Leader Spotlight: Thinking about the broader business impact, with Dane Molter

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Dane Molter is VP, Navan Group Core Travel Product & Strategy at Navan, a travel and expense software company. He started his career as a technical product lead and financial software developer at Bloomberg before moving to product management at American Express. From there, Dane joined GrubHub and McKinsey as a senior product manager. Before his current role at Navan, he served in leadership positions at Expedia Group and PayPal.

In our conversation, Dane talks about how he pushes his teams to adopt a business mindset and to think about the broader portfolio and overall business impact. He shares a cereal analogy to illustrate his approach to coaching PMs to focus on the entire business rather than a single product. He also discusses strategies to help PMs collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.

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Acting as a business owner

To start, could you talk about your view on the tactical vs. strategic components of product management?

On my teams, we push the idea that product management is not just a tactical delivery type of role. You can push data in favor of tactics and call that strategy, but for us, it’s more about treating your product like a business portfolio. So, we begin to act more as a business owner and less as a pure product owner. This forces us to think about the market dynamics that drive our product and helps us understand what the outside influences are and what makes our product tick.

As a result, our scorecards are less about product metrics than other product groups. Those still matter, of course — we still have to look at how the product is performing, what conversion rates are, etc. But treating your product like a business portfolio begs the question, what external factors are impacting our product and how do we mitigate them? How’s our product being sold? Are we satisfied with the go-to-market motion attached to the product? We want to think about our product’s cross-functional impactors.

We’ve found that in challenging our PMs this way, their solutions begin to move away from being purely product-oriented and dev-oriented. We’ve started shipping business solutions that are engaging other stakeholders and engaging different functions within the business, which really help our product deliver on all cylinders.

How do you instill a sense of ownership among your teams, especially for those who might view their influence as limited or their scope as more narrow?

We use this concept called little-P and capital-P, where the P stands for product. Little (or lowercase) P is the tech — the nuts and bolts that put the product on the market. Capital (or uppercase) P is the whole package.

Imagine that you’re the product manager for a brand of cereal. You have to decide what goes into the cereal, and you have a team that develops the cereal, designs what the cereal looks like, crafts the taste, etc. You might have a whole set of metrics that outline how effective the cereal is. Is it the best-tasting cereal? Is it efficient to develop? How many pieces can be made over some time? Those are the little-P product metrics that product teams tend to look at.

But, if you challenge them to think about the broader portfolio or overall business impact, they start to level up and think about the capital-P product. This includes the box, the bag that you put inside the box, the cereal in the bag, the branding on the outside of the box, the shelf placement in the store, how many stores it’s actually in, etc. It’s the whole package.

Your little-P product is not successful unless the capital-P product is successful. You could have the best-tasting cereal on the planet, but if no one’s buying it then what’s the point? I try to encourage my teams to think about how they work with adjacent teams. They might not understand how to change the box’s design, but they have to understand that the box design is still an area of influence that they need to work on to sell the cereal effectively.

‘It’s not just about the technology, it’s about business solutions’

Are there key factors in the business environment that you recommend PMs watch for or internal metrics that you recommend they track?

As a PM leader, you have to determine which top-line metrics need to align with the broader strategy. I don’t tell every PM to look at the entire portfolio like revenue, COGS, marketing spend, or operating expenses. Instead, I like to be targeted and say, for example, “You’re working on operational efficiency projects. Talk to me about how this company spends money.” That’s how they start to bridge the gap between the product portfolio and the top-line business metrics that they can influence.

In this way, I try to have my PMs report on top-line metrics that may feel way outside of their scope. For example, I’ll ask questions about revenue while also asking about product metrics. I don’t necessarily ask them to own those business metrics, but I do ask them to at least begin to explain them. This prompts them to ask themselves, “If revenue’s going like this or sales are going like that, am I really driving this product in the right direction?”

Is there an example you could share where you or your team took this non-traditional or more proactive approach and realized significant gains?

At Navan, we build innovative travel technology, specifically for travel management. We exist between the travel suppliers, like airlines and hotels, travel programs, and the travelers. So, we partner very closely with travel suppliers all over the world and have a very strong relationship with them. We have an amazing supply team that works directly with them in commercial relationships. We also have a product team, for example, building out all the connectivity and workflows for selling flights, managing flight bookings, and ultimately enriching the experience around the supply.

When we challenged our product team to think about those top-line metrics, including the GTM positioning of their product, they said, “We’re not super thrilled with the way our product is perceived in the market. We think we’ve built some really amazing technology, and by all standards and metrics, it’s working very well, but there are still questions about whether our content is the most competitive in the market.”

So, we decided to dive into our biggest opportunity to grow our impact in the market. The team said, “We don’t need to write any code. We should actually talk to the airlines a bit more. Let’s get their feedback and see how we can work together to find shared value in the products so that the marketplace is enriched even further. That way, we’ll be in an even better position with these corporate programs that we’re selling to.”

