Sandy Huang is Vice President of Product Management at GoodRx. Sandy has worked in tech for most of her career, beginning at small startups such as MusicNow, which was later acquired by AOL, as well as WeddingChannel, which was acquired by The Knot. She then moved on to companies including Shutterfly, Minted, Jive Software, and Flipboard. Most recently, before joining GoodRx, Sandy served as Head of Product at Amazon for five years.
In our conversation, Sandy talks about how leadership styles can flex depending on the size and scale of the organization. She shares the pivotal moment when she decided to switch from being an individual contributor (IC) to a manager and the challenges that came with that. Sandy also discusses how to find your “superpower” — themes of what you personally excel in — and how peer feedback plays a large role in uncovering these strengths.
Culture-wise, one effective leadership principle is having a strong clarity and focus on the mission — not only for the company, but also for the org, for individual teams, and how they ladder up into that North Star. Otherwise, you don’t know where you’re going. Another principle is leading by example. Leadership must model the behavior that they want in the company and its culture. Then there’s transparency, and trusting and empowering the teams. With transparency on why we’re doing certain things, the strategy allows teams to be empowered to act against that.
On the product management side of leadership principles, I’ll draw from Amazon. They have famous leadership principles that are ingrained in everything we did there. One is having product managers who are customer-obsessed. They’re deeply rooted in customer research, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, and deeply understand and empathize with users so they really know what they’re solving for. For companies and products that PMs work on that are zero to one, it is more about understanding the root of the problem for user needs.
Another one for product managers is ownership — having strong ownership end-to-end. It doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily owning every single piece, but that you’ve identified if there is a gap and ensured that everything is done from end to end. The last one I would say for PMs would be having a strong bias for action. Blockers and hurdles come up all the time so bias for action is how product managers take action when things are blocked to get to the result they want.
I’ve been at several companies, from as small as 20 people to large corporations like Amazon and varying sizes in between. I’ve been a generalist and have worked on a number of different products at different stages. A lot of it for me is amending to what stage the business and the product are in.
For example, with 20 people, it was a startup with a lot of ideation. Whereas at other companies, I’ve worked on products that were more mature. In each area in each of those times, I’ve had to understand what is important at that company and then amend myself and how I work to that structure. That’s why I think for someone who is more of a generalist, having broad experience is important to be able to strengthen the muscles to do that.
First and foremost, make sure that you want to be in management because it’s a different skill set. It is not for everyone. If you want to go into that, one gap I’ve seen between IC and management is strategic thinking. That seems to be an area of development and is probably one of the hardest hurdles to go along that route. When you start as a product manager, things can be much more defined. We’re building this, figuring out how we go about building that. As you move up, it transitions more to what should we be doing? It gets very ambiguous.
For those who want to transition, start honing those skills of strategic thinking. You really have to be your own advocate in suggesting things. For example, writing a strategic plan for some initiative. Identify what those things are. And as you move up, there’s more work around stakeholder management and making decisions with a lot of ambiguity. If you have a supportive manager, set yourself with projects and goals in terms of how you would go about it. First exercise it and then demonstrate it.
My path has been interesting in the sense that I started managing pretty early in my career. For several years, I went in and out of being an IC and a manager. And that was purposeful because I very much enjoyed being in IC. I was rolling my sleeves up, getting into the details, and loved shipping great experiences and products.
But I think at the point in my career where I said, “Okay, I really want to focus on managing” was when I understood the scale of impact as a manager. As an individual contributor, you’re contributing to the launch of one area. As a manager, having a breadth of initiatives and working with each of your teams to empower them, that scale was very satisfying to me. It was very challenging but very rewarding. That’s how I went from going back and forth from IC to manager to deciding to commit to management and continue to grow in that way.
I think the challenge is how you learn how to scale yourself. Spending time as an IC, you yourself are doing the things. And then when you have to give parts of it up and ask various folks to do it, that is a transition.
