Coffee Is Not Enough
I love origin stories.
In entertainment, an origin story is an account or backstory revealing how a character or group of people become a protagonist or antagonist, and it adds to the overall interest and complexity of a narrative, often giving reasons for their intentions.
- Wikipedia
Origin stories help us understand why a company or person does what they do. Deeply understanding this ‘why’ is a skeleton key for making sense of behavior.
Take SpiderMan. Why does he use his powers to fight crime and stand up for the little guy? He grew up as an orphan, and saw the effect of crime on his own family when his uncle Ben was killed during a burglary. This origin motivates his current decisions and behavior.
What is Product Advisory? What is our mission, and why?
Our Origin Story
When I went to college, I was a double-major in Computer Science and English.
I loved both storytelling and making things with technology. I realized quickly that there was almost no overlap in curriculum, completely divergent career paths, and if I wanted to graduate in less than 6 years I would need to pick one or the other. I chose Computer Science.
When I started working as an Engineer, I was always the person that ended up talking with the ‘business’ or ‘customers’ to understand what they wanted, why, and finding a path to get there. I really enjoyed that, and mentioned it to my manager in a career conversation.
“I don’t know if there is a job for doing that, but I could imagine doing that full time”.
“I don’t think there is”, she said.
A few years later, our product team surprised me - they reached out and suggested that I join them.
As I learned more about the product role, the more I realized that it was exactly what I was looking for: storytelling, understanding why, finding a path, and building solutions with technology.
I joined the product team, and started my product management journey.
Within a few years, I realized that my story was not unique.
I would talk to customers, peers, and community members, and there was a shortage of information about Product Management everywhere and limited information about the reality of the work. People were hungry for information about real experiences.
Because of my own experience being uninformed about product management, I felt compelled to contribute.
I decided to commit to having coffee with people who had interest in product management in my local community. I would spend time almost every week in one-on-ones at coffee shops offering feedback, guidance, and pointers in 60-minute timeboxes.
What I learned was that in many cases coffee was not enough.
When the conversation turned to specific details about how to proceed on people, process, or product I couldn’t offer real guidance, around what to do, where to go, unless I could dig in more.
What does the rest of the team say?
What are the metrics around the product?
What is happening in the market?
What is the mission of the company?
Answering these questions and providing thoughtful guidance did not fit into a 60-minute timebox.
These teams needed more product leadership on the ground than they had.
In many cases, there were product leaders, and they were just overwhelmed with too many things to do. I saw it myself in my own role - there are always more important things to do than I had time for, and fewer senior product leadership skills on my team than I needed.
I was convinced that the solution was to hire more senior product leaders into the team. A head of product, a CPO, a principal product manager, or similar seemed necessary.
It took a few years to learn that there are several critical problems with hiring senior product leadership onto your team.
First, they are very hard to find and expensive to get on your team.
Senior product leaders learn from experiences, and there are only so many that have years of experience in the field. Product Management has changed so much in the past 10 years, there are only so many people who have years of experience with ideas like lean product, design thinking, or product-led growth.
Second, when you need senior leadership, the cost of delay is very high.
It is hard to wait to have a strategy and vision, or to align your leadership around a plan, or to solve critical process issues that slow down value delivery. These kinds of gaps have increasingly long term impacts with each day they remain unfilled.
Third, it often does not make sense to hire an entire full-time senior product leader.
When you have 3 engineers, or you have a head of product who is overwhelmed because of an upcoming funding round, it doesn’t make sense to buy product leadership in bulk. Hiring a full time head of product when the company is 6 people doesn’t make sense.
I felt the pain myself, in trying to find senior product leaders to join me in guiding a hypergrowth product team. I recognized in retrospect the symptoms had been present in product leaders I had reported to throughout my career. I realized that the same pain was likely underlying many of the coffee conversations I have had for years.
This is a goldilocks problem. Coffee is not enough and hiring full-time staff is too much.
I first became aware of a potential ‘just right’ middle path when I met Jon Burns in 2019.
Jon offers fractional leadership services, at his company Modern Product, and offers a middle path to his customers. While I did not have the opportunity to work with Jon, I was intrigued with the idea of this ‘middle path’.
In late 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I needed to take a step back from the intensity of leading product at a hyper-growth company. My goal was to find a great product leadership role where I could contribute to the success of a product and company, and at the same time sustain my new COVID-triggered responsibilities.
I continued my coffee meetings, and I started talking with lots of companies seeking product leadership. I found that many of the companies didn’t need someone like me - not full time, not yet - but they had the same needs: org design, product process, build better product faster.
I had a realization: I had time to do more than have coffee.
The next time someone asked if I could help, I said yes. We talked about what I could do to help. Product Advisory was born in November 2020.
So now:
Product Advisory exists to offer companies flexible options for adding more product leadership to their staff quickly.
Whether it is fractional head of product / CPO, product management, coaching or advisory work, we want to be in the trench with our peers who are working hard to build better products faster and could use a hand.
That’s our origin story.
If you are in need of ‘just enough’ product leadership, let’s have coffee.
