. Then you have your idea, which is this hero up here that's going to save everything, based on the problems already there. Then you get agreement and then people can move forward. 

The better you can get at storytelling, the better and more successful you will be as a product manager, as a product leader, especially as a product leader, because your job as a product leader is to lead. To lead means to have people follow you. As much as, as a product leader, you now have authority over other product managers, you still need them to follow you. When you are good at telling the story of the problems you're trying to solve and how your strategic focus area or intention is the hero that's going to help move everyone forward. They will follow. Storytelling helps bring people along. If you can improve only one skill, I would say that Read stories, read fiction, read business stories and get better at seeing how stories are presented. 

0:30:41 - Mehmet
Storytelling, in my opinion, is an underrated thing that they don't train us to do, because I understand it needs some creativity also as well. Maybe it cannot be taught in a course or something, but at least we can get some frameworks to use storytelling. I tried it on both sides, being very technical, but I need to also tell a story from technical perspective or when you are doing sales marketing, whatever. Same thing. Storytelling, in my opinion, is an underrated skill. Now you mentioned to me before about the routes that someone can take, but if someone is aiming to become a product leader, like a chief product officer, so how they can do this transition, if you can share that with us, I actually just published an article about the core skills of a CPO and how they are different than a VP of product. 

0:31:46 - Tami
Most people do not become chief product officer before previously being VP of product. If you are a vice president of product, your role involves making sure all the teams execute on their objectives and that the things that they are building are successful and that you are using the resources of the company aka the engineers building things, the people building things properly, towards the objectives, towards the outcomes. Vps perfect their ability to help execute and to lead others towards execution. You also have developed at least some strategy skills. Cpo's are stronger at strategy than the general VP. So when you are trying to make that leap, one of the core skills you need to work on is strategy, and what strategy means is being able to be forward thinking, thinking about the longer term, where to, and thinking about the building blocks that help you get there. And so when people say I'm a strategic thinker, it means they are thinking about the objective and what steps need to be taken to get there and in a longer term perspective. And so when you are an individual product manager earlier you mentioned thinking sprint by sprint by sprint, week by week, by week every two weeks, every three weeks, whatever your sprint is, and as you progress through leadership, you stop thinking about an individual sprint and you think about a month or a quarter, and then you think about the first half of the year's objectives. And then you think about a year's worth of objectives and what your boulders are. That build up that plan and then, as you become higher order, you think about 18 months or two years out, and CPO's are thinking five to 10 years out, or at least three to five years out, and so the better you can be thinking about how the market is going to shift over time, how your customer dynamics are going to shift over time, how what you're building today creates a foundation for what comes later. Then you are showing your strategic thinking skills. So that's part one. Part two is you have to get better at leadership skills. 

I mentioned earlier. As a leader, you have to inspire people to follow. That means empowering the teams to make decisions on their own level. That means being great at strategy deployment and storytelling about what the focus areas are right now, so that the people who are in the layers that are beneath you, they can make decisions that they know what's right or wrong, because they have a very clear understanding of where we're trying to go and be able to decide does this help us get there or not? And that comes through reinforcement. It's not a one-time strategy deployment session, it's reinforcement. So if you, as a VP of product, are better at storytelling, are better at empowering your teams to make those decisions, at whatever level they're at, better at helping them understand the impact of what they're doing within the larger picture, those are the things that you want to get better and better at, and how to operationalize that and how to make it streamlined. Those are all great things to do. 

And now the final thing and this one is very, very hard to get experience and I apologize that it's there, but it is so important when it comes to becoming a chief product officer and that is financial acumen. Unfortunately, most product managers are not taught to build a business case. Even directors of product group PMs are not taught to say what is the return on the investment here. They just say this is a good idea, our market needs this, and they aren't doing that budget analysis or ROI analysis to say the investment we're making is going to pay off in actual financial terms, and so the metrics that product managers and product leaders VP and below care about are things like retention or NPS. Well, sorry, we talk about NPS less than retention. So sorry, nps more than retention. 

So we talk about things like net promoter score, we talk about adoption rate of our features, we talk about potentially speed of development, we talk about velocity. 

