Leader Spotlight: Leaning into opportunity through change, with Alan Fliegelman

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Alan Fliegelman is Vice President, Product: Dice.com Technologist, Connections & Data Experiences at DHI Group, a career marketplace platform that connects technology professionals with employers. Before joining DHI Group, Alan worked as a senior product manager at Nordstrom, specifically focusing on the Nordstrom Card. Prior to that, he spent five years in product roles at Healthgrades.

In our conversation, Alan talks about the various transitions he’s seen in DHI throughout his seven-year tenure, including organization structure, who comes in as a leader, and the role of data analysis in the organization. He shares how his work at DHI is transforming the job search process by helping applicants individually understand how they match with roles and promoting conversations between applicants and hiring teams.

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Reshaping the job search process

Can you start by telling us about your role at DHI and how you got into product?

I’ve been doing some version of product development for close to 25 years. I have a dual degree in journalism and computer science, and I found that having an understanding of programming was helpful, especially as I’ve gravitated toward requirements gathering and user experience.

I had an internship at an e-business consulting company before my senior year. After graduating college, I came aboard in a project management role and that’s how I broke into the industry. I moved into business analyst consulting and then product owner roles at my next company and eventually joined Healthgrades. It was a growing business and I initially came in as a scrum master and associate product manager for a more senior product leader. That grew into a more senior role with Nordstrom, and I helped relaunch a new platform to manage the Nordstrom credit card and loyalty program.

Now, I’ve been at DHI for seven years. I originally came into DHI in a director of product strategy role, so it was a great way for me to learn a lot about the business and do advanced research about users’ core problems to solve. DHI runs specialized job sites: dice.com (for tech specialists) and clearancejobs.com (for people with security clearances). After coming into a product strategy role, as we’ve evolved as a business, I ended up taking on leadership of a part of Dice where I support the technologist user experience.

How do you see the work you’re doing at DHI transforming the job search process?

Getting a job has become harder and harder in this world, especially as job postings become ubiquitous. They’re posted all over the place. Nothing about looking for jobs online replaces the value of a conversation to explore your fit with a role, company, team, and manager. We strive to help technologists find the best matches that lead to conversations about their next great opportunity. We have a unique, patented tech taxonomy that understands more than 100,000 tech skills and titles and how they relate.

If you are searching for a product person who needs experience in a content management system (CMS), we’ll be able to know that Bloomreach and WordPress are CMSes that fit what you need. If you’ve had experience in one, we can match that to a role that looks for experience in another. That level of match is one of our secret sauces to try to get you to the right places to have conversations.

DHI has two specialized job sites, as you mentioned earlier. Can you talk about how DHI, and specifically your team, is structured around those?

At DHI now, we have a product development organization under our chief technology officer, Paul Farnsworth. Paul leads the technical and product strategy, and then there are two VPs of product in his group. I’m one of them, and I have a strong product partner who looks after the employer side of our experience supporting those who hire the tech professionals.

We have others who run, for example, our product support team and other angles of the product organization. Our development and technology partners also report into our CTO. It wasn’t always this way, though — we’ve gone through several structural transitions over my seven years.

It’s been great to consistently work with my peer leaders on that tipping point of how we should evolve the strategy. It’s also been helpful to have the tech leadership well-enriched in understanding our users and what our strategy evolution should look like, as well as figuring out the prioritization and trade-off decisions we need to make.

One team

Can you speak to the workflow between you and your peer VP of product and how you align to deliver on your goals?

One of the corporate values that we talk about a lot is one team. We recognize how we have to support one another and that what we’re doing in product can’t be isolated to a team.

We try to empower our teams in how we organize our problems and divide them to find solutions holistically. But we also recognize that a solution will often spam teams — whether that’s my fellow VP and I working together to figure out how we’re going to divide up problems, or where we can get the best leverage of problems to solve, or sharing insights from the market.

Some of it’s at that level of strategy and sharing user insights and business problems. And some of it’s in the tactics of how we prioritize and deliver that roadmap. We sync in several different ways: through 1:1s with each other or different parts of our teams, as well as through group settings where we’re regularly looking at prioritization.

If we look at our monthly metrics and see some outcomes that are going great, that can be places we lean in. If we see challenging spots that are harder to build and get to market than we might’ve expected, we can again adjust there too. We do regular reviews and those 1:1s to deeply coordinate.

And how do the product analysts support your team?

On both my team and my peer VP’s team, we have a product analyst. That’s a relatively new change for us that we like. It’s been nice to have that focus with an analyst supporting the product managers on our team. We’re able to get deep insights. We also have a shared data team, which is an interesting dynamic, and we have liked that too.

The data team is largely in charge of building those core assets of the data that they need to combine and bring into the warehouse. They bring that into operating analytic models that make analysis a lot easier. That allows analysts in different parts of the organization to do the types of analysis that are most meaningful to them.

At the same time, we have bigger core analyses that we do on the data side led by our data team. That’s another place we’ve gone through different evolutions during my tenure here.

Leaning into change

You’ve mentioned you’ve been at DHI for seven years and seen a couple of different structures. Can you speak to times of transition and challenges, and how you got through those periods?

