Kristina Bailey began her career as a technical analyst at The National Institutes of Health before transitioning to an analyst role at Accenture. Kristina then entered the product management space when she joined WeatherBug. She later advanced to various product management and leadership positions at notable companies such as AOL, Capital One, Humana, and GEICO.
In our conversation, Kristina discusses the careful balance of “knowing the business outcomes you want to achieve while balancing the customer outcomes that must stay true while driving value for an organization.” She shares five core competencies of product management, and notes that all but one of them are transferable across industries. Kristina also talks about the importance of diversity of thought and her passion for making product management curricula available to all.
There are five key core competencies in product management, four of which are transferable across industries: talent, customer centricity, technical aptitude, leveraging data, and business acumen.
Talent refers to being able to hire, attract, train, and mentor. Being able to do that across industries is an essential part of building a product organization or product team.
Second is customer centricity and empathy. This refers to both the approach in understanding customer needs and wants as well as how you interact with the rest of the organization.
Third is technical aptitude — providing a common language with engineering while understanding artifacts such as high-level architecture, technical design, and how a proposed solution may enable a product strategy. Is the proposed solution going to be a fit to drive product strategy? This skill also enables you to understand the nuances of constraints and their potential impact to the business and customer experience.
The fourth transferable competency is the ability to leverage qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative metrics are tangible in determining direct value, however, you need to factor in qualitative metrics such as sentiment to tell a story.
The last competency is business acumen. This refers to understanding organizational strategy, business models, and metrics. In understanding how the business works and what matters, a PM is better able to align products to business outcomes and drive value. When joining a new industry or organization, this is domain knowledge a PM needs to learn, which is why a PM needs to identify the decision makers, experts and partner continuously to drive value through product iterations.
It all starts with stepping back and asking, “What is our overall organizational strategy?” What are our core competencies and what value are we driving? Within that overarching strategy, there are different departments that contribute.
Understanding the key business outcomes, metrics, and area of focus is important for identifying where there are overlapping needs versus department specific needs. Product strategies will be vehicles to achieve value at different levels of the organization — they will ladder up to the overall business outcomes.
In some cases, an organization may have multiple organizational designs such as functions, markets, offerings, or customers/partners. There can be real challenges when there are multiple decision makers or none at all.
Let’s say a PM wants to launch a digital feature across offerings, who will be the key decision maker — the channel business leader or the offering business leader? The potential lack of clarity creates risk with a PM launching a feature but not understanding which outcome they are optimizing around. Another risk is delaying value due to a slower time to market because the PM needs to bring decision makers together to align on outcomes first.
It’s important to celebrate both the results and the outcomes. We can look at an example where the result is the launch of a new version of a mobile application and the outcome is a reduction in costs driven by fewer support calls (due to a reduction in login errors). In this example, both the result and the outcome should be celebrated. It may take months to meaningfully move the needle on reducing overall costs, but if launching regularly is considered to be a stepping stone, that should be recognized.
Having an outcome, such as reducing costs, provides a framework that enables diverse functions to come together and brainstorm what must be done to achieve the desired outcome. It brings focus to the ideas, experiences, and products instead of forcing a specific solution. This is how teams can be empowered to innovate and continuously iterate until the desired outcome is achieved.
In my experience, we’ve been great at understanding why we’re in business, why we’re operating, what metrics we have to hit, and how we make investors or board members successful. But we also need to look at what this means for the customer.
I’ll use a media example. How do you get more ad impressions and ad revenue? If you don’t keep the customer in mind, that could result in a webpage full of ads, right? If you do that, you’re achieving those business outcomes while also creating a lot of customer friction as a result of it. Customer engagement and usage of your core product will decline. So the framework I’ve utilized is understanding business outcomes and why we’re here as an organization, as well as how we make sure we keep the customer top of mind.
It’s a balancing act around knowing the business metrics you want to achieve and the customer metrics that must stay true while you do that. You may find yourself having competing priorities between customer outcomes and business outcomes, and in many cases, the ideal state would be to address both.
That’s not always reality, though, so sometimes you may have to make a trade-off, which becomes more of a long-term play. If you achieve this more customer-centric outcome, you may leave some business value on the table, but you’re investing in lifetime value versus short-term value.
That would be the ideal state. You can look at qualitative and quantitative data but still not have full confidence. Or maybe you have a hunch that something may create customer friction or leave business value on the table. Ideally, you should test it.
You can do this in multiple ways, such as focus groups, which help take your personal bias out of the situation. Depending on how mature your A/B testing or multi-testing framework is, you can build an experience quickly and launch it. Then, you’re evaluating the business and customer metrics. We have something that we call a full-stop metric, which is when you say, “If this metric gets hit, turn the test off immediately.”
Say an initiative drives massive calls to the call center. That’s not something that you did on purpose, so you always want to ask about the unintentional metrics that you do not want to impact. If you start impacting those, you immediately turn off the test.
In most cases, you start with a small audience, a small pilot, a small A/B test, etc., and you monitor those key business and customer metrics staying within the overall thresholds. If you like the metrics, you can scale it to an even larger audience, just to make sure there isn’t bias or noise in the system. That’s a better way to validate the thought process and the instinct, and you may be pleasantly surprised that it moves both metrics.
It goes back to empathy and listening. When I started in product, everyone came from a different background because there was no formal way to enter product management. Now, there’s more awareness around it as a profession, but people still come from all different places. You could have been a designer, engineer, analyst, marketer, etc. It’s important to recognize and appreciate the diverse ways of thinking and talent within the organization and create an environment for that diversity to show up. Having a diversity of thought is what makes better products.
A lot of times, there are many differing perspectives that are all correct. It’s about figuring out which one is the best approach going forward. An example of that is when you’re under constraints and need to pick a channel to launch a feature. How do you figure out what the best channel is? Your instinct will likely tell you mobile because customers are mobile-first nowadays, but you also have to look at customer behavior.
If a complicated task requires undivided attention to complete, that may deter a user from doing it in the mobile channel. We know that mobile is best suited for quick tasks, whereas complex tasks tend to be better addressed on a computer. Even if the market data says to launch on mobile because that’s where all the customers are, you have to look closely to understand the exceptions.
When I pursued product management, it was not yet recognized as a function and did not exist in organizations. I had to really navigate and figure out how to be successful. I’ve been very thankful to have amazing mentors who enabled me to learn, and I want to give back in that way. I enjoy being a guide for others who want to explore or pursue product management as a career. I’m passionate about creating an environment where anyone interested in exploring product management can do so through a playground and curriculum earlier in their learning journey.
Part of my passion is partnering with universities to influence product curriculum in schools. I want to address the problem of “How do we provide the type of environment so that people can take on an internship or first job with some foundational capabilities in hand?”
This initiative benefits organizations by creating a pipeline of talent that already has foundational baselines and knowledge around product management. Product management is complex. There are many frameworks and it can be challenging to know when to use each one. Oftentimes, that comes with experience, so being able to provide a foundation to everyone is impactful.
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