Leader Spotlight: Thinking as though there are no limitations, with Mina Ghaani

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Mina Ghaani is an experienced product management leader serving as a Director and VP of Product. She began her career as a designer before moving to product management and has substantial experience building and overseeing international teams to bring new ideas to market. She has led product expansion and localization efforts within product management at IfOnly, an ecommerce and charity marketplace. Mina also worked in various roles to help develop private label and patent products at The Baus Movement, as well as the Amika, EvaNTC, and PYT brands of Heat Makes Sense consumer electronic tools.

In our conversation, Mina talks about how she instills a supportive culture in her team by emphasizing that “no idea is too wild or too out there.” She shares the importance of putting problems first and how she overcame a challenge when her team developed a product that didn’t initially address customers’ stated primary pain point. Mina also talks about an initiative where she scaled a product globally and was hyper-focused on geo-targeting and engaging users via customized content and brand messaging.

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An example of a problem-first approach

With your extensive experience in leading product development from zero to one, could you share a particularly challenging product launch or innovation that was particularly challenging?

I helped develop a product during a large boom in the adoption of machine learning (ML) algorithms. Companies wanted to use AI and ML to optimize their day-to-day operations and even cannibalize parts of their businesses so that they could reallocate their resources. Our product would analyze a company’s algorithms and the attributes of those algorithms to pair them with relevant, responsible AI definitions and metrics. These would be monitored as a means to detect and mitigate any unintended algorithmic biases and were customized to each client.

We did initial market and competitive research and didn’t find much else out there. Nothing that had been developed was baked into a product yet. I led the team to mock up a “Wizard of Oz” solution of our idea and when we tested it, clients loved it. We got enough data from our target buyers to prepare and launch our MVP, and then we circled back with our clients after announcing its general availability.

We were met with significant resistance. Clients really loved the idea conceptually, but we realized that with it came a lot of fear and hesitation around what they might potentially learn about their algorithms. We were smacked in the face with that reality.

While we had learned that our customers wanted clarity on whether they had actually effectively developed, trained, and managed their ML models, notably to eliminate unintended biases, the actual problem was understanding how to modify and mitigate any shortcomings thereafter. This wasn’t something that customers explicitly mentioned in their user interviews, even though it was the core of their concerns. It was an eye-opening reinforcement of why we put problems first in product and always supplement primary research with observational inquiry.

How did you modify the product to adapt to this realization that people were afraid to actually use it?

In the immediate term, we decided to supplement the gaps in the software with our consulting services. In parallel with the services, we carried out an alpha and beta of sorts to include an additional module that would provide a “what if” analysis. This was going to get to their core pain point of what to actually do if they do find biases. This module would enable users to visualize how to best retune their models to reach optimal performance and mitigate and eliminate the identified, unintended biases.

Essentially, the “what if” analysis was isolated to the application itself and gave users the ability to hypothetically tweak their models. They could visualize corresponding outcomes before making hard commitments impacting the intensive model development lifecycle.

We quickly developed the frontend of that analysis module and continued moving it forward — pairing it with our consulting services and learning about user needs to inform how we’d develop the backend logic. This was our team’s firsthand, lived example of why a holistic, problem-first approach in product is integral to its adoption.

Thinking big and working backward from there

That type of innovation requires a highly supportive culture. Can you describe how you’ve promoted an environment that encourages radical thinking and the pursuit of ambitious or even risky projects?

I worked for a director earlier in my career who shaped my method of fostering a supportive culture. He taught me how to enable teams to speak up and he always encouraged thinking outside the box. He was very inclusive and he would always bring me into important executive meetings so that I could get exposure. After these meetings, I’d share my crazy, out-of-the-box ideas with him that were byproducts of hearing what other people were talking about.

Every time, he’d ask, “Why didn’t you bring that up in the meeting?” I’d shrug it off and tell him that I didn’t want to go off-topic. He said to me, and I’ll never forget this, “Mina, I hired you because I value the way you think and how imaginative you are. Your diverse experiences inform your perspective. I will always have your back in broader contexts and meetings, even if you say something that is wildly out there.” He emphasized that he never wanted me to go into a meeting with the fear that he wouldn’t support me. That conversation was pivotal in my approach today.

I do the exact same thing for every single team member that I have now. I make sure that when I build a team, I get people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thinking differently is what shapes holistic thinking and ideation collectively. Re-instilling the confidence that each team member is there to share their perspective, that they’re encouraged to be creative, and that this a safe collaborative space where somebody more senior to them will always have their back is a huge thing.

You also live by the motto that nothing is impossible. Can you talk about that and what that implies for your teams?

There isn’t an idea that’s too wild or too out there, and this is the approach that I adopted in my earlier days working as an industrial designer. I’m a firm believer in thinking big and working backward from there. Nothing is impossible — it may just require a few iterations and some creativity in terms of how you get there. That’s something that I always encourage my teams to do. As long as they are conducting their research, putting the customer at the center, and thinking about what the market and user needs are, that’s great. Think as though there aren’t any limitations, and we’ll figure out the rest later.

Do you have an example or an experience you could share that stemmed from thinking without limitations?