None of these things make a difference in that business level executive level, financial. 

So you need to learn to convert those things into the language of business, the language of finance. So we might talk about net promoter score. Net promoter score influences retention, because the stronger your net promoter score is, the more a customer will stay with you generally. And retention is the inverse of churn, and churn is when you lose customers. And so when you can phrase it as the thing we're doing, instead of increasing NPS, actually decreases churn, that's a good thing, because that's the sort of thing that, at the financial level, people are worried about. If you can phrase it even better, as this will improve our net revenue. Retention, which is the amount of money you make from your existing customers, like more money than the year before from the same group of customers, that is a really good financial metric when you're talking about whether or not something will decrease operational costs or make a team more efficient. In the financial world, we call that EBITDA, which is profitability. I'm going to increase EBITDA, which is Earnings Before Interest Tax and amortization. 

Right, I was like I had it in my mind and I was like it's the way that things get valued less over time, amortization and that's a finance term. And so there are ways where you can learn more about revenue growth and close rates and sales velocity and return on investment and EBITDA. That will help you speak the language of business, speak the language of finance, because, as a chief product officer, your peers are the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the CRO, the CMO, and all of them speak that language, and so you will only be successful and only get that promotion to CPO from a VP of product if you can talk in those terms, and so you have to learn to talk in those terms. And so those three skills strategy, leadership and financial are what can make you a strong CPO. 

0:38:55 - Mehmet
Again, this is something even recently some other roles started to get trained about, because when you sit on the C suite, the people sitting there probably they don't know what you know not to talk about. 

0:39:11 - Tami
Everything I just said applies to the CTO as well, so don't talk to them about velocity or points or things like that. Talk to them about efficiency of your team. 

Talk to them about the percentage you're investing in innovation. Talk to them about something called KLO keeping the lights on what is the cost of just running this team if we weren't building anything new. If you can be talking in those terms, if you stop talking about risk in a way that doesn't translate into business risk and it's just technical risk, you've got a problem. If you're talking about paying down tech debt but you don't refer to that, as if you don't pay down this tech debt, we are going to have these risks and these problems and these costs that are coming at us and these churn issues that are coming at us. You're not going to get buy-in for the tech debt pay-down. 

0:40:04 - Mehmet
Yeah, that's true, and actually you know another example, not maybe from the other side of the table. So, for example, chief information security officers. They had to learn how to talk instead of going saying like, hey, you know, we have put firewalls and we've put this, so they needed to go and talk about you know the risk and quantify the risk and then sort the ball understand what these guys are talking about. So, 100%, now tell me, you know. Actually you mentioned, yeah, you mentioned something which was my last question to you, because you talked about the CTO. Recently I started to see a lot of people who have both title, cto and CPO at the same time CPTO. 

CPTO or CTO slash CTO. Is this where you know we are heading or is it just like depends on the organization how you are seeing you know things going from that direction. 

0:40:58 - Tami
I see it in. There's so many different forces at play here. So there's an antiquated force which is that engineers are valued higher than product people because they build the things and therefore it is not uncommon that there are still many organizations where product reports into technology and therefore a CTO believes that they have developed enough product strategic abilities to then oversee product as well, and then they become CPTO. So that's one direction this comes in. Another direction this comes in is the product person has so well managed strategy, leadership and finance that if the technical team isn't strong enough and the technical leaders aren't strong enough, but this product person actually has enough technical acumen, they then can take over the technology leadership piece, because they are talking in the language of business and they are talking about how do you shift the costs of the engineering team to better serve the business, and et cetera, et cetera, and they have deputies that are much stronger in technology than they are, but they lead it from a strategic perspective. So that's one other thing that I see happening. And then the third thing I see happening, which is correlative but not exactly the CPTO, is CPOs taking over other parts of the business. So because you've shown yourself as a strategic leader and a good problem solver and somebody who knows how to care about the business of metrics. Often a product office, a chief product officer, will oversee customer success or some sort of operational delivery thing. Dominique Essig is a great CPO. She's now an SVP of conversational commerce at Walmart, but she was CPO at Bonobos before they got acquired by Walmart, and when she joined there she said I want to learn a new skill and she therefore oversaw some of the operations and some of the customer service stuff because she knew that her product would be better if she understood those things and that those teams would be better if the product better served them. And so there's often a product person who starts overseeing something operational or something service oriented because of how tightly that winds up with product. I have not seen a product officer take over sales yet, but I'm fascinated to see what would happen if that would be the case. And so those are the scenarios I'm seeing. 

