Leader Spotlight: The art of staying grounded, with Nicholas DePaul

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Nicholas DePaul is a former Senior Technical Product Manager, Fintech and ML at Intuit. He started his career in tech at Locent (YC S15), an SMS service startup, as employee number one. Nicholas then joined Square as a senior growth manager before transitioning to lead the user experience research practice at Brex, where he was the 20th employee.

In our conversation, Nicholas talks about practices that help him, as well as his team, stay grounded at work. He shares his career journey and how he switched between product management and user experience research, as well as the importance of “focusing on the moment.”

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Deciding between a PM and UX career

To start, can you tell us about your background and how you got into product management?

I’ve been doing product management my entire career, even if I didn’t know it early on. My first job in tech was as the first employee of a startup. I had never heard the letters PM or UX before, but in my role, I was researching the market, collaborating with designers, defining requirements, and talking to customers. I was doing nearly every part of what’s required to build a product zero to one, and a lot of what PMs do every day.

While I was at the startup, we went through Y Combinator, and after a big pivot, I joined Square. At Square, I learned about the more formal PM role and continued doing product-oriented work, except this time I was more focused on growth and monetization. We did a lot more experimentation, and I participated in a formal PM apprenticeship program. I also did a UX research apprenticeship, and while I was considering which path to go down, I decided to join Brex.

The PM title didn’t exist at Brex yet, and a lot of people didn’t have formal titles at all. All of my work was oriented around building the product, however, so when I joined Intuit’s UX research team years later, it became apparent that my expertise and skill set were better suited to the company’s titled PM role and track.

What did you learn from getting that bird’s-eye view in such an early-stage company, and how did that inform your approach to user experience research?

I learned that, when building a company, learning by doing is really the only way. When I joined Brex, it was early — pre-launch and pre-website. You can read every business book, read every article, and talk to every expert, but the only way to really learn is to do the work, so I feel really lucky to have worn so many hats, such as customer support, business analytics, sales, and marketing.

For me, the through line is always how we can solve customers’ problems with what we’re building. If we do that, the revenue will follow. That’s sort of simplistic to say, but I do believe it’s true when the market you’re tackling is big enough, and at Brex, it was.

I truly believe that to be the most effective product manager, UX researcher, or any role that’s working towards product success, you need to have an understanding of those different customer voice inputs and the roles responsible for enabling and nurturing them.

Ultimately, you chose to move to product management. How did that transition come about?

I chose to switch to product management because I wanted to get closer to the day-to-day building. As a UX researcher, I wasn’t really able to take what I had learned about customers, users, and their problems and use that knowledge to build. Many of the people who are drawn to research love and excel at learning, but aren’t as interested in the many tasks that come with being a product manager.

Product management is more about making money for the business. To succeed as a product manager, you have to love revenue and engagement and be willing to prioritize those outcomes. Ultimately, it’s about what you want your day-to-day to be like.

That being said, I do love and believe in the role of a professional researcher within large companies — having somebody who’s an expert learner can raise the bar for output quality, and design systems that help those who aren’t learning experts. To be successful, you have to help everybody learn efficiently, and that’s the role that researchers play. If you can get closer to being an expert learner, especially if you’re a product manager, you’ll supercharge your output because learning is an input that keeps on giving.

Focusing on the moment

You are also devoted to your meditation practice, which you’ve cited as helping you build more awareness of yourself within an organization, how you tackle problems with different teams, etc. Can you talk about that?

There are many misconceptions about what meditation is. There are also many different types of meditation. I’ve been meditating daily for over 10 years, and I’m still very much a beginner. I like to describe it, particularly to other tech people, as practicing a tennis serve or a basketball free throw. Except, instead of practicing a physical motion, you’re practicing the ability to recognize reality.

The aha moment for many meditation practitioners is recognizing that all thoughts and feelings are a creation of our own mind — not objective reality. Recognizing that more frequently can lead to all sorts of personal and social insights that, in turn, result in positive outcomes.

Professionally, I’ve become much more patient and aware of my own perspectives and biases, and I’m more easily able to embrace whatever unfolds. This is in contrast to the frustration that I often felt earlier in my career. It didn’t help anyone — especially me.

How has this practice also helped you deal with the day-to-day of being a product manager?

