Vanessa Davis is Vice President of Product Management at LegalShield, a legal service software company that has an identity theft protection and reputation management brand, IDShield. She started her career as a practicing lawyer before transitioning into legal tech. Vanessa served in various product leadership roles at LegalZoom, One Legal, and Litera Microsystems before starting at LegalShield.
In our conversation, Vanessa discusses how legal precedent directly challenges the notion of innovation and the importance of striking a balance between a product manager’s split responsibilities: delivering value to customers while also driving business value. She also talks about her experience going through acquisitions at speed and getting involved in them early to stay ahead of challenges.
I practiced law for about four years, and then it wasn’t quite for me. I ended up at a legal tech company because a friend said he thought I might be interested in it. They had some openings for people who wanted to explain how the law worked to non-lawyers — to people who were trying to solve their own legal issues. I really liked it. I felt like I was making a difference in individual people’s lives by helping them figure out their own legal issues.
It’s about seeing where the focus is specifically for this day, this moment. And it’s hard. You need to make time in your schedule to look at big-picture things because it is very easy to get drawn into the fire of the day. There are a million fires. That’s what I try to tell people on my team: it doesn’t mean it’s your fault, but deal with the most important thing in front of you right now. Try and figure out if this fire is the most important thing or if it’s noise.
It’s about carving out enough space in your day, even if it’s by literally having meetings with just yourself so you can block off that time and do big thinking exercises or writing documentation. And it’s also continuing to look at varying time levels. If I solve this thing that is very important for this week, does the thing that’s important for the month or the year not get done? You need to build out those levels of focus and keep time for all.
Ultimately, as product people, we have split responsibilities. We are responsible to the company that employs us and need to bring value. But we also need to do something useful and valuable to our customer base. So how do you balance those two things and make sure what you’re providing value for is not taking away from the other constituency that you owe things to? Finding something valuable on all sides is really the key.
At a prior company, we had a consultancy come in and observe that the valuation of the company wasn’t ever going to go up because we didn’t have any subscriptions. We were a one-and-done kind of shop. To build value and to build ongoing sustainable growth for the company, we had to find something that was recurring revenue. So how would we do that? That is the big problem.
We spent a lot of time talking to customers and trying to figure out how to solve this problem. What are their ongoing needs? What needs to happen over and over again with these individuals and these businesses that we can account for? We found something and decided to test this tiny little thing to make sure we didn’t build it and fail on a big scale. We prepped forward and found this solution that really worked for both our customers and the business. That was a huge win because it sounded so absurd at the beginning.
That’s the thing about legal services. Often, the laws are so specific and so localized that you can test things very locally. You have a very limited dropdown of what’s available in this very specific jurisdiction. Depending on what it is — a city, a county, a state, or, if you’re lucky, it’s federal — it gives you kind of a population to test in. You don’t have to spend the expense of building it out with a group of lawyers doing research because often that’s needed to make things usable in various jurisdictions.
The history of law revolves around not doing anything that people haven’t done before. There’s a whole idea of precedent. The way you do something now is based on how it’s always been done, and that’s how it’s legal. That’s the whole idea of case law. I have to look to the past to make sure it’s been done before so I don’t create a disadvantage for my customers and that I’m within the scope of the law. But that’s the opposite of what you want to do in innovation.
Lawyers as a group are very risk-averse, so innovating for lawyers is very difficult. Take the whole conversation about e-signatures, for example. There was so much debate. Is this legal? No one’s ever done it before. But it’s a squiggle representation as opposed to ink on paper. Then, during COVID, it exploded. All of a sudden, now, everyone’s like, “Of course you can do it.”
There’s a feeling people have about law-related stuff where they feel the same way that lawyers do: if it doesn’t look like it’s always looked like or reflect my existing understanding, is it real law? If you’re a legal document company and you provide something innovative and cool, and it’s a contract in a way, people are like, “That doesn’t look like I expect it to look, so I’m not comfortable with that.” There’s a way that law is supposed to be presented that is very hard to shake. It’s a perception that you have to try and get around or work within to make people comfortable.
