The Missing Link Between Great Products and Great Sales, with Heather Inocencio

With Laurier Mandin and Heather Inocencio

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• Heather’s journey from MCI Telecommunications to fractional CPO work (01:52)
• Why product management was misunderstood in the early 90s and the “German to French” translation role (02:30)
• The shift from enterprise to high-growth startups and common optimization gaps (03:45)
• How The Product Consult’s embedded approach differs from traditional consulting (09:16)
• The three-part engagement process: assessment, integration, and successful exit (09:16)
• Identifying the right clients: transformation needs vs. just “butts in seats” (10:30)
• Building product-marketing integration from acquisition through engagement (19:15)
• Overcoming sales team resistance and breaking down departmental silos (23:16)
• The critical role of aligned success metrics across all departments (24:19)
• Product manager-company fit: matching disposition and communication styles (32:11)
• The relief factor: making work easier, not harder, through optimization (36:56)
• One action product leaders can take tomorrow: individual team assessment (36:56)

Episode Transcript:

Laurier: Hey, product people, if you’ve ever wondered why some products seem destined for market success while others struggle, despite being technically brilliant, this episode will connect the dots. Welcome to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about creating and marketing products people truly need. I’m Laurier Mandin, president and lead consultant of Graphos Product.

Building great products is only half the battle. The other half is building them with marketing success baked in from Day One. Too many product teams operate in isolation, creating features customers don’t understand or positioning that marketing can’t sell. Heather Inocencio has cracked the code on building product teams that inherently understand marketing needs. For more than three decades, since the age of 17, she’s been immersed in the product world. Heather went on to transform product organizations at companies like The RealReal, where she drove innovation that grew revenues from $100 million to $400 million, leading to a $1.6 billion IPO. Then at Haute Look where she built the product team from scratch and scaled it to 4 million members and a $270 million acquisition by Nordstrom. Heather now helps retail e-commerce and SaaS brands bridge the critical gap between product development and market success by embedding customer-centric thinking into every stage of the product lifecycle. I’m thrilled to have Heather as today’s guest on Product: Knowledge. Heather, welcome to the show.

Heather: Thank you, Laurier. Happy to be here today.

Laurier: It’s so great to have you. I’ve been really excited about this. Our listeners are deeply interested in the practical side of building successful product teams and how to get it right, which is exactly what you do at The Product Consult. Right?

Heather: Yes. Yes. 

Laurier: Tell us about that. Tell us how your background brought you to starting The Product Consult.

Heather: Sure. So I have a lifelong career in product management. As you mentioned, I started young working with technology. I. That led me to be one of the first people with the title product manager at MCI Telecommunications back in the early nineties. Product management wasn’t very understood at the time, but we knew that there had to be some mediator between the end users that, that were using the products that were being built.

And the engineers that were building them, they spoke different languages. I used to say my job is to translate German to French and French to German. That’s one way to think about it, but even the mental models and the thinking are very different. And so, my role in-house as a product manager was really to make sure that what we were building.

Is what the end users wanted. back then we had long development cycles. It could be six, seven months before idea to something being live. And so seven months later, the needs could be different. So constantly touching base with the users and the engineers to make sure that we’re on track to build something that they are really going to enjoy, that’s going to add value for them.

About 15 years into my in-house career, I made the switch from enterprise to startups. High growth startups was the sweet spot for me. So when a company had just raised around a series A, series B. There’s more pressure, there’s more money involved. You’ve got more board members that are, that are really driving.

We need to see growth, right? They wanna get paid back for their investment. That’s usually when my phone would ring. And, and what I found with most of most startups at that stage was they had a product management function, but it wasn’t optimized at all. It had probably been the founder leading product management.

And so while marketing and finance and customer support those. Departments were rocking and rolling. But product management, engineering, and eventually what became user experience design, those always felt less optimized than the other departments to the people that would call me. And so it, you know, we can be odd birds.

Those of us that work in engineering and product management and product management itself is extremely misunderstood at a lot of the companies I’ve worked for. And so product people, we wanna show up. We want to be strategic, we want to be thought leading. We want to represent the voice of the customer while connecting the work that we do.

