Mark Kamyszek is Vice President of Product Management at TeamSnap, a software application for sports team management. After getting his MBA from Loyola University Maryland, Mark led LeagueAthletics.com as Head of Product Development. From there, he joined product at Time Inc. (acquired by Meredith Corporation), a mass media company. Before his current role at TeamSnap, Mark led mobile at SportsEngine, a part of NBCUniversal.
In our conversation, Mark talks about the product launch process for B2B2C companies and how different strategies, principles, and personas apply to each side of the platform. He also discusses the role of seasonality in his work at TeamSnap and how it enables the team to create valuable sub-segments. Mark also shares his philosophies around professional development and anchoring goals within the context of OKRs.
For context, at TeamSnap, our B2B customers are youth sports organizations across North America and Canada. They’re the primary buyers. They have their own customers, who are the parents, players, and coaches who interact primarily with our mobile application.
The first thing anybody has to do in this type of B2B2C business is customer segmentation and persona definition. At TeamSnap, that’s how we have to focus our work on the B2B side. Are we doing the right things for those sports organizations — admins, schedulers, and everyone else running them? On the B2C side, are we doing the things that support what a parent or coach needs to do as they interact with our applications?
On the B2B side, while we can generalize our customers as sports organizations, the reality is that a soccer organization differs greatly from a hockey organization, for example. As a result, we run on the principle of flexibility. Our customers generally need to do the same things, but they operate differently, so there needs to be an enhanced level of flexibility against B2B.
On the B2C side, these could be users interacting with the same application, but across many different teams associated with many different sports organizations. For that group, the principles there revolve around things like consistency. Is there a standard level of simplicity so that things don’t look completely different for each organization or team a user is connected to? When you have those different breakdowns and principles against each one of them, it helps guide what you’re building.
Further, with these different principles and personas, specific metrics will tell you if you’re successful or not in each area. On the B2B side, we focus heavily on NPS for our sports organization admins. We might think about feature utilization because it is such a broad and deep product. But, on the B2C side, we might be looking at things like engagement, user satisfaction, and ease of application use.
There are a few things. First, I ground our prioritization against our OKRs. We have certain objectives and business goals that we need to hit, and they’re on specific timelines. When we’re talking about all the things that we could potentially do, that is number one. Do the problems that we think we want to solve ultimately ladder up to what we’re trying to achieve, either from an overall business or each business unit perspective? I like to explore and map impact versus effort.
Also, effort isn’t just about if you can execute the task in a given timeframe. You also have to talk about the effort in the go-to-market motion as well. Is the team going to build something that’s going to impact your sales motions differently? Or is there some new SKU that has to be added from a subscription standpoint that’s going to have to be enabled? Customer-facing teams have to think about the levels of engagement and enablement necessary to talk to customers and support them appropriately.
All of those things have to go into the effort conversation, but you can use this to gauge the overall impact that you’ll have on your base. That really supports the prioritization. Once you get to that point, you can have customer-centric roadmap reviews with your internal stakeholders or advisory boards, get feedback, and round off the edges of what that roadmap might look like. Ultimately, it’s important to keep going back to those feedback channels to figure out the next problem you’re going to solve.
It’s pretty similar for both B2B and B2C, the difference just lies in where you focus your attention on each of those lines. To bring a new product to market, our process starts with the discovery and research on the problem or opportunity. We go through the development process, have some pre-launch readiness checks, and work with our team to help us launch to market. We have great marketing, sales, and support teams that help us go to market with a winning strategy.
When you’re on the B2B side and need the flexibility I mentioned earlier, you have to spend a lot more time and do a lot more rigor around the problem discovery — specifically the validation of the solution that you think you’re going to bring to market. It’s the same with investment in pre-launch activities. You have to ask, “Are we solving a problem that will be able to support the majority of the current base? And for our prospective and soon-to-be customers, are we going to be able to solve their problem as well?”
On the other hand, the B2C side is a much more isolated and contained environment. Also, the release cycle is slightly longer, so you have to go through the app releases, reviews, app adoption, etc. The post-launch stages of monitoring and understanding get more focus than B2B as well. For example, it’s important to ask things like, “Have we introduced something that is causing some friction for customers?”
Absolutely. We did a ton of market research on the challenges of sports organizations in North America. We found that all of our competitors were positioning themselves similarly. They were all typical league management solutions, but none of them were doing anything to influence the growth of sports participation and youth sports.
