Leader Spotlight: Breaking out of silos, with MQ Qureshi

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MQ Qureshi is Head of Digital Product Experience at ClearChoice Dental Implant Centers, the largest network of dental implant centers in the US. Before joining ClearChoice, MQ worked in product leadership at both enterprise companies and startups, including as the global director of digital experience at McDonald’s. He started his career as a digital product manager at General Motors working on OnStar.

In our conversation, MQ talks about his experience with “unexpected sparks of brilliance” — solutions that are not always big moonshot ideas, but that help you get to the core of what you’re trying to do. He also shares the importance of maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit and going outside of your job description to bring solutions to the table, and discusses how keeping the user journey in perspective can eliminate friction points throughout the funnel.

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Creating your own opportunities

When we talked offline, you mentioned that you created a role for yourself in digital experience. Can you talk about that?

At one point, I was going after a particular role at an incredibly interesting organization. I had accepted the offer letter and had gone ahead and resigned from my previous employer at this point. A few days before starting, they got in touch and said that they had to pause all new hire start dates due to some massive unforeseen headwinds with the company.

That was quite devastating. I could have gotten upset (and everybody would’ve been completely understanding of that), but I wanted to think bigger and turn that into a positive.

I came back to the group and said, “Listen, while I’m disappointed, we’ve been on this exciting journey for a while. I’ve met a lot of different people through the interview process, and I’m excited for the future. My role is to think of solutions.” So, I proposed that between now and the hiring freeze lift, I take a stab at putting together a strategy, and if it works, fantastic. If and when the time comes for us to re-engage and this freeze lifts, we’ve hit the ground running and made the best of our time. And if that doesn’t come to fruition, it was an interesting exercise anyway, and it’ll have given me something to focus on.

They welcomed that. I met with a bunch of people, started putting this deck together, and then started sharing it. It was very well-received throughout the organization, even making it to the CEO. They ended up creating an exception for me to come in and start early. I was very grateful for that, and it helped to expand my remit. I had an opportunity to not come in the box that was presented to me but to show that I have a larger vision and skill set. That really shined through. My scope of responsibilities increased as a reflection of that.

The lesson learned here is that adversity comes to us all, but sometimes, if you think creatively and you disassociate yourself from the personal to what’s practical, you can find a way to move forward. Sometimes you have to create your own opportunity, and that’s something that I would advise anybody at any stage of their career to think about.

Brilliance isn’t all about moonshots

That’s a great story. You’re also writing a book called Unexpected Brilliance. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and the thought behind it?

The book has been interesting. I was just going to start it off very simply about what I’ve learned about product management and digital experience. As I got into it, I started pulling together case studies of interesting examples of things that I came across. Some of them were really surprising to me. When you learn about the unexpected origins of solutions people have come up with, it can be very inspirational.

It also became kind of semi-autobiographical in terms of my experiences that have colored how I think about things. Where have there been times of unexpected sparks of brilliance that have occurred in my career and my experiences? And how can I be a tone and a guide on how to harness brilliance within yourself, within your team, etc.? That’s been where the direction of the book has gone and has taken shape.

Many product leaders have to balance big moonshot-type ideas vs. being iterative. What is brilliance to you? Is it that moonshot idea?

I don’t think that brilliance is all about moonshots. It’s good to think big, and sometimes we get mired up in paralysis analysis and want to get to decimal-point-level detail. The key is to get to the core of what you’re trying to do. When you think about that moonshot, you’re often thinking about the result rather than the problem you’re trying to solve. So, it’s about bringing it back to that problem you’re trying to solve and the quickest way to validate that problem.

A good example of that is with VanMoof, a Dutch high-end bicycle manufacturer. They make these brilliantly engineered bikes that ship all over the world, and they are a digital-first company. These are serious bikes — complicated pieces of engineering. And unfortunately, during shipping, there would be a lot of damage to the bikes because they’re very delicate.

