Leader Spotlight: Focusing on quality and engagement in tech plus services, with Liz Li

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Liz Li is Chief Product Officer at Velocity Global, an employer-of-record company that helps businesses hire anybody in the world without having to set up a legal entity. She has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and began her career as a technology analyst at Accenture. Liz then climbed the ranks at LinkedIn for 11 years, where she developed and launched the first Sales Navigator product, led product for the Core Growth team, and worked on content experience. After wrapping up her tenure at LinkedIn as Senior Director of Product, she transitioned to her current role at Velocity Global.

In our conversation, Liz talks about the importance of meaningful interactions in tech plus services that contribute to the company’s overall goal, rather than aiming for “engagement for the sake of engagement.” She discusses her work developing LinkedIn’s creator economy and how her team had to incentivize productive conversations, disincentivize empty engagement, and be intentional about feed ranking. Liz also talks about the concept of “career principles” and how, similar to product principles, they help you make trade-off decisions for your career and life.

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Evangelizing the value of product management

I’m curious about your thoughts on evangelizing the value of product management. Could you speak to that?

The best way to evangelize the value of product management is to deliver impact. You can talk about what a product manager is supposed to do, but when the rubber hits the road, are you actually seeing an impact from adding this role or function to your company?

The way I’d approach it is to focus on a few key problems, deeply understand those users, develop some products and ship some wins, and then show measurable impact for your users. If you do that, people throughout your company will see that value and will want to work with product managers.

Also, even if a company doesn’t have a product manager role at the start, there are usually adjacent roles like product operations or product owner. It can also be helpful to have some training or lunch-and-learns to differentiate the roles and responsibilities of a product manager versus other positions.

You’ve worked at both tech and tech plus services companies. How do the product function and strategy differ between the two and what adjustments have you made transitioning between those environments?

Product managers are typically quarterbacks in that we call the plays, but we also work with the wider team in concert. At a more traditional tech-only company, that larger team is usually EPD — engineers, product managers, and designers — and a few other functions as well. That’s the composition of a product manager’s core team.

In a tech plus services company, there are more players on that team beyond just EPD. Velocity Global is a good example. Because of the global nature of what we do, we have really strong service and operational components. We have local experts in all the countries that we work in, and that’s a huge value-add to our customers because they’re hiring in geographies that they’re unfamiliar with and where they don’t have a legal entity. The whole reason they need a company like ours is to help them through that process compliantly.

Transitioning from a PM at a typical tech company to tech plus services involves ramping up on a whole other function, understanding how that function works, and how to best partner with the people working in that function.

Is the EPD model the same as the three-in-the-box model or do you think about it differently?

What we’ve recently started using is an alignment team around a product area. Because of the nature of our business (global employment), we’re dealing with different countries’ compliance laws and the legal stakeholders involved in that are big partners of ours. Depending on the product area that we’re focused on, a couple of different functions are key to product development. We’ve settled on alignment teams, which we also shortened to “A teams.” It sounds good and is a fun pop culture reference as well.

‘Seeing is believing’

What’s your approach to promoting a collaborative environment? How do you align the different members of your cross-functional teams toward a common product vision?

That’s definitely a challenge when people have different backgrounds and experiences. I’ve found that the best way to align on that product vision is with the phrase “seeing is believing.” You can write strategy docs and create fancy PowerPoint slides, but the best way is to actually show it.

I do what I call vision demo videos. This is when we work with PM and design teams to mock up what the product is going to look like — going as far as a year out. We create our vision for it and actually have a video or a prototype that demonstrates this vision. This is much more powerful than seeing words on a page. People rally behind what we’re trying to do and then work backward from there to determine how we’re going to get there as a team.

What are the biggest challenges that you’ve experienced in trying to get people on board and marching in the same direction?

Especially at a startup, some folks are really deep in their functions and may not be as familiar with typical product development. The challenge is understanding each other’s functions in the areas they’re coming from. This even comes down to the literal terminology and words that we use.

For example, it could be as simple as even the term “platform.” What do PMs mean when they say platform? How is that different from what an engineer or operations person means when they say that? Clarifying all of that, making sure that people aren’t making assumptions, and having explicit conversations are helpful in this.

Building LinkedIn’s creator economy

Can you share insights on how the size and scale of a company influence product decisions, prioritization, and innovation?

I think smaller companies can be more nimble. There are also usually fewer people and stakeholders to align, so you should also be able to move faster. That’s part of the reason why I went from a large company like LinkedIn to a smaller company like Velocity Global. I felt like I would be able to innovate, experiment, and move more quickly.

Externally, if you’re a smaller company, there’s likely not as much of a public eye on you. If you run an experiment and it doesn’t work, there’s not really much harm done — you take those lessons learned, move on, and incorporate them into how you continue to innovate.