Through our market research, we found that it all starts with coaches. Do you have coaches that can actually teach kids how to play sports? When we talked to coaches and these sports organizations, we realized that none of our competitors had good resources or ways to recruit coaches to join or be successful in their organization. They were handing out drills on a piece of paper, which is not efficient for a coach who’s trying to run a practice.
As a result, we found that we had an opportunity to launch a subscription, which we called TeamSnap+, for our sports org customers, coaches, and parents. We positioned it as a way for organizations to recruit and retain coaches, which ultimately helps them grow their organizations. It makes the kids in the organization more successful. And if kids have success early, they’re likely to come back and participate season over season.
We have a strong belief that we are doing something that is directly impacting the growth of youth sports. Using that research, messaging, and product positioning, we’ve seen wild success. TeamSnap+ has exceeded expectations and it’s now one of the fastest growing parts of the TeamSnap business.
They’re similar across B2B and B2C. With B2B, there’s more focus on the acquisition metrics. Also, our business is very seasonal, since sports like basketball play in the winter and soccer plays in the fall or spring. It’s important to understand this aspect of the business and track metrics such as DAU and MAU to see how many people are engaging at once.
I find the seasonality to actually be a blessing because it allows us to create sub-segments of our audience, which are the different sports types. It gives us some advantage because we can plan against it and find patterns to win against that vertical slice of the market.
On the B2C side, it is all about the top-level funnel. How many users are signing up? At TeamSnap, we have a paid subscription, so we monitor conversion rates for those types of things. We also look at retention rate. Are coaches coming back to renew their subscriptions each season? Are we providing enough value to keep them as a subscribed customer? We’re also constantly monitoring things like NPS scores and app reviews.
When you have all of that information together, you can ask things like, “Where are we being really successful? How can we keep the foot on the gas and add more fuel to the fire?” It’s also a really good opportunity to look at where things are falling short. What are the challenges certain customers are having, and why is a certain metric changing from what we historically knew? That helps us establish feature prioritization or plan roadmaps to course correct.
On our product teams, we have an overarching B2B2C strategy, which is how our customers operate. We break our teams up by B2B and B2C, and they execute against the different projects we have going on.
We have leadership at the top of each function within product development — so, we have a product leader, engineering leader, design leader, and QA leader. That way, if we have a theme, we can look into how it impacts each part of the customer journey. And while the teams are executing their different parts of the product, we still have that oversight to make sure that everything is cohesive.
The first one I’d mention is a no-brainer — customer empathy. Does the person have the ability to figure out who the customer is, what problems they might have, and their motivations? As they build out their intuition for what a customer needs or what they want to do, can they marry that with data? Can they use data to validate assumptions and make the best decisions?
As a product person, I think a core competency and qualifying characteristic is the ability to communicate effectively. I always use an analogy in my teams that product is like an air traffic controller. They’re the glue that holds a lot of things together. Being able to manage stakeholders and effectively communicate what’s happening, what the vision is, and what priorities are is hugely important.
Lastly, when you hire people into your organization or the business, grit tends to get overlooked. And I know it’s hard to measure, but in a product role when things are always changing — whether that’s priorities, capacity, resources, etc. — will the person be resilient in the face of change and continue to drive things forward? That characteristic is hard to identify, but when you find it, it’s a great quality for a product person.
I believe that enabling innovation comes from setting clear goals with your team. If you don’t have that level of what you’re trying to accomplish and what the objectives are, it’s very hard to be innovative. At TeamSnap, we anchor those goals within the context of OKRs. Once those are defined and the teams are aware of what success looks like, it’s much easier to give them autonomy to figure out how to reach those goals. And that breeds innovation.
Further, open communication is vital. When you’re building things as a product team, you have to do it out in the open to get as much input and feedback as possible. That drives a level of innovation. Accountability is a big factor too. Everyone is contributing and trying to push the ball forward. Lastly is transparency. This refers to the transparency of communication, as well as the results of something you’ve launched or shipped. Whether it’s product metrics or something else, how can you continue to democratize access to these insights?
First and foremost, you have to understand each individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and what they’re hoping to accomplish in their career journey. Are they trending toward becoming a people manager or executive, or do they enjoy focusing on the IC parts of their work? Once you have that, you can tailor your coaching style and how you interact with that person to ultimately get where they need to go.
For example, a more junior PM might need more hands-on coaching, while senior PMs might just need feedback. They might need somebody to bounce ideas off of. When they get to that level, it reminds me of parenting my kids in that I have to give them the space to operate. I have to give them the space to push bounds and make decisions, and whether the decision is right or wrong is part of building great product teams. It’s important to let people learn from their mistakes and day-to-day to become stronger professionals.
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