I was working for a consumer electronics startup in the hairstyling industry. I was hired as the in-house industrial designer, and this is when I wore many hats and grew into their product manager as well. I was overseeing all of the electronics that I designed through to manufacture, market availability, import, and export.

I coupled observational inquiry with our primary users, professional hairstylists, with general and secondary research to learn about problems in the industry, especially from a health standpoint. A big issue was the lack of ergonomic tools. I learned a lot about repetitive-strain injury, which is from the wrist movement hairstylists experience. That inspired me to start to think about hair tools differently — specifically the blow dryer. I was like, “There has to be a different way for us to imagine this.”

I sketched something up, and it was essentially a hair dryer with a seamless, ergonomic handle that was rotary in terms of the buttons. It would allow for a more ergonomic design in the hairstylist’s palm. I sketched it out, wrote a Post-it note, and left it on the CEO’s desk. The next morning, he called me over to talk about it. He suggested I send it to our manufacturers and see what they say, so I reached out to them. They wrote back quickly and said it was impossible and wasn’t going to happen.

Intuitively, I thought, “They’re only saying no because it’s not familiar to them.” As humans, we always have a natural tendency to reject something that seems wildly out there, or even simply unfamiliar. I took that as a sign to be more innovative in how I presented the idea and how I could make it resonate with our manufacturers. I thought about what objects are rotary in design to help translate into what I was trying to do in this handle. And it was a radio dial. I dissected that so that you could see the inner mechanism of that dial, took a few photos of it, and then superimposed it into the Photoshop rendering I’d made.

I sent that back to the manufacturers, and said, “We can create a custom mechanism similar to this, and we can implement that in this dial. It’s been done before at this scale. It’s small enough to fit and we can still keep it ergonomic.” They were on board, and I flew to China to visit the manufacturing factory. That was the beginning of the first patent.

That core lesson was about how to present the idea. In prototyping, how you present it is key. It doesn’t have to be aesthetically refined, beautiful, or finalized. That can actually become a distraction to progress when you’re really early in that prototyping phase. Rather, you have to have a strong narrative and present it so it’s more believable in terms of achieving the desired end state.

The dynamic between IP and innovation

Speaking of patents, you’ve produced multiple throughout your career. How do you balance the pursuit of the IP with the speed of innovation?

It’s funny. I think there’s actually a really beautiful dynamic between IP and innovation, and it goes back to the constraints that are posed within IP. I’ve always had the mindset that constraints help innovation thrive. When it comes to limitations, guidelines, or strict procedures on how something needs to be defined or developed, many people might say, “That’s going to hinder my ability to be creative.” But I feel like it actually does the opposite.

When there are those constraints, I’ve been forced to look at the solution or the problem that’s being solved from a different angle. That elevates my creativity, so for me, it’s a beautiful dynamic.

Effectively segmenting customers

You also have deep experience in expanding into global markets. Could you share an example where you’ve taken a product that was being used domestically and adapted it to a global market?

I was working for a startup and their product was an ecommerce platform that served as a marketplace for unique and inspirational experiences. They had hired me specifically to localize their product. When I started, the product was only available in a few states, and I had been tasked with localizing that product to 25 countries supporting 14 languages in eight months.

There were several personas at play within that software, including the experience vendor and the primary user or buyer of those experiences. Those personas actually required notably different interfaces and feature sets. It was almost like we were developing two or three products in parallel to support those multiple countries and languages. It was a unique challenge since the admin functionality was robust and the customization capabilities for the marketplace were intricate.

We looked at how to translate that into a culturally considerate platform that was compliant and could scale internationally. Beyond core considerations around security, privacy regulations, payment compliance, and language translations, we needed to identify how to resonate with such different target demographics while keeping the brand consistent.

As with every product, the customer comes first. This meant figuring out the analytics strategy and A/B testing at scale to drive necessary insights and inform continuous improvement. I coupled that with my focus on tracking metrics and figuring out segmentation by geographics. As a part of that, geotargeting became a key focus, and I became hyper-obsessed with how we would engage our users via customized content. That taught me how important personas are, as well as how to effectively segment customers so that you are learning as much as possible about them.

Could you share any lessons learned from this experience zeroing in on segmentation?

Even if you don’t necessarily have a wealth of data on your target users, it’s prudent to at least create those personas based on research to establish a foundation. Then, identify the necessary tracking metrics, as well as the user attributes that you want to monitor upfront to hypothesize the effective segmentation of your users.

Those steps will ultimately be imperative to how you can speak to your users via the product, how you customize messaging, how you geo-target and market those experiences, etc. That’s going to help you ensure that there is consistency and continuous relevance.

Was there anything that you recall that surprised you in that segmentation process from any of those geographic markets?

It wasn’t necessarily surprising, but seeing the difference in terms of timing around buying behaviors was really interesting. Whether it was seasonal or driven by cultural events, watching the uptick in buying patterns and behaviors was fascinating.

Another unique finding was around economic behaviors, specifically in terms of how that was informed based on what was happening within that country at the time or what was culturally standard. We saw fluctuations with commonalities by geographic segments in how users navigate purchase flows and searches, and their engagement with the solution overall. So, we looked at how we could modify our offerings, and in some cases the user experience, to promote a shift in how they were interacting with the solution.