Leader Spotlight: Simplifying the complexity of product strategy, with Nadya Boone

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Nadya Boone is a SaaS CPO and was most recently Chief Product Officer at Huntress. Nadya previously held product leadership roles at DAT Freight & Analytics and New Relic. She began her career as an engineer and worked for The Standard, a provider of financial products and services, for nearly a decade. Nadya transitioned to project management at General Electric and got into product management during her tenure at NWEA, a not-for-profit assessment solutions organization.

In our conversation, Nadya talks about how she simplifies the complexity of product strategy, including using methods like creating different versions of the product roadmap for various stakeholders. She shares an example of framing product strategy in a way that was familiar, and talks about leveraging “radical candor” — i.e., being extremely direct and having deep empathy — to help teams reach goals.

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Looking through multiple lenses

To start, when you’re building a product strategy, what are the frameworks or analytical methods that you rely on?

It’s really important to look at it from multiple lenses, such as market trends, customer needs, or competitive landscape. You may find that things look good through one lens but not another, and you might still be OK with that. You can still be deliberate. I like to start with the baseline of how this stacks up financially. Can I draw a line from this strategy to our financial goals and a corporate-level strategy in terms of how we’re approaching growth and new markets? There should be a clear line between product strategy and those top-level goals.

Similarly to that, there’s another lens around risk and boldness. Are you focusing more on growing in areas where you’ve got confidence or are you looking to place some bigger bets? A lot of times, you’re balancing that. This is a great place to engage the rest of the exec team or your peers across the organization because you don’t want them at the feature level saying, “I think you should build this.” You want them saying, “Is North American growth more important than international?”

Then, I continue down the list to look at investments. Where is time going in terms of new revenue versus existing revenue versus cutting costs? If you don’t look into this, you can fall into the trap of not spending enough money — you’re protecting the things that are making you money now but not looking ahead to new sources of revenue. On the flip side, companies get excited about chasing new things and neglect the strong products they already have.

The last component is competition. You have to be aware of the competition but you don’t want that to drive your strategy. Otherwise, people can get caught up in chasing what everyone else is doing.

You’ve managed significant transitions in your career, such as integrating AI into New Relic’s offerings. Could you talk about managing change and innovation, especially with an established team?

When you’re leading a technology change, engineers thrive on working with new tech. I’m an engineer by training, so I get it. The challenge is that a lot of times when you’re seeding something new, you need a small team that can focus and move fast. Part of what good leaders do is find a way to bring everyone along. They say, “We know you don’t want to be left behind. We can’t have every team in the company working on AI, but we know you’re all interested. How can we find ways to get you working on it?”

At New Relic, we had a special interest group around engineers who were interested in AI. This included both people who were doing it for their day job and people who weren’t. They would get together and share their learnings. When you’re leading companies through that kind of change, if you can involve more people that’s always the better option. You can address people’s fears that if they didn’t get on a “cool” team, there’s no hope for them to advance this interest of theirs. You can say, “We’re going to need more people, just come along with us.”

Also, if you want to drive innovation, regardless of the technology, you need as many folks as possible close to the customer problems. It might come from a PM, but that’s just one person. Some of the best developments I’ve seen came from the true product team — product management, design, engineering, etc. — understanding the customer problem. They were spending time with the customer, watching interviews, etc. Some of the best ideas came from engineers saying, “Oh, I see this firsthand now.” You need to bring the team into that if you want to apply some of this tech to get the best results.

There are many industries where it’s feasible to do a customer visit, but that’s probably challenging in cybersecurity. What process have you used to get close to the customer?

At Huntress, we had some awesome folks called product researchers. Their job was to get into the hacker’s mind. We had two frameworks: product-market fit, which is standard, as well as product-hacker fit. That meant evaluating what the hackers were doing. What is the emerging tradecraft? What’s coming our way? We say that our partners don’t have to worry about that because we’re worrying about it for them.

Product researchers were aligned and deeply embedded with each product team. They’d evaluate what they’re seeing coming out of how people are going after a particular Microsoft product, for example, and how they think we could defend against it. That generates more discussion and innovation around that.

Creating different roadmaps for different conversations

You mentioned executives earlier, but there are multiple stakeholders that you work with. How do you tailor your communication about your strategy and roadmap when you’re talking to different personas?

One roadmap doesn’t work for everybody, so you should have multiple versions. As I moved up from a product manager into a leadership role, I was used to creating one roadmap. When you’re working for a SaaS company, everybody’s a stakeholder, because this is a foundation that is making all the money that everybody has to market and sell. It’s crucial to come back and say, “Do I have a view that is going to resonate with all those different people I’m going to talk to?”

Sometimes, I end up with three versions: a traditional Gantt chart roadmap, a roadmap geared more to the finance folks and the board, and a roadmap focused on problems solved or outcomes. Some PMs will say, “Forget the feature roadmap, just do the customer-centric one.” That’s a fine approach as well, but a lot of times people want that concrete “tell me what you’re going to build” view.

Personally, I find the customer-centric or outcome-based roadmap can work well for stakeholders in support or marketing. This shows customers that you’re not just focusing on features, instead you’re actually engaging them. For example, you can show customers that the problem you have is around onboarding, so we’re going to make onboarding great. That leads you into those conversations, which I find to be valuable.