During your time at LinkedIn, you significantly contributed to leading the platform in the creator economy and ecosystem. What key strategies did you employ to promote that environment?

LinkedIn was unique in terms of the creator economy. I would say for most social media platforms, whether it’s Facebook or TikTok, there’s an aspect of driving engagement for engagement’s sake. That’s because these social media companies get revenue primarily through ads. LinkedIn had a varied business model where the largest business was actually talent solutions — recruiting, job seeking, etc. At LinkedIn, we had a really principled point of view on creators and why they mattered.

The overarching mission of LinkedIn was to help professionals be more productive and successful. We only wanted the creators, content, and conversations that we felt contributed to that goal — we didn’t want engagement for the sake of engagement. We tried to be very thoughtful when it came to ranking the main feed on LinkedIn, incentivizing productive conversations, and disincentivizing what we characterized as memes or empty engagement.

Part of your tenure at LinkedIn also involved redesigning its consumer onboarding flows to focus on quality and long-term engagement. That marked a strategic shift for the company — what impact did that have?

In the early phases of a company, growth is the most important thing. In the earlier days of LinkedIn, the top metric was the number of members registered on the platform. As LinkedIn as a network and platform matured, how many people were registered mattered less and less. Almost every professional in the US was already signed up on LinkedIn, whether or not they were using it regularly.

That’s when we started digging into what would actually drive engagement and retention on LinkedIn. How do we get these people to be more productive and successful as a result of using LinkedIn? We looked at what drove that long-term engagement, what was correlated or causal to that, and signals such as if people were completing their profiles, connecting with others, etc. We also looked at how reachable someone was. If somebody sent a person a message, would the person actually receive it because they had the mobile app installed with push notifications, for example?

Those were the types of things that we were trying to promote because we saw that they correlated with long-term engagement. The more that members exhibited those behaviors and took those actions, the more likely they were to come back to LinkedIn and eventually engage with their feeds as well. Over time, LinkedIn shifted more toward trying to drive feed engagement, with the ultimate goal of making professionals more productive and successful.

When growth is more important than revenue

Having led product initiatives across consumer, growth, and monetization spectrums, what’s your approach to balancing user needs and business goals?

In the long run, serving user needs and solving their real, daily problems is always going to have a better outcome for business goals. In the short term, if you’re bringing that timeline down a bit, you might have to choose to prioritize differently to meet a business goal.

The best example that I can think of here is in the early innings of a product or a company. This is similar to what I mentioned before when growth is the most important thing — even more so than revenue. To some extent, it’s even more important than solving the immediate user problem because you have to bootstrap and grow your products’ user base. This is necessary for customers to be able to get value from your company in the future, and for you to learn about what works and what doesn’t. That’s the one area where I would say in the early innings, growth is the most important thing.

The idea of career principles

You are passionate about advancing careers, especially for women in technology. What advice do you have for people who are mid- to advanced-level product leaders and are eager to make an impact on their organizations?

In terms of making an impact on the organization that you’re already in, take the initiative to solve an important problem that no one else has solved. Do the research on it. Validate that it’s a big problem and would have a big impact if it were solved. Build the business case, and then go and tackle it. It’s one thing to do a really good job at something somebody asks you to do, but then it’s another to independently identify a thorny problem and then rally resources, get the buy-in, go after it, and solve it.

That’s something that can be really impactful and significant. When I reflect on my own career, the most growth and advancement came from when I was able to do that. It wasn’t the literal part of my job description or something that I was asked directly to do — it’s something I had an idea for, went out after, and then helped make successful.

Lastly, do you have any other general career advice for product managers?

One thing that I’ve taken from product management as a discipline and applied toward career advancement is the idea of having career principles. As a product manager, when my teams are building products or strategies for product areas, I ask them to define what their product principles are.

For example, at LinkedIn, a product principle would be something like, “If we had to choose between a feature that would significantly impact the creator versus the viewer, responder, or participant in the conversation, how would we make that choice? What’s the principle around what matters more?” You could have a principle that if we have to prioritize, we’ll prioritize creators because they’re the ones who start the conversations.

I ask PMs to make sure they’re very clear on those principles because they help make trade-off decisions later on, should those cases arise. And they usually do. That’s an important practice for your career because depending on the phase of your career or even your personal life, you’re going to prioritize things a little bit differently.

It’s always best to have those principles written out before you evaluate new opportunities and make decisions. Otherwise, it’s easy to get distracted by some shiny object or new role. It really has to come down to what you value right now for your next step in your career and what matters. Write down those career principles first and then use them as criteria to evaluate new opportunities. That will help ensure that once you’re in that new opportunity, it’s genuinely fulfilling for what you want from your career or your life.