Back to the real business value that we’re creating. And companies I’ve seen too often hire. Product managers build a product team but don’t know how to create the space for that product team to truly be successful and add all of the value that it can. And there’s often this moment of tension where the executives at the top of the company believe they know what we should be building.

And the product managers are expected to just get that stuff done. And so the voice of the customer gets lost in that process, as does actually tying the work that we do. Back to how we’re moving the needle for business metrics. So I did this for the second 15 years of my in-house career working with high growth startups.

I was often the first seasoned product leader that was hired. So I was inheriting teams that were. A mess in various ways, and my job was to get that team organized, focused, moving in the same direction. Embedded tightly with our engineers and with our designers and building relationships across the company so that we could get support for the roadmaps we were building evangelize why the work that we’re doing is important.

And so I did that over and over at startups until it started to feel a little bit like Groundhog Day. Different set of actors, but same basic challenges and I. Got to a point in my career where I realized I can do this and I, I can help more than one company at a time. So I started doing fractional chief product officer work.

I. Back before fractional was really an understood concept. It just means part-time, right? It’s a fraction of a full-time employee. So I was doing fractional product work, helping multiple companies, but I had been germinating this idea for about 15 years at that point of having a company of product managers that go out and help clients.

And while we show up in an embedded hands-on way doing product management side by side with whatever existing in-house team they have. We’re also leveling up that product team, and we are informing those that run the organization around insights. So 30, 60, 90 day observations of here’s what we’re seeing, here are the opportunities to do better, and we’re really trying to create the space for product managers to.

Have the time to talk to the customers and hear what the customers want. Two, have data dashboards so that they understand the work that we’re doing here. Here’s how it’s moving the needle. So I grew up working side by side with engineers. I reported to a CTO for the first maybe decade or so of my career.

Then we saw this industry shift where product management MO was moved under marketing. I think there was this idea across industries that tech was driving too many of the decisions and we needed more of the voice of the customer. So then I reported to CMOs for many years. I. Then this new role of chief product officer came out and I remember giggling when I first heard the title CPO because I instantly thought of C3PO.

So I’m a little bit of a nerd in that area. But it sounded, it sounded fake. It didn’t sound real to me. And what I love that I’ve seen now is product management on its own as its own pillar within a company. Equally partnered with marketing and engineering. And then in some companies you have a design officer at the top as well.

In other cases, design rolls up under either product or marketing. I. But understanding how often I see product management not done well. So the product managers aren’t happy with their roles. They don’t feel that they’re empowered or being given the room to be empowered. And the company feels that the product management team is a cost center not a contributor to the top line in preserving the bottom line.

And so I wanna change that and I, I wanna change it with as many companies as I can. And I decided to build my company so that we’ve got. Product managers at the company. We have weekly team meetings. We level each other up. We share knowledge and new information, and we bring, we infuse this, this outside perspective and point of view with our clients.

So our clients are getting a breath of fresh air, but at the same time via someone who is hands-on, embedded side by side with the PMs doing the work.

Laurier: You’ve said a number of things in there that are, are really intriguing to me, but one of the ones, some of our listeners might have the hardest time envisioning is how you come into such an important central role where you’re the conduit between the customer and the team members and, the executive team, all of these people, and you come in on a fractional level.

What does it look like for you to, first of all, identify that this is going to be a good fit for you because it’s such an important and central role, and then introduce yourself and your team members to embed. To do the work you’ve gotta do and then recognize that it’s time to extract yourself, so to do a handoff from there so that everybody is able to not fall on their faces without you once you leave that important role.

Heather: I am so glad you asked that question. A three-part question is how I see it. So, you know, how do we decide we’re going to engage? How do we then plug in, get engaged so that we can do great work? And then how do we exit? And I. We don’t leave companies with a playbook and then walk away. So I have a couple of key thoughts that help shape this company from the very beginning.

And one is we are not outside consultants that come in to observe write out a playbook for how they can do better maybe get some of that done and then walk away. I’ve been in-house at companies too often where consultancies and agencies come in. And they give us great ideas and everyone’s excited and they leave.

