Product Management at Super Scale with Andy Boyd
How to build, grow, and develop product management teams
I sat down with Andy Boyd, Chief Product Officer at Appfire, to talk through his experience building product management from a team of 3 in the early days to a full product team (including PM, Growth, UX, Customer Research and Product Ops). Appfire develops collaboration apps that make work flow better for distributed teams in Atlassian, Microsoft, monday.com and Salesforce. Andy leads product at the company supporting a portfolio that today is over 150m ARR.
Andy shared great advice that he learned firsthand on how to build successful teams, develop people, scale customer feedback (even with active customer installations of over 200,000), and important support that boards/advisors can bring in this process.
Andy’s journey into product management
Tell me about your background. How did you get into product, and how did you find your way to Appfire?
I started in product management (PM) in small/fast growing companies. In 2014, IBM was looking for entrepreneurial PMs to help launch / grow IBM Watson. I won the lottery, I had the opportunity to help bring IBM Watson Developer Cloud to market. Amazing. I held a number of PM leadership positions, including the responsibility to start the first Growth team for IBM Watson. The growth team was very successful which led to me working with other business units, including Cloud and Quantum. Also amazing.
Fast forward to now, I won the lottery again. I have the amazing privilege of leading product management and growth at Appfire. Appfire is unlike any company I’ve worked with, the growth is incredible and the people are amazing. I feel so fortunate to have had these experiences.
Many PMs find their way in through other functions like marketing, engineering or others. My story is the same. I started my career in a small software company where I was responsible for all things digital marketing.
This was a small company so I started going deeper into the product to try to pull levers and improve the business. Turns out, this was “product management”! I loved it. I was hooked. I haven’t looked back.
Appfire found me. I was a keynote speaker for a growth masterclass and Appfire reached out after the session. It didn’t take a lot of convincing. Appfire is really special, not only the business but the people and culture are really unique too. I’m glad Appfire found me, there is something really special here.
Early days at Appfire
What were the early days like after you joined Appfire? Walk me through what product looked like when you got there and the evolution to now?
When I joined Appfire, we had 3 product managers and a lot of apps. We were growing really fast (ie. acquiring more products, bringing in new team members with different levels of maturity in their PM skills). I needed to scale the team really quickly.
I also needed the team to be “customer-centric” PMs, not “project managers,” which is what the PM role looks like in some companies, unfortunately. Project managers execute the work, “tell me if it’s done or not.” Skilled product managers understand the market, customers and the business and then build a product strategy to serve a unique set of customers in a market in which they can win.
I focused on a couple important things:
Develop the PM Team
I focused on developing the team top-down and bottom-up:
Established a PM Leadership Tier: I built a leadership level. Customer-centric PM leaders who will drive the strategy and who will also develop and coach the PM team. Today, we have a solid group of PM leaders across the team.
Developing our awesome people: We had a mix of PMs with different levels of skills and maturity, not all of whom were customer-centric. One of the first things I did was to get access to industry-standard training programs to develop those skills within our team - plus the added bonus of active coaching from their direct manager (ie. point 1, PM Leadership). The majority of our PMs have taken this training. I’m also proud to say that 80%+ of my team has said they have grown their skills here at Appfire. My desire is to get to 100% but this is awesome. People are our most important asset.
Scalable access to customer input
When I started, the PM team had very limited ability to interact with customers - this is inherent to our business but it’s one of the most important factors in a PM’s ability to be successful.
We focused on establishing a customer research function and a mix of tools, techniques and playbooks that the PMs can use to better understand customers. We are well on our way and this continues to scale.
Andy’s advice for founders building product management
What can a founder do to set their first product management hires up for success? What advice would you give?
Success will ultimately depend on targeting a great market, with a winning strategy and executing well. There are a lot of great books on those topics, I’m happy to recommend some, but aside from those things, a few tips:
A) Hire leaders - and do it before you think you need to
The advice is actually for the founder. The mistake is to hire a more junior PM, thinking you can guide the strategy through them while also developing their skills. I don’t blame you, I love developing people, but this can be a trap.
Aligning and leading the team (PM, engineering, etc) to deliver against your strategy is time-consuming, hard work. On top of that, coaching and developing your team is also very time consuming - deceptively time consuming.
Hire a PM leader who can help you both drive your strategy and to develop your team. This will help you scale at the top versus getting too bogged down in details.
Along similar lines, hire leaders before you think you need them. It is so easy to get overloaded but it’s really hard to get back out after you’re there. Get your leadership team in early.
