Leader Spotlight: Solving people problems, with Alec Fullmer

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Alec Fullmer is Head of Product at Angel Studios, a film studio that creates and produces faith-based and family-friendly content. He started as a web developer at Brigham Young University’s McKay College of Education before moving to ​​Xactware (now Verisk). Alec then joined Whistic, a vendor security company, as a software engineer. He became the company’s first product manager and eventually transitioned to his current role at Angel Studios.

In our conversation, Alec talks about his passion for building products that solve “people problems” and how focusing on users instead of the product is the best way to do that. He discusses the importance of organic conversations, as well as how his team leverages social media listening to hear what users are truly saying. Alec also shares insight into monetization strategies for Angel Studios compared to competing streaming platforms.

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Bringing empathy and perspective

You started your career as a software engineer before transitioning into product management. Does this background influence your product management style?

Understanding what it’s like to write and build software, as well as the aches and pains that come with that, naturally gives me more empathy for all the engineers I work with. This is helpful when it comes to building relationships, because I understand that what I’m asking the engineering team to do might appear very simple but is actually quite complex.

This empathy is a bit of a double-edged sword, which I learned early on as I transitioned into product management. Sometimes, I find myself hesitating when requesting a feature we need to build because I know the struggles will come with it. But, of course, as a product manager, I shouldn’t have to worry about these technical hurdles — the engineers will push back if they need to. My job is to advocate for the customers and the business and what’s best for both those parties. My background has also helped me understand the critical role engineers play in product development.

Product ideas stem from understanding your customers and technology well. At its core, a product manager’s job is to understand the customers, their problems, and the opportunities associated with fixing them. This insight generates a set of product opportunities, but understanding what is feasible technologically and what can be built opens up an entirely new set of possibilities. Because of my background, I’m more prone to mining my engineers for product ideas and insights and seeking inputs on how they would approach certain problems.

You were the first product manager to join Whistic. Could you talk about your experience joining the company as the first PM and what you learned from it?

This was an exciting experience because the company didn’t have any former product managers, and the founders had never been product managers either. They could feel that we needed more organization around what we were going to build next for the engineering team. In many startups, the founders typically do the product management for a time, and then as the company grows, they need to worry about other things, so someone else steps in to do the product management.

When it came time for that change at Whistic, the CTO and the director of engineering sat down with me. They said they had seen some natural product management tendencies in me and asked if I wanted to “try this product thing.” I figured I could return to engineering if I didn’t like it, so I agreed.

How did you navigate that transition, as you had no product experience up to that point?

First, I had to figure out what product was and what it meant to be a product manager. I cold messaged senior product leaders on LinkedIn and asked if I could buy them lunch and pick their brains. That was super helpful. A couple of those folks turned into long-term mentors.

It was a bit of a precarious situation at first — the founders had to give up some of the product responsibilities that they had been driving up to that point. My approach was to work very closely with them and push them as hard as I could to make sure that we had direction as a team. We needed a vision that we could use to prioritize against and be anchored in.

That was my focus at the beginning — to learn from experienced and existing people who had been in my situation before. Then, I partnered very closely with the people doing the job before me and progressed from there.

Surfacing ‘people problems’

You’ve mentioned that you’re passionate about building products that solve ‘people problems.’ What are some strategies you rely on to understand the struggles that users might face?

If you sit down with a customer and figure out their goals and the issues they face when trying to accomplish them, you’ll see that the actual people problems will surface. In my experience, this leads to the best insights.

If you sit down with them and want to talk about your product, what it can offer, and what you think it could do in the future, that is unlikely to surface people problems. Instead, they’ll talk about your product and what they like about it, what they don’t like, etc. It may be difficult for them to be fully transparent with how they feel about your product, and they’re going to have a hard time connecting their actual problems to what your product can do.

Focusing on users and not the product is the best way to get to the heart of their experiences, goals, where they are trying to get to, what they are trying to accomplish, and what’s standing in the way. Then, you partner with them to solve those problems.

Once you surface those problems, how do you determine which ones are worth solving and then prioritize them?

In a macro view, you have to figure out specifics about the world you’re trying to create and the world you want to exist in. Then, you have to find other people who will be your customers, ideally, who also want that world to exist. Next, you prioritize what is preventing that world from existing.

But the more specific you can get, the more beneficial it becomes. At Angel, for example, we’ve had this mission of amplifying light. Specifically, we want parents to have content options they feel comfortable watching with their children.