And within four to eight weeks, we’re back to doing things the way we were before. So part of my thesis was that we can be more effective with clients if we show up in an embedded hands-on way and are doing work from the beginning, not just observing and giving a playbook for how to move forward.

The companies that we work with. The way that I think about who I would work with and I have turned down new business before when I didn’t feel it was a good fit. So we’re looking for clients who are going through some type of transformation or transition. It could be I. We feel like we’ve hit a glass ceiling in our growth and we want to grow more.

It could be every other department at the company feels like it’s rocking and rolling, but product and engineering, I’m not sure. I feel they’re doing the, the great, the greatest things and delivering the most value that they can. It could be a company that is losing product managers. We’ve had quite a few of these where PMs are quitting because they’re unhappy with the culture.

And so they need to get PMs in there to do the work, but also fix what’s going on there. And it could be companies that are just experiencing high growth. And hiring in-house FTEs, full-time employees takes time, interviews, there’s costs, there’s risk. So with our company, we can plug in quickly and start doing work right away and stay with them for years in some cases.

So that’s how I look at companies is do they have the pain points that we solve? Are they in need? I don’t like to sell my services. I have had a situation for five years that. Companies call me when they say, I hear you can help. We have a problem and I believe your company can help. And so I really want it to be that we’re showing up to deliver value and that their problems are aligned with what we can, what we can fix.

I am also looking for companies where the leadership at that company depending on the size of the company, that can be a few people or many people are open to being influenced about doing things differently. So if they’re calling with pain they’ve gotta demonstrate to me that they’re open for feedback and maybe changing some things up a little bit in how they operate.

Once we know that there’s a good fit on both sides, we’re right for the client. The client wants to work with us. We have an onboarding process that we follow. We start collecting information ahead of the engagement start date. And so we have templates we ask the client, as you’re able to give us as much information as you can and we walk them through specifically what’s helpful to know we’ll also happily hop on calls with them and help them get that filled out so our person is showing up on day one.

Having already learned quite a bit about the business and what’s going on under, under the, under the hood. And then it’s the, you know, we’re not always al many of our engagements. Our people are full time. They’re just not a full-time employee. They’re a full-time contractor. And, and so by showing up, being present, being in the team, meetings with the company expressing that to the client, what their success looks like and what we’re working toward, it’s very natural. 

It feels very organic, that it’s just like you’ve added kind of a superpowered product manager for your team that really cares about that company, that team, that client we take on the company’s email address. So, our PMs having, and we’ve had clients tell us they forget that our people are out of house because we’re so embedded with them.

We work with the clients until we get to a, and it’s usually, it feels very natural when we understand it’s probably time for us to start rolling off. They can spread their wings, leave the nest, if you will. And there are things that I look for specifically I look for does product management and engineering and UX design, which is usually that triad that you have.

Do those people, do those teams feel well integrated across the company? Have we opened up. Conversations and communication. Do other departments feel that they’re being heard by product design and engineering? Are the product managers and engineers able to predictably understand? What their velocity looks like.

So maybe they work in two weeks sprints, maybe they work in some other cycle, but how good are they? How accurate are, are they at identifying this is the amount of work we’re gonna get done in this time period, and then delivering that work and getting it done. I also wanna make sure that. Success is being identified upfront ahead of doing work.

So when we do this work, we roll this stuff out to our customers. What does success look like? Is there a percentage uptick we wanna see on top line revenue or order values, or I. Lifetime engagement or repetition in the company or the clients coming back to us. We trying to boost referrals. We want our clients to love us so much that they’re telling other people about us and referring other customers.

And so I look to make sure that it feels like generally a well-oiled machine. And what that means to me is. They have great relationships across the company. There is predictability in how they work. They feel empowered. They’re bringing in new ideas and information based on both customer feedback, market research and data analysis.

Yeah. And, and, and it feels like they can really stand on their own now and grow forward together and the executive support the culture that we’ve built. And in some cases, we’ve helped companies hire their next in-house product manager will stay on while they build out their in-house team.

In some cases, our clients like to keep a hybrid team, so they keep 70% of their in-house people, but they still want a third of their team to be from The Product Consult. Because we’re bringing in those outside ideas. So, when we exit, we make sure that they’re ready to stand on their own again.