I think it’s so interesting, because the more things change, the more you realize there are pros and cons to the different ways to organize.

It’s been interesting for us as we’ve seen some of these changes to take it as an opportunity for a better way of organizing. How can we simplify how we make decisions? How can we be more nimble in discussing things and getting things to market?

Sometimes change is really helpful for thinking about things a little bit differently. I think there’s a lot of good to lean into some of those things, and sometimes it isn’t necessarily changing how you’re structured, but changing who comes in as a leader in different areas and working with them on the areas that they’re strong in where they bring fresh insight.

How have you worked with teams on goal setting and the strategies around pursuing large goals?

We introduced OKRs about halfway through my time here at DHI, and we’ve liked them as a way of working. We’ve gone through different iterations of how we apply that. For a little while, each person had individual OKRs interpreted from the higher-level company OKRs. We’ve gotten better with that and now, we consistently have the same OKRs across all teams. I think that’s been a healthy evolution for us at that very high level.

Right now, we’re focused on finding the right KPIs that help us balance. If you optimize in one direction — especially in a two-sided marketplace like ours — you can lose balance in the other. We’ve become more sophisticated in mastering our KPIs, understanding them, and seeing which KPIs feed up to the others.

In terms of how we get teams to then align into those, we have to make it clear which teams will have the biggest influence on that result. We’re trying to help teams take that to heart, again, in a one-team view. If we think some of these initiatives could help us, it’s our team’s job to figure out how to achieve the outcome we’re looking for. Go do the research, go test things out there, and let’s see which ones actually move the needle.

Measuring below the surface

Do you have a recent example of how you’re becoming better at mastering your KPIs and really understanding them?

We just did a really interesting churn analysis, for example, where we analyzed different factors to find which clients renewed and which ones didn’t.

We had a couple of hypotheses of which ones were going to be the most magnetic, tested about 7–10 different ones, and, ultimately, the data from one of those analyses showed pretty interesting stuff. Some higher-level KPIs were easier for us to measure and were actually just as impactful as some of the lower-level things that we thought required more complex measures to understand that success.

We ended up realizing that if we focus on this and keep measuring some of these things below the surface, it will probably lead us in the right direction.

Can you talk about what specifically was the feature that people were using that made them stay?

A lot of this goes into our evolution from a job board to a modern marketplace that’s much more about connections and communication. We’re working toward making communication happen in real-time so that tech professionals are talking with hiring teams, learning more about the organization and how they fit, and making a case for why they fit. Those conversations lead to productive outcomes. Those kinds of things have been the most magnetic for us.

Along that line, how do you balance testing, learning, and driving value with leaving room for things to fail?

It definitely is such a cycle. We continue to do consistent deep research, whether to understand our different user segments or to understand the evolution of those segments. The research that I started doing five or so years ago, especially pre-COVID, has to be dusted off and revisited to see what’s changing in market dynamics and user preferences. If someone has a job to be done, what features or capabilities do they need to hire to complete that job?

We are also consistently learning from the products we’ve got in the market. As a pretty mature business, we’re trying to understand that there are lots of people using these features, so how do we evolve them in ways that don’t destroy value for our existing base? Some of that is through A/B testing new features and seeing how they impact other features, or through analytics, user interviews, heat mapping, and a consistent feedback flow from within the platform.

Evolving your strategy

Can you speak to your experience with online strategy in general and how you’ve seen it evolve in your career?

Strategy is such an interesting thing because a lot of times strategy and tactics get blurred. It’s good to take different approaches to strategy. Going back to the pre-Y2K days and the ecommerce explosion, you definitely had some crazy business strategy where people would say, “If I can generate revenue or build a user base, the profit model will show up.”

I think it depends on the stage of the business and industry you’re in, and trying to figure out what is truly the thing you need to do now. Your strategies can evolve. Sometimes your strategy will carry you for a few years. But so many times you envision the bigger picture and it’s going to change as you get closer to it. Understanding what you’ve learned, what the business has learned, and what you now need to focus on is crucial to that strategy.

Finally, you spoke about shipping DHI into a marketplace. How are you thinking about the competitive advantage with DHI with platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor?

For us, it’s about being a specialized, niche marketplace — both for clearancejobs.com and for dice.com because they’re so different. On “generalist” competitor sites, oftentimes, relevance falls off or you don’t get the opportunity to connect at a more personal level. For example, on a more general marketplace like LinkedIn, you’ll get outreach from all sorts of people who aren’t necessarily focused on your career area. They might be trying to sell you a product or just grow their network.

I think our main areas of specialization are in helping you see more distinctly how you match not just to the job, but also the company and tech culture of the company. If you go on Glassdoor, the Nordstrom reviews on Glassdoor are going to tell you what it’s like to work in a store at Nordstrom, not so much what it’s going to be to work in technology at Nordstrom.

On Dice, we’re talking more about the tech culture, the learning and building culture, the tech stacks we build in, etc. at each company. Beyond that, we start to encourage a more focused set of connections with hiring teams and, ultimately, your peers. And with Dice, all of our career advice is about how you, as a tech professional, can evolve your career forward. We help people look at career paths and how to interplay between the different tech roles.