Because I have a research background, I know how to get close to the customer and identify the problems that they’re having quickly. I believe that I was a great product manager from day one because I already had those skills and, of course, the confidence that comes with that.

In the product management role, you’re often working hard for many hours with many different people, all of whom have different perspectives. Being more aware of yourself and those factors is very healthy. Additionally, meditation helps me remember that what happened yesterday is in the past and what’s coming up tomorrow hasn’t happened yet and might not ever happen. This leads me to just focus on the moment.

The soft and hard skills of product management

Being able to stay grounded — and help everybody else to stay grounded too — is super important. What other ‘soft skills,’ in your opinion, makes a great product manager?

Outside of the responsibility that hopefully every professional has of regulating themselves, becoming a better person, and being a great colleague, what makes a great product manager is prioritizing collaboration.

Product management is sometimes viewed as a top-down or lone-wolf role where you go away to strategize and then come back and tell everybody what to do. I’m not a big fan of that model. I’m very focused on collaboration — it’s something that I care about and think a lot about.

I believe that collaboration needs to come from the top. If leaders and executives don’t care about collaboration and aren’t actively modeling it, then it’s really hard to get management and individual contributors to do it. In particular, I encourage product leaders to collaborate publicly, or to “share their LEGOs” as the phrase goes, and to consciously ask other people for their perspectives, even if it won’t or can’t change the decision.

Embodying honesty, humility, and high standards at the office is another big one. It can be hard to be intellectually honest when you have a pressing goal and the data is telling you that you might not reach that goal or that what you’re doing isn’t working well, but it’s really important to be upfront and follow the data regardless. It’s not personal; although, getting over that personal element at work is very hard.

As a product manager, you set the standard for hard work and output quality, and ensure that you don’t go to market until that standard has been met. Those standards can differ between products and phases of iteration, but it’s a big responsibility for product managers nonetheless.

You mentioned following what the data is telling you. That’s more known to be a ‘hard skill’ in the product realm. Can you speak to that as a trait for successful product managers?

Yes — another key trait of a great product manager is making data-driven decisions quickly. A product manager’s role boils down to making decisions, but they need data to do that, so being able to acquire, synthesize, analyze, decide, and eventually articulate those decisions to various audiences quickly is important.

With that said, it’s crucial to stay flexible. Change will come no matter what and product managers must lead these changes instead of trying to force the usual way, the “right” way, or, worst of all, the way that they want to do it.

I’ve worked at some big companies where we put a lot of time and effort into something, and it seemed like there was total buy-in up the ladder, but then the rug got pulled out from underneath us. Though it’s not for nothing, it can feel that way. Regardless, product managers have to be the ones to drive that “what’s next?” mentality. Product managers need to focus on the bigger picture and being a leader, and they need to use data to help get there.

The power of team dynamics

What makes someone not only a good product manager or leader but a good team player?

Team dynamics are underrated. It’s rare for there to be an intentional effort to improve or change an established team dynamic at the team level. It’s common for there to be a company-wide or organization-wide push to do something better, but on a team level — where we spend most of our hours at work — it’s usually less concerted. While different models fit different stages and cultures, trying to force it never works.

I took a lot of lessons early on in my career from leaders who emphasized trust, collaboration, and personal relationships with other team members over raw output. I truly believe that time should be dedicated to getting to know each other, even for teams with tenured members that you might assume know each other well already.

Following through on feedback is a big part of how I like to build my teams. Whether it’s at the individual or organizational levels, or via managerial feedback, feedback cycles are often challenging for everyone involved. Writing, receiving, and sitting with feedback is hard, but what’s the use of going through all that if there’s no follow-up or discussion? When managers and individual contributors work together, ideally publicly, to create feedback-tracking structures, positive change is likely to happen naturally.

As a leader, you’re helping shape the next generation of product and user experience professionals. What are the things that you look for when building a team?

I’m also a big proponent of healthy disagreement and creating spaces and practices that take feelings and conflict out of the equation. So much stress within teams, in my opinion, comes from unvoiced disagreement or disagreement without having data or a counter-idea behind it. As a result, I look for people who are willing to disagree and discuss rather than be angry or turtle up.

It’s hard to figure that out about people when you’re hiring them, but you can create the necessary structures and practices so that people can have healthy disagreements and debate in a way that doesn’t feel personal and scary.