That exit might be that we stick around for a while and. Yeah, that there’s understanding and satisfaction amongst the executives of the company that we now believe our product management and engineering team are delivering the right things. And I know we’re gonna talk a bit about how product management and product marketing work together because that’s critical.

You can’t build a great product and not have it marketed well, and you can’t spend a lot of effort marketing something if the great product isn’t there to deliver. 

Laurier: You’re really teaching these entire teams new skills of how to interoperate and how to be attentive to really important things that, they probably wouldn’t have discovered on their own.

And that’s one of the things that clearly you bring is the ability to train. To orchestrate, to inspire. It’s a whole variety of skill sets that are essential. you know, you’re not just the training wheels on the bike, you are this capable carrying instructor that comes in and sets up this new rider to understand the physics of riding a bike and to understand the rules of safety. to be able to fully operate as an expert at what they’re doing, and then you give them the push off and watch how they go, and you’re able to come back in and, and guide them. If that wasn’t enough, it wasn’t securing for them as a safe and confident takeoff. So it’s all of those things together where I think people might underestimate what it is that you’re there to do, that you’re not just kind of there to prop up the organization or to just kind of nudge it through a tough stretch.

But essentially, you’re there to help them construct. Something scalable, something highly functional, something competitive within what they’re doing. Also, to create a mindset that’s very customer oriented. I love how you talk about not just embedding yourself within the company itself, but getting to become a user of the product and to interview actual paying customers to understand, we talk about voice of customer, but this is. Also understanding mindset of customer and understanding, you know, needs and pain and the things that, that drive customers. It’s very complicated. It’s not just something, a survey answers, it’s really understanding this full cross section and everything you do is so multi-dimensional that way.

Bringing in a true expert with the kind of experience that you and your team have is unique You can’t just bring in somebody who decided to become a fractional CMO or CPO after working somewhere for a year or two, and they just wanted the independence, so that’s why they’re doing it.

You’re doing this because you, you have this rare expertise that is really very hard to find. There aren’t that many people with the kind of, not just experience you have, but the ability At an overall organization that’s so complex and so different from any other company on earth and to figure out what it needs. So with all of that, let’s talk about this other complicated world of marketing, which is what my team and I work on. We create Go-to-Market Roadmaps for our clients that are not to be confused with a product roadmap, which is, about creating an engineering and, all of the other things that go on with the internal teams, at a product organization. But when it comes time to, create positioning and marketing for that company, that’s a whole other thing that’s very closely related, but how do you bring those together? 

Heather: I think of it as in product management and engineering. We’re building the things, right? Product’s, main role, product management’s main role is to make sure we’re building the right things at the right time in the right way. Not over-engineering it, but delivering the value that our customers want in a way that aligns to moving the needle from the business.

So, we’re building, right? We’re building things. Well, you can build a great product, but if it’s not marketed well, it won’t matter. So. And you can have some great marketing activities. I won’t even say campaigns because marketing extends so much beyond just a campaign. But you can have great marketing campaigns, great marketing activities, but if the product isn’t delivering what the customer wants, then it, it doesn’t work.

It falls apart. So. Product management, marketing for me, were two sides of a coin, right? And I think about marketing as there’s acquisition marketing efforts. We’re trying to acquire new customers. And so that journey starts from, for the, for the customer, it starts from the first time they ever hear of a company.

So that could be an ad, it could be through a friend. They see a billboard; they get a flyer in the mail. The first time they hear about that company all the way through. They’re interested, they have a need or a desire, so they explore the company, right? Everything that they’re touching at that point is produced by marketing.

So whether it be materials or brochures or more information, or I’m getting to have a chat with someone at the company and ask questions. Marketing is really driving that conversation. So now the customer is interested. They’ve decided, yes, I wanna work with this company. They wanna sign up, they want to purchase, they want to, whatever that first action is.

Marketing is driving that end user to that place where they can make that purchase or sign up for an account or buy a license. And so there’s a landing page usually. We’ll see how websites change with AI now, and conversational search. But that landing page, what the customer sees when they begin to sign up is where you see the tactical efforts of marketing and product management really start to intersect.

