Leader Spotlight: Developing horizon-spotting skills, with Jennifer Musser Metz

Jennifer Musser Metz is Vice President, Product Management — Core Platforms & Expansion at Paramount+. Her career took her from the newsroom, to a platform trial war room, to the board room. After starting out in online journalism, she jumped to managing technology at Philly.com. She then specialized in product management at Comcast, starting with the trial version of the X1 platform and gained expanded roles as it won Emmy Awards and patents, and scaled into the company’s flagship converged TV-streaming product. She now is a vice president focused on Paramount+’s expansion to new platforms and new partners worldwide along with leading product management for its core platforms team

In our conversation, Jennifer talks about the importance of horizon spotting — when you take advantage of opportunities by keeping current conditions in mind for the long-term vision but course correct as needed. She shares the benefits of looking at your career as a portfolio, i.e., viewing previous experiences as a compilation that showcases your skills and learnings. Jennifer also discusses the idea of an “owning versus renting” mindset that indicates accountability and being invested in outcomes.

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How transferable skills give you a broad perspective

You’ve successfully transitioned your leadership and product management skills across different sectors. Are there any core skills that you believe are transferable across industries?

It’s a balance no matter which sector you’re involved in. My friend, Rachel Owens, who’s SVP of Product & Technology at Altice, describes product as a multi-disciplinary sport. I agree with that and think it’s a great way to characterize it. Years ago, I participated in triathlons. Some people are excellent runners, some are excellent bikers, and some are excellent swimmers, but nobody is great at all three. The workplace is so much that way. There are lots of transferable skills in product management from industry to industry.

Some transferable skills are curiosity, familiarity with the technology, and the approach you take in working with your colleagues and team. Leaning into your strengths and understanding what you’re trying to achieve, as well as what your allied and dependent teams are trying to achieve, can be helpful in terms of building up your skillset. When you look at other opportunities, you can think about what you want to expand into. What’s a good challenge? How can you stretch yourself or your leadership capabilities?

Do you have an example of a learning from a particular position or industry that was unexpected and that you were able to leverage in another area?

When I joined my previous company, I’d just come out of the media business. I found a lot of similarities between the two, as well as some massive differences. My skillset of curiosity, communication, understanding the alignment of goals, and how to think about the long-term roadmap all transferred well. I realized that in the news business, I was still functioning as a product manager, I just didn’t have the formal title.

We were building products on deadline, so I’d hear, “We’ve got this big news report about X. We have a bunch of videos — what can we do with it all?” I learned a ton about video early on in the days of broadband, before that technology exploded. At its core, it’s still the same as before, so early exposure to how video codecs and advertising calls work provided me with a helpful framework.

In a new role, I can fall back on that. I say, “I’m familiar with XYZ, but how do you do it a little bit differently here?” That’s when I’m listening to those disparities. Each company has a slightly different technology stack and tweaks to how they approach things, but that’s cool because it gives you a broader view of the universe.

Looking at your career as a portfolio

What are some strategies that product folks who are at an earlier stage of their careers can use to make sure they aren’t boxing themselves in or limiting their career opportunities?

When you look at opportunities, what you’re doing now, and where you want to grow, it’s helpful to view your career as a portfolio. In a lot of ways, life is kind of a portfolio because nothing is ever a straight line. You end up with opportunities to do things that you couldn’t have imagined years ago, but when you look back, you see the breadcrumbs that led you there.

Career progression is often that way, so my advice is to lean into things you’d like to try and learn more about. When opportunities arise, you can think about the areas you want to extend yourself in and challenge yourself with. Does this new opportunity include that?

I also look at the environment. Is it going to be conducive to learning? Do you have a manager and leadership you’ll report to who are supportive and who you can learn from? What is the working environment and the team like? That can really impact how much you’re able to learn, grow, and work with other people to collaboratively achieve goals. All of those things ultimately add up to that portfolio because, at the end of the day, you want to be successful.

Sometimes, when people are looking to pivot or change their careers, they discount prior roles that don’t seem related to what they want to do. You made the point that oftentimes, there are relevant skills in those past roles. Could you say more about that?

When you think about product as an interdisciplinary sport, that means that you may have skills or past experiences that don’t immediately translate. Maybe it’s because the product was different, but there may have been functions associated with it — whether it was the market research or iterations based on customer data — that make you a well-rounded candidate for this new opportunity.

It’s easy to get hung up on titles and companies, but if you think about your career as a holistic portfolio, you can see the pieces that relate to your new potential opportunities. Something I like to do before a job interview is write out my experiences, skills, and learnings, and how they translate into my candidacy for this new thing.

Oftentimes, the best people in product management are not people with classically trained backgrounds — they’re people who have curiosity and have been able to learn on the fly.

The benefit of diverse viewpoints

Do you find that you look for people with a variety of backgrounds when you’re building a team?