But I think that it stems from a lack of management training. 

So in that leadership camp, like are you being trained to lead well and manage people well? A lack of strategy training, a lack of being able to be forward thinking and be more responsive as opposed to reactive, Like you're forward thinking about where you're going and you're making decisions based on a larger context versus recency bias or hippo bias highest paid person in the room bias and so if we aren't doing a good job of teaching our product managers and engineers to be people managers and then more strategic and higher order thinking about how do we approve efficiency on the teams and processes and execution and how do you lead teams to inspire them to do the right thing and help them understand context about how to make decisions, If we're failing at that on either side, one side will have to be stronger and will often take over the other side, whether that's CTO becoming CPO or CPO being taking over CTO responsibilities. It's a matter of the fact that we don't invest enough in management training, which also includes financial training. 

0:45:21 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. Just on a personal experience, the best customer calls I would say that I attended is when I had a product manager with me on the call, because the customer's feedback is really old. You brought finally someone who's listening to me, asking me the right questions. It's not a sales pitch and customers love to talk to product managers and I was lucky with some who also used to ask the right questions, and if the customer is a little bit frustrated or a little bit angry, let's say that why this feature isn't coming or why this is done in this way, so the way they communicate this. Again back to the communication. So this is why I told the time before product managers and product leadership is close to my heart a little bit, because I think they play major role in a success of a company. Now, anything that you want to add maybe I didn't ask and also where we can find more about you, Tami. 

0:46:25 - Tami
So I'm going to add a little tidbit, which you said product managers help companies be more successful, and I agree with that. And the way we do that is we make decisions, and I learned recently that the word decision or decide side, from an etymology perspective, means to kill, like homicide or suicide. It's a killing thing, and so decide means to kill ideas, and so the mission of product managers is to kill the bad ideas. Our job is actually to say no. Our job is to help teams focus. So when you have that as a mindset, that that's actually your mission, your mission isn't to say yes and your mission isn't to say not. Yet your mission is actually to say no and to be clear about something and say this is not fitting with our company mission, or this is not fitting with our current strategy, or this doesn't have enough ROI, or this isn't something that the customers want. Saying no with reason and with context, you will be serving the higher purpose of product management in the right way. So that's one thing. 

And if you want to learn more about me, either go to Tamireesecom or productleadercoachcom. They both go to the same place. Connect with me on LinkedIn. The main thing you have to do is spell my name correctly, which is T-A-M-I spelled like Miami and R-E-I-S-S. I'd love to connect with more technology people. I have always been the kind of product manager who collaborates with their engineers, because I believe you are all smart people and we are all problem solvers and our heads work together, the better we serve our customers in the market. And then the business growth and so, yeah, whether you want to talk about your own career growth, I do have CTOs that are my clients and I'm helping them get more executive presence and more strategic and more financial acumen Because, again, there's a similar gap in product and technology, and so I'd love to have more technology clients and I love helping people be awesome. That's all I do. 

0:48:36 - Mehmet
That's great, Tami. I will make sure that the links you mentioned are in the show notes so people can easily find and they can connect with you. Yeah, and again, thank you very much for this. I enjoyed the conversation, I learned a lot and I hope also the audience will benefit from this and I advise them to go and connect if they are thinking about elevating their game I would say if they are in the product leadership, and so you can reach to Tami. 

0:49:11 - Tami
And the other thing you can do is if your company is looking for a speaker, I very often will do something, even for free, for a smaller group, to give them this talk about where to and how to be more outcome oriented. Please reach out to me Like if you have a small budget or no budget or a big budget and you want me to fly across the world, I will do it. I love inspiring people to be more outcome oriented, more product like thought process, and so I'm going to ask you a question, mimet when to with the CTO show? Where are we trying to go here? 