So, we should be talking, we should be strategizing together throughout all of this all of these touch points in the early customer journey. But when that customer is now taken to a webpage and they’re gonna interact, that’s where you’ve got product management working with engineering to build that thing.

And so making sure that the message that the customer wants to hear, whatever was that value that they see that they wanna get from this company, that messaging is echoed through their journey from the first touch point all the way through. Now I’m signing up. I’m maybe giving you my name and email address.

I’m making a purchase on your website. And so if we can carry whatever that unique message was that drew that customer in all the way through their journey then they’re seeing consistency, which is what people expect now. They’re, they’re expecting our ai advances to carry them uniquely through the journey.

And marketing is thinking a lot about that. So there’s that acquisition marketing, what big campaigns are we doing? Are we gonna do some big TikTok event and try to sell $2 million worth of product in one day? Which I was just reading about a company that did that. It’s pretty wild. So it’s ac acquiring new customers top of funnel.

Now we have customers, they’ve engaged with us at least once. Now we have engagement marketing. So how are we making sure that we’re talking to the customer with messages they wanna hear, giving them value and driving them back to want to interact with us? And that engagement marketing, again, there are tactical pieces of work where marketing and product management and engineering have to pull together.

So, a company may reach out to one of its customers and say, Hey, we haven’t seen you in six weeks. We think you might be needing more of this thing. Click here to come and engage with us to get more of that thing or explore your options and they’re, that customer is gonna be driven to something that marketing, product management and engineering have built together.

Laurier: And there’s also the component of sales, which I find is a very tricky one too, especially when you’re coming into. An existing company where the silos exist and they can have these very thick walls and very often the people within them. If you have an existing sales team, for example, you can work with marketing to craft Great positioning and to create all this wonderful messaging, but to get the sales team who has their habits and their patterns and they’re often very much creatures of habit to use and stick with and believe in the new positioning and messaging. I often find there’s a lot of resistance from executive team members and sometimes there are some. Really big challenges to be overcome especially if you’re somebody who came in from outside in this role that people recognize. They know, that you’re kind of an outsider and you’re gonna come and go. There can be a mentality of they just gotta wait this out and then they can go back to their, their old habits that. Maybe accommodated laziness better. Maybe it’s just what they know and they feel that’s the real them. How do you overcome that? this kind of invisible, unspoken barrier that you see it and nobody talks about it. 

Heather: That’s a good point. I think the, the main way that we help. Really solve this at a systemic level for a company so that the success that they’re seeing when we’re working with them continues long after we’re gone. A big part of it is opening up conversations, so getting people talking, getting people talking, honestly.

So, you gotta step back a little bit earlier than that. How do you make sure it’s a safe place for people to communicate with one another? I also like to look at success metrics. So if you’ve got a salesperson and their success is measured this way, they’re gonna do everything to create that outcome.

If you’ve got a marketing person, a product person, A CTO, they have different success metrics. If those don’t align at the company level. It’s always gonna be problematic. And too often I see that the, the head of sales and the head of marketing and the head of engineering and the head of product, they come up with their own ways.

They’re gonna determine success for the people on their teams. And they’re not collaborating together to say, well, are we creating? A contentious environment here, or are we creating a harmonious environment where all of our departments are moving forward toward the same goals now? Exactly. What does that look like?

How do we accomplish those goals if they are unified across the different departments? That’s where you get fun conversations. And I think if people have a safe environment where they can show up to a meeting and you can have your sales person, your marketing, your engineering, your product your design, if you’ve got a strong design, you get everyone together.

And you talk through it. So, a lot of it is really building relationships across departments within a company. And we help facilitate that. We help make sure that these relationships are being built, trust is being built. And we do that in a number of ways. We do it by showing up in a way that people know we have their back.

Right. We have everyone’s back. We’re not gonna say one thing in one meeting, and then when engineering isn’t there, have a different conversation, right? We’re gonna get in the heads of all of the different departments, understand what keeps them up at night, what are they seeking to accomplish, and we’re gonna speak for that and represent that.

So, we demonstrate by doing ourselves. And then often again, there’s opportunity to open up conversations around are we all actually aligned and working towards the same things, or is there a competition here inherently because of how the executive team has structured our job functions. So, our goal is really to build a great product culture at a company.