Customers would have to ship things back, and that would cause a lot of dissatisfaction. To fix this, they could have added shipping instructions, more complicated packaging, etc. But somebody came up with a really brilliant, and very simple, idea to solve it: on the box, they printed a picture of a flat-screen TV. That’s it. They found that their shipping damages were reduced by 70–80 percent. Everybody has a flat-screen TV at home and knows they don’t want to damage it. No one wants that to happen to somebody else.

When we talked offline, you also mentioned that the idea of brilliance is helping your team harness an entrepreneurial spirit. Can you speak to the importance of that in the PM role?

If you look at a lot of corporate structures as they exist today, they are a reflection of what I think is the industrial age. A lot of them exist because they were structured when things were defined and scaled up tremendously, but have been duplicated and replicated across the board. You have a division, and within that are certain functions. In each function are specific areas with different people in charge of those areas, and you give them very specific KPIs to focus on improving. And there’s a thought that if all these individual KPIs are fixed, then that rolls up naturally into improvement.

And I could be wrong there, but what happens is that people get used to thinking in silos, i.e., thinking only in their particular areas. And inherently to product management, there is an entrepreneurial spirit. Product managers are like the CEO of their product line. A bad CEO sits back and goes, “Alright workers, go do all these things and I’ll make the decisions.” A great one gets involved and understands what’s going on in every single piece. That is something that a product leader needs to embrace — thinking not just about just the solution, but how to sell the solution.

How do you market your solution? How do you package it? How do you brand it? How do you communicate it? You have to be willing to take all those things on, not just think about the thing that you’re trying to fix. It’s expanding that thinking. In terms of bringing that to life for your teams, the opportunity there is giving voice to their ideas and helping them adopt that thinking by saying, “Well, how would you sell this? How would you get someone to use it? How would you know that it’s a success?” Ask them the questions to then give them the framework that they can apply.

Right, you can’t just love your solution, you have to love selling your solution. Can you speak to that methodology and how you’ve adopted that in your work in digital experiences?

Prior to working at ClearChoice, I worked in McDonald’s corporate on their mobile app and kiosk technology. After I left, I started a company called Xoobies with my old boss from McDonalds and a third colleague, who had both also left.

I thought I had all the answers because I had come up with this brilliant idea for Xoobies. But all three of us were siloed in our thinking because we focused on building a great product. We thought that if we solved all these operational issues and created this great product, that by itself would speak to and resonate with investors and users alike.

The money we raised was a decent amount, but when you’re up against big travel groups, it’s difficult to compete. We had a truly brilliant platform — we had a really good way of sourcing our guides and creating great experiences, and every single person who went on those experiences gave us great reviews, but people weren’t discovering it enough. Could I have made this simpler and built traction faster and been more in love with selling my solution than building the solution? Yes, I could have. And I learned from that.

I thought creatively and realized I can’t continue to afford this marketing cost, so how can I go into something that’ll bring my customer acquisition cost tremendously down and solve that problem? We shifted into a B2B model where we were leveraging hotels and brands and letting them drive volume and demand. Then, unfortunately, COVID happened.

Being entrepreneurial and creating your own opportunity

You mentioned working in corporate at McDonald’s and now you’re at ClearChoice, both big companies. Is there an equivalent for the product people in those organizations where they should be focused on how to sell as well as how to build, or have you found that that’s usually another team?

This is where the organizational silos come into play. I’ll give an example from when I was at OnStar that gave my approach a certain irreverence for some of those structures. When I started, I was a low guy on the totem pole, but I noticed that we kept talking about how poor our data quality was. Our customer data was bad, and we were spending millions bringing in companies to fix it. I started thinking, “Why do we have bad data to begin with?”

Without knowing what I knew, I was mapping the journey. It turns out that there were a lot of manual processes. A sales guy would sit in the car and read out the 16-digit VIN to somebody at OnStar who would type it into the system. And this was around the year 2000 when there was a lot less automation than today, but I knew we could solve it via a web solution. When I went to pitch that, there was a two-year wait in terms of priorities for the engineering team. I could have stopped there, but I went to an executive director of the field sales team and said, “I think I can build this. I talked to somebody at the call center who can join us and give us some agents who could do this work.”