How do you tweak communication for stakeholders who may be less technical, such as folks on the finance team?

It’s important to focus on outcomes and differentiation. Marketing, sales, and the whole go-to-market organization are very important stakeholders. The first thing they’re going to ask you is, “How is this different? How is this not the same thing that the person next door is doing?” For example, most products have onboarding. Say your onboarding is causing a lot of friction. Your competitors have a five-minute onboarding, and yours is 20 minutes. You don’t have to go into specifics with the go-to-market team, but you can tell them that you’re working on getting the onboarding process down to only three minutes.

You want people to leave the conversation thinking, “OK, I get the problem you’re solving and I understand how it’s going to help customers.” Get into those outcome-based stories of what you’re doing for customers and how it’s going to be different. Those are things that everybody can connect to.

Framing strategy in a way that’s familiar

Simplifying the complexity of your product strategy for different groups is an important skill. What is your process like and can you give examples of how you’ve accomplished this?

This is where a visual component comes into play and where I will spend a lot of time if I need it. I was working on a presentation a couple of years ago on the strategy for my department and was talking to a friend of mine. She is a former Bain consultant, and she is great at doing these types of executive-level summaries. She said, “I’m telling you that two-by-two is your friend.” So, I found a way to boil it down to a two-by-two matrix that I could use with my team and the execs.

At Huntress, when I was creating our first product strategy, I wanted people to be able to grip and engage with not just what we’re doing now, but where we could go. Huntress is a cybersecurity company, and there’s an industry-standard cybersecurity framework for talking about what products you need. By using that, I was able to frame our strategy in a way that many people were already familiar with.

The lesson I learned in doing this was interesting. When I first approached it, I wanted to make a unique version. I tweaked a few things in the standard framework to be more precise, but it actually made it harder for people. I unwound that and went back to using the industry standard because it was close enough. Even though I wanted to be a little bit more precise, that precision was making it hard for people to grasp. When I put up the one that they knew and I explained where we fit and how our strategy aligned with this common matrix, people understood. It was good enough and it got people on board.

Making ‘radical candor’ work for you

You are an advocate for creating a culture of ‘radical candor’ in teams. How have you gone about introducing and promoting that within your product teams?

It’s so important to keep both aspects of radical candor in mind: being extremely direct and having deep empathy. This means coming to the conversation from a place of curiosity and caring about the other points of view. When you can pair those two together, you can have much better conversations.

Some of the things that I’ve done to facilitate that is making sure that the team is clear on what the common goals are — this could be a product team, a PM, a designer, or an engineering team. Do we all know what the KPIs are? Which of these proposed solutions is going to help us achieve that? This helps folks put aside their ego and focus on the solution. This helps everyone decelerate a little bit and focus on the team goal and the team win.

Those very direct conversations can still be challenging. How have you navigated the difficulties around that?

For me as a leader, it all starts with setting the example. I work to understand the role of my ego in that conversation and set a goal of always approaching the other person with a true sense of altruism. It’s not that I don’t want what I think is good for me, I just want what will benefit the greater good. We all have egos and they’re there to protect us. But when I approach a conversation where I know I disagree with someone, I’m like, “OK, am I scared? Am I frustrated because this person always gets their way? What are the emotions around it? What is the greater good that I want?”

I am bold in bringing up difficult topics, and I’ve done it in a way that is neutral and lets other people engage with that same spirit. I’ve created a place for them to also be a little bit of a bigger person and say, “Now that you said it that way, let’s talk about how this helps us achieve our goals and frame it in terms of that rather than two opposing ideas.” That creates space for both of us to do better work. It requires self-reflection, altruism, and really good listening.

Having a community that cares about the craft

In addition to active listening, the feedback loop is also important for continually improving and adapting to the needs of the team and organization. Could you say a bit about that?

When I’m coaching my team on this, I tell them this is part of the full-service plan that I provide as a manager. I give quick, 360 feedback. It can sometimes be overwhelming to get 360 feedback, but I’ve found that Slacking someone and saying, “Hey, providing some feedback on person X. I’d love to get quick bullets from you on how they’re doing in meetings or how they’re doing with this topic.” With three to five samples, I now know a lot more than I did before. I’m able to check in on folks even when I can’t be in the room with them.

The other advice that I give people is to develop a reputation for being great at taking feedback. If someone says, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” people will open up if you respond with, “That’s interesting, tell me more.”

You initiated some programs when you were at New Relic, such as the New Relic Women’s Brag Lunch. Can you talk about the important role that community plays in product teams?

One of the interesting things about being a PM is that you don’t get to work with your peers a lot. You’re working with your team but you’re not usually working with other PMs. You’re each kind of running your own business. But it’s also important to have a community that cares about the craft and discipline of product management. We all have different superpowers. Sharing them is really valuable — otherwise, it can be really hard to learn from each other.

Huntress is a fully remote company, so we had to put even more thought into spending time together. There was monthly sharing, a weekly team meeting, and a Slack channel, but it took a fair amount of work to be deliberate about it. People need to come together and collaborate. It’s important to have that balance so that you can feel like you’re continually improving your craft.