Product touches almost every department within a company. It’s one of the few roles at a company that really touches everything. And so by being in that product role, coming in and opening up those conversations, building relationships, building trust, and that takes time. It can be tedious and it can be frustrating, and you can think you’re.

Building a great relationship with one person and then find out later through someone else that maybe they’re not really telling you exactly what they’re thinking and feeling. So, you gotta just keep at it, keep showing up with trust, with empathy, hearing each other, and then enabling those departments to hear each other as well.

So, one thing I always look at is, does the product management team, the merchandising team, if you’ve got a merch team and you’re selling physical product and the engineering team, do they talk. Do they know what goes on in each other’s minds? Do they know what keeps each other up at night? And if not, I simply facilitate a regular meeting cadence where we talk about.

Well, what’s keeping you up at night this week? What’s a great accomplishment you’ve had that you’re proud to share with the rest of us? And this empathy that I see departments build for other departments within the company is phenomenal. And that does stick, that does last. And so I think about regular meetings, regular conversations.

And then you can revisit the cadence, right? Do they need to be the soft and this frequent? But once you’ve opened that up and folks really do trust each other, they have empathy for each other. They understand why engineering is trusting about this, but merch is trusting about this and marketing just had a big release and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

They can care about each other then that does last.

Laurier: I think some of the key words you said there are listening and demonstrating, right? and listening is really important. So, you’re able to pick up on what’s going on and demonstrating is how, not through just what you say, but through what people are seeing you doing and seeing who you show up as those two things combined build your credibility and show the people You were truly there for them to help them all get to what their vision of success is. 

So, you’re listening to find out what that vision looks like to them. And then you’re demonstrating, through empathy, through your skills, your capability, and what you’re able to execute that you’re capable and competent and at the same time you’re demonstrating that what you talked about last month is tied to what we’re doing this month and beyond the plan that you’re working on building takes into consideration all the stuff you’ve been listening to up until that point, and then people see demonstrated. they’ve been heard. you’ve pulled the value out of them and now you’re building that into the plan going forward. 

So, for all the teams that you’re working on gluing together those become really, really important to get everybody to that next level of success, which is, really why you’re there in the first place there’s another level of success that that organization wants, they need someone who’s got a different set of skills. That can get them to that next level from where they are? 

Heather: It can be helpful. That we’re not in-house employees, we’re not getting mired in the company politics. We’re not competing with our peers for that next promotion. We can really show up, right? I’m bushy-tailed every day because at the end of the day, our team comes back together and we talk about what’s going on, how can we support each other with the work that we’re doing at our clients.

And so I think in a way, not being in-house, even though again, our clients tell us they, they feel like we’re in-house with but not being in-house gives us that advantage that. Others can trust a little more easily. If we first show up and listen. We really hear them. We understand what’s going on in their world.

And then we demonstrate bringing different teams together. But they know that we don’t. We’re not here to compete. We really are just here to help your company, your teams, your people work more harmoniously. And, you know, a hundred percent of our clients have extended their engagements with us.

I will say this doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve been with some of our clients for years. It takes it, it takes a while to build and continue to build relationships, but getting the great work done together, really, I. I think it all starts with do you have good relationships, whether it’s trust and there is respect them and there is gratitude for the work each other is doing and there is understanding across the board.

And yes, building that for an in-house client, I mean, that’s the role of your in-house product person anyway, but it’s a lot when you’re in-house. I think it’s a lot easier when you’re, when you’re not in-house to build trust. Especially when you demonstrate you’re gonna stay around as long as it’s needed to make sure that this is really internalized by the company. But no competition. We really are just here to help. 

Laurier: My listeners have been hearing for years about product-market fit, and we talk about that in a lot of our episodes. But you’ve got this thing called product manager-company fit, which is essentially how well your team members fit with the place that you’re looking to embed them in. How do you look at the characteristics of an organization when you don’t necessarily know it inside and out yet, and it’s user base and understand if it’s going to be, if you’re gonna have product manager-company fit, and if you have a good chance of reaching that success. Because some organizations there are factors in them.

it could be leadership team, it could be the structure. There can be kind of insurmountable things that are just going to make your work, if not impossible, unpleasant, and you may not know those things until you’re inside of them in some cases. What do you ask a prospective client to let you see in order for you to be able to tell if you’re going to have that kind of fit? 