B) Scalable customer input:
The essence of all of the great books on product strategy, product management, innovation, etc is to understand what the customer wants and give that to them. If you don’t have a way to get that customer input, then your number one priority should be to build a scalable method for your PMs to get it. This is the fuel they need to make great product decisions.
Customer feedback includes both input for big market-related questions as well as tactical inputs (e.g. feature inputs, usability studies, etc). Having different levels of granularity allows you to fine-tune your efforts. Build this capability.
PS - Customer research is a science. If your team is not well-versed in how to correctly get this customer input, find experts who can do this. You need access to customer input but you need to perform the research the correct way - otherwise, garbage in, garbage out.
C) Product Ops
There is a lot of operational work to keep things running smoothly as the team continues to scale. This includes things like goal setting, roadmaps, planning and reporting. As a founder, you may be tempted to think you can structure all of this. You probably can but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Establish an ops person (or team) who can help build the product “management system”. An effective product system will enable the team to be more effective and will keep you free to focus on higher-level strategic work.
What should the process of ramping look like for a new product manager? How long should it take, what milestones should there be?
This will always depend on what they are working on, and at what level, but let’s assume it's a PM leader and there are a small handful of PMs in the organization.
I would imagine a general framework like the following:
First quarter in the role
Customer input: Spend time learning the market. Get some time with customers, understand how/why they choose your product.
KPIs: understand the numbers of the business and where to focus first
Team: Build relationships with the PM team, extended stakeholders. This is critical.
Capabilities: Assess capabilities - capacity, skills-gaps, process, gaps.
Second Quarter in the role
Product Plan: At 90 days in, there won’t likely be a major shift in the strategy but the PM leader is starting to identify some focus areas and moving to execute on them.
Team Plan: have an initial plan for how the PM team will start to evolve. Potentially some organizational realignment, likely hiring too.
Operational: The leader has either hired or re-allocated someone who can start to build the product team’s “management system” - goals, planning cadences, artifacts, etc.
Next Two Quarters
Product: starting to see signs of traction and early wins against the product strategy. This is also likely where you might start to see some real shifts in the strategy as customer input and numbers are providing learning against the strategy. If the initial strategy was the wrong one, this is where you would start to evolve based on the learning.
Team: Team is maturing in their abilities, skills - and, if under-resourced, new hires are coming into the organization.
Operational: You can start to see a system forming with clear(er) goals and cadence forming that enables the team to see progress and allows you, the leader, to adjust as needed.
What are early positive indicators that a PM will be successful in their role, and signs that suggest a need to course correct? Any false positives?
Generally speaking, for a PM, the biggest signs within the first 90 days would be:
Team:
In most cases, a PM must lead through influence. This includes their team but it also includes the extended team (engineering, design, marketing, sales). Positive signs would be common language/strategy with key stakeholders (PM team, Eng leadership, Marketing). You should see signs of trust and respect at multiple levels.
The negative is of course the opposite. If the PM leader is dictating “from on high”, you don’t see signs of collaboration across teams, or even worse… distrust… this would be a major red flag.
Product Strategy:
You can’t build a product without understanding the market and customer needs. Positive signs are an understanding of your core market, real insights from real customer conversations. The ability to articulate a high-level value prop of your product and why customers choose you vs competitors.
A big red flag would be no real understanding of the market. Inability to name any important trends. Another red flag would be no real customer interactions, simply repeating what other teams are saying about customers without engaging him/herself with customers. Red flags.
How boards can support product leaders
What are the helpful questions board members can ask of product leaders? Would be great to talk about the right questions for early board meetings as product is getting off on the right foot, and then for post-ramp phase.
Appfire leadership was, and is, very supportive of the principles of good product management. For a new leader coming in, you can help them to be successful by advocating for those things which may not come naturally to non-product people.
For early days, things you can support:
Customer research initiatives: Are there capabilities to help the PM team understand the market and customers? If this is not an in-house function, is there budget for external research?
PM capacity: PM is an irreducible component of a well-functioning product team. Advocate to appropriately staff this important function and to develop the existing team (e.g. training).
Accelerate domain-specific learning: All businesses will have a wide range of strategic options and priorities. It takes time for someone to ramp up and learn. Share great connections, experts within your network to help accelerate learning the domain.
How about the bad questions? Be honest!
We are lucky at Appfire because Appfire leadership is supportive of the product function. The total inverse would be an environment in which leadership says, ‘We only need developers, they can just code and deploy.’ This ignores the market and customer inputs and only focuses on the “building” side of things, countless teams have failed with this approach.