Also, when talking about bugs and feature changes, it’s important to identify the most high-value actions for a user. What aspects make them fall in love with our product the most? At Angel, when someone downloads our app, they usually come to watch a show they already have in mind. We prioritize very heavily against that flow of someone coming into the app and trying to get into the video player to watch something. If anything goes wrong during that experience, we quickly move it to the top of our priority queue.

What is your process for gathering user feedback aside from speaking directly with customers?

I push hard for weekly face-to-face interactions with users, but we also conduct surveys. Our UX department is anxiously engaged in collecting all sorts of data and conducting research on various topics.

It has also been helpful to integrate app reviews into our communication channels. We integrate our app reviews into Slack, so every morning, I come in and see all the new app reviews. We also integrate our support tickets into Slack, and I spend a lot of time there. Further, we run several A/B tests every month. This is another way we collect a lot of insight from our users.

Seeking out organic conversations

Do you also do social media listening, to follow the opinions of movies and shows that are posted in many forums?

We are fortunate to have a product that people talk about online. Since we’re empowered by pop culture and we’re in the media space, I get to see how our customers talk about us and not just how they speak to us.

I ingest everything our customers say about the way they feel about Angel. Some of that is them talking directly to us, but they also talk about us on social media, on sites such as Letterbox and IMDB. What are they saying about us to each other, as opposed to what they are saying about us to us? Angel is a consumer-based company, and people talk about us in social circles, with their family, and online and sometimes there’s a stark difference there. You have to put in the effort to seek out those conversations.

That sounds like a lot of information to ingest from a lot of different sources. When you structure your day, do you set aside a couple of hours to review feedback on different platforms?

When I first joined Angel, I wasn’t used to constantly checking in on what people said on social media. I had to start making conscious choices to regularly monitor Letterbox. I would schedule an hour to review our social posts and read the comments. But after doing it deliberately for so long, now I do it naturally. I don’t block time on my calendar — it has become a habit.

Do you have any best practices to share when it comes to user feedback?

Don’t get distracted by the loud minority that often shows up in customer feedback. They usually only reflect a small portion of your audience or users. A loud minority might be screaming for something like better app functionality on the iPad or some other platform. But when you look at the app’s iPad usage, you may see that there aren’t a lot of users on that platform.

This is why it’s important to couple your qualitative data — the data that comes in through surveys and user interviews — with your quantitative data to put it in context. That will help you determine if it’s a loud minority or something that actually reflects the majority of your users.

Increasing value per user and measuring delight

When you’re working on a new feature, what’s your process for scaling it to a larger audience?

If we want to reach new users, often that means getting on devices we’re not on, such as TV. We build TV apps for people to watch our shows. We started on Roku and Fire TV and then added Apple TV and Android TV. The list of opportunities that we can build on just keeps growing. We just added Xbox and are considering PlayStation, Xumo, and Tizen TV as well.

When considering going after a user we don’t currently have, we have to figure out the cost of acquiring that user. The same thing applies to the cost of moving your mission forward, which requires maintaining and growing a healthy business. This means weighing the cost and the benefits of going after a new user. We have learned that it’s typically smarter to move slower than we tend to want to. This is because there’s more opportunity where we exist versus chasing users somewhere that’s new for us.

In your current role, you’re focusing on driving up value per user. Could you talk about that?

Yes. We have a freemium product, and most of our content is free. We’re not like Netflix, where everything is gated. Netflix or other similar subscription companies understand the value of having users pay for their platform. It’s easier to figure out a user’s value that way because it’s set by the price they charge users every month, etc. It’s more complex for us to calculate average user value, since they can initially join for free.

We monetize our users in different ways. We have a membership called the Angel Guild, which is comparable to other memberships where you pay monthly or, if you pay annually, you get other benefits. We also sell merchandise by partnering with our filmmakers to create items for their brands, such as clothes or toys. Also, people on our platform can do what’s called “pay it forward,” which is where if they want a project to make the next season, they can donate specifically to that show to support its continued production.

What metrics do you use to measure user happiness or engagement?

We measure how often people come back, so we monitor retention closely. We look at that daily, weekly, and monthly and measure it by cohort. As I mentioned, we’re trying to grow the Angel Guild membership, and retaining that group is what we have our eyes set on.

Once we acquire that user, how long will they stick around? That’s the best indicator of how much value the platform provides. Outside of retention, we measure delight and user happiness by keeping a close eye on app reviews and support tickets. We care about those a lot, and we want to keep them trending up.