That’s a big one. At prior companies, particularly when dealing with forms and things that change with frequency, we had massive amounts of people monitoring those laws to make sure that they had automated changes to those things. And it’s hard.
Particularly as you’re developing something, it’s sort of like tech debt. But it’s law debt. If you need to make a change to account for changes to law, that might jump the queue in terms of priority. It’s just another line of things that you need to keep in mind.
I know some people always divide engineering time to allot some percent for debt. I think you can have that as a framework, but just understand that it flexes up and down. As you’re planning, keep that general approach, but know that there are some weeks when things change.
Quality is always in there, though. People notice those things and that is their perception of your product. If you’re not constantly improving, if you’re letting things sit out there that just don’t work, then that is people’s experience of your product. You have to have time where you’re going in and finding what we call “quality-of-life improvements.” You add time for those as well.
We try to maintain a list of quality-of-life things that you can always dig into if you have extra time.
Feedback comes from everywhere. And it’s funny, it’s both too much of some kind and not enough of the other. We’re in the process of looking for additional software to maintain that list because the list comes from everywhere.
We try to focus it on a single place and then start going through it to see if there are any themes. And as we see that people are saying certain things about this, we try to understand what are the real problems that people are facing in that area. Everyone has a feature request, but are they speaking about a problem that they’re having? What is that problem and is this the best way to solve it? Is this the most important thing we should work on right now? Once we’ve decided it is, let’s talk about different ways we can solve this problem.
We have a D2C funnel, and this is the easiest channel to do tests on because we can surface those tests relatively quickly and get a fair number of people in the door. We can test, is anybody clicking on this? Is anybody interested in this? If we put it at this price, are people more likely to click or less likely to click? Once we have that general understanding, then we can start testing more solutions from a usability perspective.
It’s a tough one. At the prior company I was at, we did something like 20 acquisitions in two years. Acquisition was part of the growth lever of the company. The challenge is, particularly at acquisitions at that speed, that the vetting process doesn’t often include people who are in the trenches. They know the tech stack or how to incorporate it into their day-to-day flows.
You’ve purchased a company in the same vertical, but they’re using entirely different tech stacks. Now you have entirely different engineering teams and two products that are running simultaneously. It’s going to take way more architecture and orchestration to make them work together. It’s a challenge to figure out how to address that. And it depends on how receptive your acquisition team is to hearing that.
As a product person, it’s good to make friends with that team and get involved in things that would integrate with your product. That’ll help you understand where they fit on the roadmap.
That acquisition is not just a plus one, it’s an addition of a huge amount of expense, tech debt, product debt, and a delay of the anticipated roadmap. So you won’t make the achievements that you would initially hope to make on your own progress.
A proactive approach is identifying potential partners or acquisition targets in your space, which shows that you are looking not just at the present of your product, but the future of your product. And then being involved from the beginning in any acquisition. Just try to be in the room, or at least at the forefront of thought when those things are about to happen, so you have some control over it. Will you sway the decision? Maybe, maybe not, but at least you’ll have a chance to articulate any hesitations before it gets dropped in your lap.
Rally bridges the gap between small law firms in small businesses and offers a solution where people can collaborate. They’ve added Spellbook, generative AI contract drafting for small businesses, and were one of the first to incorporate GPT-4 into their software.
Lawyers like it because, for a certain kind of lawyer, they see the potential of it — it cuts down the amount of time they have to do first drafts. It doesn’t replace lawyers, which people have been nervous about with the rise of AI, but helps them do their work more efficiently and practice at the top of their license. It pulls all the information from a bunch of the contracts and provides a credible first draft. Additional iterations happen, conversations happen, but the point is that it gives you this great performance for your first draft and huge efficiencies.
There are a bunch of great members on the board. I have a bunch of experience with consumers and small businesses. With both my legal and consumer-facing backgrounds, I can understand the potential and legal limits of things while also understanding what appeals to a broad consumer or small business base. I get to play both of those cards.
In the product lens, without having to answer them, I get to sit and ask a bunch of questions to the team that’s building stuff. It’s a fun view to be not the one who has to answer those hard questions and just get to raise them.
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