So, our product team started a road show with our commercial teams. They took the product out regularly and collaborated with our airlines — outside the scope of anything that they were doing before — which was extremely successful. Now, we’re at a point where the team that’s influencing the product is making changes to it without writing a single line of code. Instead, they’re influencing the supply partners by saying, “If you did this differently, then we would get this shared value outcome that we’re ultimately looking for.”

To me, the mark of success is that they’re able to make those changes, which ultimately opens up even more opportunity for Navan’s product to innovate business traveler experiences on top of that supply. Going back to what I said before, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about the business solutions and building a much better product from top to bottom.

How do you coach your team to offer suggestions to other departments and get folks on board without them feeling like their toes are being stepped on?

Toe stepping definitely happens — managing it is twofold. The main thing is understanding the stakeholder’s motivations and finding that shared alignment, whether it’s a coworker who you collaborate with every day or a stakeholder who you meet with once a year. For example, if I know that you are very passionate about operational efficiency and I’m also worried about that, saying, “Hey, I’m working on this thing. I want your input on it and support for it. What do you think?” is a great way to find that shared alignment immediately out of the gate.

The second step is to go deeper and form a genuine relationship that will drive outcomes. This is where that business mindset plays a really important role. PMs who understand how they impact top-line metrics are going to have a more productive conversation with cross-functional stakeholders who work on other areas to reach those metrics. At that point, it feels less like toe-stepping and more like a partnership.

The ethos of a PM

You’ve talked about your approach to structuring and coaching a high-performing team, but how about when you’re recruiting for your team? Are there certain traits or attributes you look for?

There are four key points that I want PMs to embrace as their ethos. The first is focusing on outcomes and getting the signal on those outcomes quickly. We’ve all seen product teams go off in their own silo to build out some interesting idea they found in discovery, but that doesn’t actually lead to making money a business outcome. That can be very problematic. I want PMs to be super focused on the outcomes and understand their impact on those outcomes.

“Strong opinions loosely held” is the second part of our team’s ethos. You’ll find that some PMs have strong opinions that they hold onto too tightly — those PMs tend to be unsuccessful in my experience. Our PMs push hard on having very strong opinions, but we really lean into this loosely held side of it where you have to be able to drop your opinion quickly as new information comes to light.

The third principle is that you can’t know your business without going deep. I’ve never met a PM who’s been successful without being willing to dig in and get their hands dirty. That doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone, though. Some people are SQL experts who look in the database to understand every side of the data. Others spend an hour a day with a customer to understand the person better. Some might be engineers by trade and might spend time looking at the code. It doesn’t really matter how a PM goes deep, but they have to be able to do it.

The fourth tenant that we hold onto is being unafraid to make hard decisions. Being a PM means being a catalyst. There is a lot of pressure on a PM’s shoulders, but they have to be able to make the hard, unpopular decisions. We encourage our teams to not shy away from that and be able to pivot the product, kill a feature that everybody loves, or restructure the organization. Those are hard decisions that shouldn’t be taken lightly, but a PM needs to understand their responsibility as the person making them.

Of those four ethos, which one is hardest to find in PMs?

I think it’s really hard for PMs to go as deep as they need to go. Most PMs will tell you, “I’m very data-driven,” “I understand my business,” or “I understand my customers.” The reality is that many of those PMs only know those things at a superficial level. A PM is a jack of all trades but a master of none; they play a lot of different roles and wear a lot of different hats. It’s really easy to think that you’ve got it covered on the data or customer side of things, but unless you’re actually making time to go deep, you won’t. Successful PMs set aside time to go deep and are very intentional about that.

Stepping outside of the core product

When product managers on your team step outside of those traditional boundaries to impact the broader business, what’s your approach for measuring or recognizing successes?

PMs who challenge their thinking, step outside of their team, and think about what their influence areas are, come back to the metrics. As they look at their product as a portfolio, their measure of success begins to change a bit. It begins to take on some of those business metrics over time.

Going back to the cereal example, say you’re the PM for the marshmallows in the box of cereal, that’s one very small piece of the broader product. Your natural inclination might be to say, “I’m going to focus on what makes these the best marshmallows — taste, softness, and freshness. Those are the metrics I want to monitor as a PM.”

But, if I’m your boss and say, “Hey, PM for marshmallows, we are trying to sell cereal here. We’re selling something much larger than just your marshmallows, so what metrics should we look at to see how you’ve influenced that?” At the end of the day, our shared goal for the capital-P product is sales, so this will help you think about how many marshmallows were sold, how many marshmallows were consumed in a year, the branding of the marshmallows, and so on. You’re going to start thinking about the product as more of a business.

Do you find that after a few successes under their belts, it’s easier for a PM to then build those relationships with people and get buy-in?

Definitely. After a few wins, you become more comfortable and build up a lot of trust within the company as someone who can collaborate with other organizations. Then, as you push yourself outside of that comfort zone, those become super transferable skills. That’s a great quality to have because you can then go to any other company and say, “I actually understand what it means to step outside of my core product and challenge the rest of the business around me, and I’ve previously done that successfully.”

From there, you’ve got a little bit of a blueprint and some confidence that you can do it. That’s a big push for a lot of people, and it pays off in their careers.