Luckily, the leader I approached was a man of vision and didn’t mind taking calculated risks. He gave me some money, but more importantly, he gave me some backing.

I went to visit different dealerships around the Detroit area, got them involved, and built a quick pilot. Nobody asked me to do this, my job on a day-to-day basis was making copy updates to the site. Sometimes, you have to take that chance and see what you can do to bring something materially back.

If you are thinking about how to improve your company’s performance, you’re solving a materially important problem, and you bring solutions to the table, people are not going to get mad. Some people might get upset that you’re stepping on toes, and I certainly had my fair share of that, but you have to work your way through, be entrepreneurial, and create your own opportunity. That’s just been a mark of everything that I’ve done and how I look at things.

I think many people fear that they’ll be seen as going outside their jobs. How did you think about that fear? Did you make sure you did your job well and then pursued this?

You can’t be not doing your core duties well and then go do this. You have to keep doing your job well and maintain a good reputation so that people know that they’re dealing with a person who is diligent in their job and their duties. However, when you take something like this on, I find that it works well if you frame it with curiosity, question-asking, and wanting to learn.

If you approach things with a healthy amount of respect and learning and whatnot, you find that you get a lot more cooperation and you get a lot more people on board with your idea.

A lot of entrepreneurism and the hustle culture is based on this kind of mythos of hero attitude, like Mark Zuckerberg building Facebook. Everybody wants to be that guy. But no one ever does it themselves. You have to bring people along. It’s not about credit, it’s about solving a problem. If you are giving credit where it’s due and allowing others to come along with you, not only will you be more successful, but you’ll also build a reputation as an individual who people like to work with.

Removing friction points

You spoke to this in your example with OnStar, but can you talk about how folks should be thinking about the user journey? Do you have examples that you’ve had when thinking through user problems?

The user journey is, I think, the biggest unlock that you can have for your organization. It’s amazing how many organizations don’t embrace that. A lot of organizations look at the sales funnel, but how is the sales funnel tied to (and how is it different from) the journey? The journey starts with the customer. What is the customer doing? How are they moving through your sales funnel? What’s their consideration cycle? What channels do they go through for that?

I’m not saying that sales funnels are bad, they’re absolutely an essential tool, but I think that when you add in the additional dimension of the journey, you suddenly have a lot more understanding. You can see where your friction points are. If you focus on removing friction points first, that creates a ton of opportunity. When you do that exercise with cross-functional teams, it’s easy to see where problems are and how we can fix them.

When you refer to friction, what do you mean by that? What sort of friction do you usually look for?

Friction can manifest itself in many different ways. Since we’re framing this in a digital discussion, and you look at a digital experience, you have high bounce rates. There’s a friction point right there. Your customers are not engaged. What they’re finding when they come in is not engaging enough to keep them. So, how do we focus on removing that friction and retaining people? That’s a combination of content, user experience, product lines, and product marketing.

With all those things, it’s multifaceted. Everybody focuses on the transaction point and thinks, “That’s the place where we need to remove friction.” The truth is that it’s a series of things. There are very few people that are turning up and going immediately to buy. There’s a lot of things in between. How do you remove those points that are keeping them away from that buying decision, that transacting decision, etc.?

And if you have hundreds of thousands of users, how do you identify those? What’s the process to find the friction?

There are lots of fantastic tools that are out there that help quantify user friction in terms of paths and allow you to look at that en masse. You can pinpoint where slowdowns occur, where code is breaking, etc. So, there are lots of great modern tools out there.

But let’s say you don’t have any of that. Talking to customers is the best tool that you can have but you then need to be able to group those experiences together. That’s where I think customer segmentation comes into play. You can see the different types of customers, the stages they are in their journey, and if and how you’re engaging with them at the right moment.

Having tools is helpful, but combining that with talking to customers will unlock the biggest opportunities for improvement.