0:49:42 - Mehmet
So my goal is, like similar to what you mentioned. So my goal is to inspire as much people as I can. Maybe it's like a humble start, but I can't see where it's going. 

0:49:53 - Tami
So if we can get as they say, to inspire people to do what? 

0:50:04 - Mehmet
To build things right, so to make anything that can make this world a better place to be. Whether they build a startup, whether they write a story, whether they I don't know like maybe they become themselves podcasters. 

0:50:19 - Tami
OK, so audience Audience is listening. Mimet we need to know whether or not he's inspiring you to build things, to create something new. So tell him, write him notes of success stories, of how this podcast is inspiring you to do more. 

0:50:35 - Mehmet
I receive that. I receive that sometimes and actually fun enough. Today I was sitting with someone who was my manager and he's a close colleague today, so he was saying to me like you need to sit with me, I want to do the same thing with you, but of course he doesn't want to make a podcast about tech, like about sport mainly. I said yeah, of course, but why you need to do this? I asked him the same question. He said you know what All the things around like he's too much into biking. He said the biking podcasts that are there, like they just, you know, they talk about the same thing again and again. 

I want to push more people to be active and go do cycling. I said wow, that's fantastic. Just that way I can help you in this. So to your point. This is again. By the way, you stole that from me, Tami, kind of, because it's what I tell people at the end of each episode. I tell them please, please, please, reach out to me for any feedback, whether it's positive or negative. If there's something you don't like or maybe you want me to change something in the way I'm doing, I love to hear this constructive feedback. 

0:51:37 - Tami
But I also want you to hear success stories, like I want people A, because we talked about storytelling. 

0:51:42 - Mehmet
Right. 

0:51:43 - Tami
Write the story of how there was an episode and refer to the episode and say I listened to this episode and it made me think about this and I realized there was this problem. And then in my job I suggested this idea and we were able to implement this new thing. And tell him this, because he will make him happy and it will inspire him to keep going and produce more and more episodes. 

0:52:05 - Mehmet
Exactly, thank you. Thank you, Tami, but no, I received one note one time and I put it on LinkedIn. Someone told me they connected with one of my guests on the podcast and then they decided to go and build something together. When I received this, I was so happy. On another occasion, it was not related to building something, but start a founder who talked to one of my guests and he might become an advisor for him and he can do a lot of introductions. 

And, by the way, I'm in Dubai, they are in the States and then I said, wow, just miles away, I'm able to help people and if I can add a little bit, I can do a small contribution. That, for me, is enough. So thank you, Tami, for mentioning this. Actually and this is why I love to host people like yourself, because always I get inspired also myself you gave me a good idea also now. So, yeah, so one day I'm waiting a couple of months, maybe more, and I will do these kinds of clips where people shared some stories, and that would be a good idea also to have more, I would say, people encouraged to listen to the show. And this is how I end my episode Usually. 

I said if you are first time here and, by chance, the universe sent my podcast to your feed, on whatever platform you are on, please subscribe, tell your friends, tell your colleagues about it and if you are one of the loyal fans that keep sending me their also feedback, or they see me sometimes on the state here, the local people here in Dubai, or sometimes I receive emails as well so thank you for your support, thank you for your contribution as well. Finally, if you are on a mission to build something you are maybe a startup founder that looking, no one is giving him the chance or her the chance and you want some place to share what you're doing, please reach out. If you have a story that you think it's worth to share and I keep repeating every episode, I promise you, Tami, please also reach out. I'm looking for people who also, like myself, want to inspire, who want to come up with ideas, who loves innovation I love innovation a lot, so please reach out to me. And again, Tami, thank you very much for your time today. 

I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. This was super fun, the discussion and, I promise, the audience. We will be in more and more discussions like this in the future, so keep tuning in and thank you for the support. We'll meet again very soon, thank you. 

0:54:54 - Tami
Have a great day everybody.