Heather: I do look for, signs from the people that are calling us and I’m having the initial discovery conversations with, are they expressing an attitude of openness? are they teachable? Are they willing to maybe learn some new things? I have heard some clients, and these would be the ones that I, turned down that really just wanted a butt in a seat to get work done, and there was not a signal that there was like, appreciation for the value that that person brought.

they really just needed like a staffing firm to help them. And because we are so focused on leveling up the entire client’s organization not just within product management, but also across the board, I wanna know that, that they’re gonna be an open partner and willing to maybe hear some new feedback and some new ideas.

I look for, obviously how much domain expertise is needed. So there are certain domains where you really wanna have a product manager that has worked in that domain extensively. Other domains, product management skills are very transferable. And so I consider that I consider the specific work that needs to get done.

Are there certain technologies that the product manager should have experience with and be familiar with? So I look at that, the skills and the tactical level. I. And I look at the seniority level. So, what does this customer need from us? What level of of career seniority is gonna be the right person to place with them?

Do they need someone who’s gonna come in and really influence across the executive team? Do they want someone that might even join them occasionally in board meetings, or do they need a, you know, mid-level? I see individual contributor level product manager who’s just plugging in arm, in arm with the PMs around them and getting work done in any of those cases.

We’re always looking to how we can level up the product organization and therefore the whole organization. But those are the main things I look at. Then there are also. Time zone, is that a factor? Price point, obviously. And probably the biggest thing that I’m looking for as I’m having discovery calls with these potential new clients, what type of disposition I.

Of the product manager is going to work well in this company’s culture and be able to be effective. Because while we have different tactical skills and different technical skills and we solve different problems we all have different personalities and how we communicate how we listen and sometimes even how rapidly someone communicates If I am meeting with a client and everyone that I meet with talks slowly.

And with intention and they really listen and they pause before an right. That’s one style of conversation. I’ve worked with some clients where everyone’s a fast talker and we’re going, going, going, and so I’ve gotta consider the disposition of the product manager too, and are they going to be able to be effective?

Are they gonna be welcomed into that culture?

Laurier: Yes. And does everybody have time for this too? Because I find that’s another thing is you have the very slow moving or they’re very fast and sometimes it’s like nobody in the company seems to have time to do the things that they’ve gotta do. And that can sometimes change if they realize what they’re going to be doing with you has value. But sometimes it’s just. The people don’t want to allow the mental time for something else that’s really important. So, I think being able to look at, the factors of do they value what we’re going to do for them enough that they’re going to appreciate the effort we’re gonna put in.

’cause we’re gonna put everything we’ve got into this engagement, so are they going to value what we’re gonna do enough and not just. Think of it as a phase or something we’re trying to get through. And I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about too, is that this isn’t something to get through with you.

It’s to rise above where they have been. And everybody’s gonna have to elevate their game in order to take this organization to that next level. So you’re gauging with them, are they ready to take this on?

Is everybody ready for something more challenging than what they may have been doing up until this point. Even with a start-up, you know, everybody’s working their tail off already, they think, but sometimes the reason you’re coming in is there’s probably ruts, there’s probably inefficiencies.

There’s probably a lack of vision that you’ve got to overcome with this group. So I think there’s probably less obvious signals are the things that if you hadn’t been doing this as much as you have, you might overlook and think, well, I can whip anybody into shape. you can, but you can only take on so many different engagements in your career. So you have to pick and choose at this point. And for leaders who are looking at bringing in a team like yours, they’ve got to be ready for that kind of commitment. They’ve got to be ready for the next level. And what it’s going to take. 

For the product leaders who are listening right now, what is one action that they could take tomorrow to create space for a highly effective product manager to come into their organization like you or someone from your team, and really have the kind of impact that you want to have for them.

Heather: A good step would be to deeply understand at an individual level what the state of their current product management team is. So if they have five or 25 product managers do they, have they done that individual assessment of each product manager? Looking at their alignment with their skillset and the work they’re expected to do, their commitment to the company, their enthusiasm their disposition.