I’ve seen people do it gracefully and not so gracefully, and that was an area where I really sought mentorship. Early on, I thought that I could figure it out myself. But why not have someone who’s recently gone through that transition in the past few years be a sounding board or a mentor? You can skip trial and error and skip ahead a few steps.
I really enjoy empowering my team to achieve, whether that is a launch or achieving a metric. And in that transition from IC where you’re responsible for doing that and then moving to empowering the team, I like that challenge. How do I best set up my team, coach them, and put the right incentives in place to help them achieve those goals?
Earlier in my career, I would reflect on if a project went well and think, “What are some things that I did uniquely? What did I contribute?” I’d reflect on that and see what the themes are. I think, inherently, I knew the things that I was good at. When I was at Amazon, Amazon had a 360 peer review where we call them identifying superpowers specifically. They do that every year and I had one theme that was consistent every single year: customer obsession.
I also had, early on, one thing that showed up that I wasn’t even aware of. When you are inherently good at something, you don’t perceive it as a superpower. I certainly didn’t. That’s interesting when you get anonymous feedback — people can be very transparent. We all should be self-aware, but people may see things that you just don’t even consider yourself. That was enlightening to me, and I thought, “Okay, well, that’s great. How can I do more of that?”
It starts with understanding who you are and what your strengths and superpowers are as a product manager. Obviously, everyone brings different strengths and has different areas of opportunity. It’s important to understand that and look for a role or a company that values your superpowers.
For example, say one of your superpowers is your quantitative ability. If you join a company that doesn’t value that as much, doesn’t have the data set up, or indexes more on qualitative decision-making, then that’s probably not the best fit. Ideally, you’ll find a role and a company where there’s an intersection of what you’re really good at and what you like with what the company values.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about stretching skills. I was very motivated by caring about my product. As a product manager, I really needed to care about that. I didn’t have to be the customer, but cared about an area or specific thing that I wanted to see through.
In terms of the different companies I joined, there were specific reasons for that. For example, I went from small company startups and mid-sized companies to Amazon. I wanted to understand and educate myself on operating at the scale of Amazon. There are very few companies where you can do that. So, I worked on the Alexa side of things for the first few years and then later on the e-commerce shopping side.
Absolutely, work is a big part of people’s lives and it’s an important thing to consider. For example, this is common when people have a baby. A lot of time goes into being a parent. Is that the right time for you to find a role where you have to do a lot of learning, versus a role where you already have expertise, versus time to stretch yourself? I find that to be a very important piece of it. I’ve certainly utilized that for myself in different parts of my career in my stage of life.
When starting a new role or a new project, it’s important to set specific goals — whether they are metrics goals, non-metrics goals, or, ideally, a combination of both — because, without them, it’s hard to measure. For example, if you’re in a new role, at the end of six months there, what would your self-review be? You can write it out. I’ve done that, and it’s a way to have a personal North Star to get to. It’s about setting milestones too. It’s important to have those check-ins so that you can calibrate where you are each step of the way.
Well, the obvious one is the focus on AI and machine learning. That is definitely number one, and there are so many aspects of it. How do you incorporate AI into your products? How do you incorporate AI for personalization and customization? But also, how do you as a PM use AI for your own productivity to save time and be more efficient? That’s a big area.
Another one I would say is multimodality in different modes of interaction in different types of devices. Blurring the lines of voice, touch, and sight. Things like AR/VR where you’re using a device with your voice and touch. We’ve already seen this in the last several years. That will continue to grow, and lines will be blurred.
I joined Chief this year — it’s a network of executive women. As we know, women in executive leadership percentage-wise is not where we’d all like it to be. If you look at women and men in the workforce and how as they move up, women drop out at faster rates, for a multitude of reasons: unconscious bias, family needs, whatever it is. By the time you get to executive leadership, there are just a few women.
Having a group and network of women leaders is very empowering because you’ve shared the same struggles and share a lot of commonalities. At Chief, you get put into a core group with some peers so you can share and have your personal board of directors to talk to. They have events with great speakers. There’s a lot of learning, education, sharing, and networking. It’s been wonderful.
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