Yes — I think diversity makes us stronger. When you have team cohesion and the right mix of people, you get a whole new outlook. For example, it can be great to have people with an engineering background on the team who can speak to tech debt and new ways to approach things. Or when you have someone who is familiar with the customer service world, they can give you a different perspective on how to read App Store reviews and suggest slightly different approaches to prioritization.

Having diverse viewpoints is very helpful, especially with a general consumer product that spans cross-culturally. We say “inclusion is Paramount” here. With Paramount’s global workforce, that really is a key advantage to meet our global streaming audience’s needs.

How do you stay up to date with changes in technology, media, etc.?

It’s a mix. I read a lot, and love listening to audiobooks or podcasts. It’s also great to set up notifications and alerts on a couple of subjects so that you can stay on top of news. For me personally, one of the most valuable things as I’ve built my network has been catching up with people in the industry.

For example, I haven’t been able to go to a conference this year yet, but I was able to reach out to colleagues from other companies who have attended to get their perspectives on what was beneficial and what they were interested in as an industry trend. Those insights can be really helpful, especially when they are from people who you know and trust.

Learning how to be good at horizon spotting

You describe horizon spotting as one of your superpowers. Can you talk about that and the processes you use?

I started rereading Atomic Habits recently, and there is a passage about the value of expertise and intuition. In the book, this person’s daughter-in-law said, “I don’t like the way your face looks. You need to go to the emergency room.” He said, “What are you talking about?” They were going out to dinner, and she was like, “No, I can’t explain it but you need to go to the emergency room.” He did, and it turned out he had a blockage in his heart and needed immediate surgery.

The reason I’m sharing this particular passage is because sometimes, you don’t know why you think something. It’s often subconscious and based on experience. There’s a proven phenomenon about how people who have worked as EMTs can detect when someone’s complexion or face doesn’t look right, to the point of detecting a heart issue. They can’t explain it, but they’ve seen it before.

Tying this back to product management, you need to pay attention to your roadmap and what your long-term goals are. You need to look at your vision for your product, as well as what you’re seeing in the environment around you.

As PMs, we have a goal to do something with our product next year. As we take steps to reach that goal, we need to be aware of new things that are popping up. Some of the new devices we’re launching may be different than we expected. The hardware environment changed. To be good at horizon spotting, you need to keep the current conditions in mind for the long-term vision, but course correct as needed.

Do you have an example of something that you spotted and knew was important to monitor going forward?

When I was at Comcast, I led the product management team for X1, which was the company’s flagship video product. I’m very proud of the work we did. We knew that the entertainment industry was going to go through some very big changes around how content is licensed and how customers watched their favorite shows. Some of the laws and regulations around video delivery and the economics of video delivery were going into effect. We’re still seeing changes in that area today as streaming becomes the primary viewership for folks around the world.

Because of how the company operated, we were always looking five years ahead. We knew that this change was coming, so we were looking for opportunities to leverage our robust software stack and also play in the streaming space. When we built our X1 service, it was meant to be a converged experience with both traditional video and app video, so we had always had that streaming component to it. That capability early on in the platform allowed us to use it as a framework to build our new services.

We also looked into other business opportunities to pivot into the B2B space. We asked, “How can we deliver video business to business — particularly in hospitality?” I’m really proud of the work we did to figure out the needs of a customer who runs a hotel, and how to build a video service that works in the hotel room so that when someone checks out, it resets to a fresh experience.

What recommendations do you have for product managers who want to work on improving their horizon-spotting skills?

Look for multiple inputs. This may be advice aimed more at product leadership, but you need to understand where you are and where you’re going. You need customer service inputs, as well as machine data on how things are performing in production. You need an understanding of the competitive landscape and the industry, and you also need information from your engineers about the software stack and opportunities that new code capabilities could give you.

Further, continual curiosity is super helpful, and building relationships with folks who are experts in those disciplines within your company can be great. It’ll help you develop that broader view of where you are now as an organization and where you’re going.

‘Own, don’t rent’

Lastly, you have the personal mantra ‘own, don’t rent.’ That suggests a strong commitment to personal and team accountability. Can you say more about that?

The concept of “don’t rent” is really about accountability. Sometimes, you don’t necessarily recognize opportunities right away. That idea of horizon spotting helps you figure out what’s happening in the field. There are opportunities in a lot of those things that come up, and if you’re thinking as an owner, you’ll make a shift to capitalize on something or to try to avoid an issue.

Owning versus renting has other implications. If you’re renting, you may not be as invested in the long term. You’ll see things differently depending on which mindset you have, such as how you invest your time or energy. Owning, to me, is about taking accountability for your decisions. If you put something in production and it doesn’t perform as expected, own those results. Be ready to iterate, make a change, or if it’s doing really well, think about how to scale it.

Paramount+ has a strong culture of A/B testing, which really helps inform our product development. That is a hallmark of ownership! Being invested in the outcomes and learning from them is one of the biggest components of owning as opposed to renting.