Their effectiveness, right? And, and getting a sense across their team of where is my team now? Do I have some stronger players and some other players that have opportunities to grow? Is everyone aligned well, right? Are we giving the right work to the right product? People that they care about, that they’re gonna do a great job with?

And if that product leader does that rough analysis of the individuals on their team, they will. No more clearly and be able to communicate more succinctly. These are our, as a team, these are our biggest opportunities for growth and taking ourselves to the next level. So it’s really helpful when the product leader has a good handle on what’s going on today and has a, a good understanding of where their opportunities for growth are.

Now once we get in there, we always find things that they hadn’t predicted, they hadn’t expected, they hadn’t understood before. And, and one slight shift I would make to the mental model of us joining a company I. We are there to make work less challenging, not more challenging. So often when a product management team is struggling it’s not because they’re not working hard enough, it’s because they aren’t necessarily working in the most optimized ways and by introducing new ways of thinking.

New models that we follow and how we produce work doing scrappy customer discovery instead of long, drawn-out research efforts. There are ways that we can tweak the how that they become more effective. But it feels easier and less stressful. And so, so that’s our goal. And, and I think it should feel like, wow, we’re getting relieved.

So we did some of our own research with our customer base after a couple years in business. And relieved was the most, the highest emotional sentiment that was expressed is once we were there and they saw what we were doing to enable them to be better to help, help get more work done, but also to up their game.

They felt a sense of relief. Wow. I picked the right partner in, in The Product Consult and I can see now where we were getting stuck before and why things felt sticky or hard or just not optimized. And so we can, we can kind of breathe some fresh air into things and hopefully lighten, lighten up that stress load a bit while.

Leveling up the team and what they’re doing, so they’re getting more recognition from across the company because their results are better. But it should feel easier after they’ve been with us for a while. 

Laurier: Absolutely, you’re coming in generally to create relief. You’re coming in because there is a problem. There’s something that isn’t as good as it could be. everybody, every professional wants to excel. They want to reach whatever these goals are that they have personally and for the company and why they’re there in the first place.

So, if you’re there to truly help them to get to these goals, to hit this new level of career success, to create company success. that is the Holy Grail for them as professionals. That’s what they want in, in their professional career right now. one of the most valuable things anyone can introduce to a company is someone who is, the catalyst and, empowerment engine that can bring the kind of growth that the company needs at this point.

Heather: Mm-hmm. I love that. And I, I love seeing the product leaders that we work with begin to soar even more in their careers. Feel that their careers are taking off a little bit more, that they are more confident that they are running a more effective team that is delivering demonstrable results that are being measured and the rest of the company becomes aware and they see, they, the rest of the company sees the change, the improvement in the PM team and that product leader.

When, when I see product leaders gain more confidence and be able to just. Deliver more clearly, more succinctly, run their team with confidence that that’s really what fires me up.

Laurier: Yeah, you’re seeing your baby get up and do the things that you knew were possible all along, right? It’s that almost parental pride that you get in witnessing that you’ve caused the success you want. Obviously, you want to come in and succeed personally at what you’re doing, but that only happens through getting this organization to succeed in the stuff that it brought you in to do in the first place.

Heather: Correct. Yes. I was surprised at how much advising, coaching, being a friend and a confidant I do for the product leaders at the companies we work with, and for the CEOs, when it’s a smaller company, so while the folks from my team are in there doing all the work we just described I am a sounding board, a best friend, a coach, a mentor and advisor to the product leaders.

And I don’t charge separately for that. That’s just baked into when they work with us. So, I’m available as needed and I’ve built some great friendships through it and seeing some product leaders go on to get promotions and continue to have great careers. And so it’s very, very rewarding.

Laurier: That’s it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and my conversation with Heather Inocencio, founder of The Product Consult. Find out more about Heather’s work at theproductconsult.com and connect with her on LinkedIn. You’ll find links in the show notes. Be sure to also visit graphosproduct.com where you’ll find all the podcast episodes with transcripts, and get insights from our blog. And you can subscribe to my daily emails or buy “I need That” at LMandin.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Laurier Mandin.