In-house product management vs. external consulting

Welcome everyone to the Product Bakery Podcast. I'm here today as usual with my friend and co-host Christian and today I quickly wanted to discuss a topic that's a little bit like on top of my mind. But before we jump into the discussion, as usual, I just wanted to point you in the direction of our website where we always post the latest episodes with a short transcription as well as the minutes of the episodes. So you can also make sure that you find whatever is most relevant for you. And I would ask you all to leave your questions in the comments. If you want to follow up on something, it's also something that our speakers look at so you can interact with them directly. And if you like it, and this is very important for us to keep growing the podcast and to keep also pushing forward with the podcast, feel free to follow us and share it with everyone in the network where you think the episode might be relevant. So with this said, hi Christian. Hi Alex. How are you doing? I'm doing good. It's weekend time, right? Holiday, yeah. We're recording at the public holiday. Exactly. It's an interesting holiday. It's the day, the International Women's Day, which is literally a public holiday. Nobody works. Except us. Let's celebrate this. Yeah, but product bakery is not really working. Whenever you love what you do, it doesn't feel like work. So I'm 365 days a year on vacation. Same here. Cool. Christian, we talked about this already some weeks ago. I did change job. I moved back into working as head of design in-house for a product company here in Berlin. For everyone, like as a refresher, I was working last year in consulting. I was working for Bain & Company, which is a management consulting firm. And prior to that, I was also head of design of a fintech here in Berlin, which was called SumUp. That was also where I met Christian as product manager there. And Christian is working still as a freelance consultant coach for all sorts of different companies. So Christian, what I thought might be very interesting is to touch a little bit like on the topic and the differences between in-house work, agency work, consulting work. And knowing also you're very vocal about it, that you will never go back to an in-house job. I thought, who is a better person to talk to than you to also understand a little bit what it is that you like so much about the independent consultant and coach job? First of all, when I said that I will never go back working as an employee, it's more like a personal freedom thingy. So it's not directly related to product management, but yeah, interesting topic. And there's already this triangle of agency, consultancy, and then in-house. And yeah, I think everything has its pros and its cons. I think maybe we start at the beginning where a company is and what a company maybe needs at a certain stage. So it's definitely worth, or it's definitely important to build up a strong product team, but on the other end, if you're an early startup, but it can never be a bad thing to get help from the outside. And I think it's always worth to have a strong partner inside. For example, let's say you are a 10 people booth or let's say 20 people. So it's good to have someone with experience, whether as a interim VP something, or as a coach who asks the right questions or also teaches and educates people to ask the right questions, for example. And on the other hand, you then have these agencies, which I believe looking at our last conversation with Andrea, HR 42 as a bigger firm that comes in and helps with streamlining processes, doing coaching on a bigger scale, as well as looking at the company culture. And then it's important to have this core product team that is not only working on the product that's also supporting the company culture, driving change, and is always in the center of everything that is happening inside the company. You have always the product team that is usually involved in almost every topic. And it's very important to have a strong team there. But so what you're saying is that anyway, these three kind of parties should play together. But what I'm curious, what I am curious of is, especially for product managers and designers or developers and so on out there, what are like the key differences in terms of working? Like how do I find what works best for me? That's a good question. If you're very passionate working on a product directly and owning it and building it up from scratch or bringing it to the next level, I believe the product manager job or the product designer job or whatever product title it is, is definitely the right thing for you as a full-time employee. That's the very first thing. And we talked about it, right? So some people love being individual contributors. Some of them love to climb up the ladder and lead people and build up their own team that works on that product as well. So you need to figure out for yourself if you are passionate about the thing you're building. And I think we just published today, today it's Monday the 8th, this Instagram post that also said, use what you build, use the product that you build. And yeah, if you're committed and if you like working on projects, I recommend people to work as individual contributor or leader in a company. So that's the first thing. If you like to stick to something, if you like to see something growing, then that's absolutely the right thing for you. If you are more adventurous like I am, so if you like to take risks, because being an independent coach or consultant is also like a risk because you always need to get customers who want to work with you at one point. And on the other hand, you have a lot of context switching. I think I'm happy to hear what your experiences were at Bain, but it's sometimes a tough job because not only from the workload, I think this is something that is manageable, but you are always between many parties and you look through those things with your own glasses and with your own eyes, right? So you don't know the company culture directly. You don't know if people are lying or if they're telling you the truth or if the circumstances that they believe they are the right ones. So it's a tough job to stay neutral and to help finding the right solution. So I believe that's definitely one biggie here. But bottom line, if people call a coach or a consultant in-house, they call them because they want them to be honest and they want to, I mean, usually it's triggered by some problems or by maybe looking at the future and trying to avoid certain problems. The session with Andrea was really good. So I guess it's a work that allows you actually to come in, bring in this perspective and be super honest also to people about what works and what doesn't. Yes. A side effect or another part of the job itself is also to train and educate people. In order to be able to do that, you need to have a certain level of experience. It's very helpful if you have specific skills that you don't learn as a product manager, but that you have to learn as a coach. So asking questions or asking good questions is not something that you are born with. It's something you can train, that you can learn by getting coached at one point, which I'm getting. For example, I'm taking personal coaching as well. And on the other hand, also reading books. But I would also like to hear from you, Alex, when you were working as a consultant, what were the key points from your point of view that motivated you doing that instead of working as IC back then? Yeah. I need to frame a little bit also what working as a consultant for me meant, because I think there is a little bit of difference between what you do on a daily basis compared to, for example, my job working at a consulting firm. There's a difference between coaching and consulting and coaching and consulting. Yeah. But at the end, what we were really good at, or specialized in also as a company, was like, we have consultants in a firm, they're running some strategy projects and so on. And they usually, they're on the ground, they see that there is some need, I don't know, mostly looking at digitalization. And then I and other people from my team were pulled in to help developing that. And it's like developing the vision, it's developing a product, developing an MVP. I mean, we were really staffed with product designers, managers, developers, innovation experts, and so on. So I would almost compare it more like the agency work, because you have a client, part of a strategy project, they see, okay, we need to actually build a product that solves x, y, z. And then they get us in to pretty much buy in the expertise that they don't have in the building. And I would go and run and have user research sessions performed, do some ideation sessions, present it back to the company, and so on and so forth. And I think it's like, more an execution sort of work that's very different from, okay, I'm going in and analyzing and trying to help you as an in-house team to develop these things. Like usually the companies that we would work with don't have an in-house team, or they have an in-house team, and that's focused on something completely different. And we are running like these, let's say, innovation projects. We launch new ventures, we launch new products, we build MVPs, we try to test stuff. So I think there's a very different thing, because when you do that, you need to, whenever you start a new project, get your mind in this, I would say almost like in-house mindset, because you're building a product from scratch, or you're improving a product, and you're doing the heavy lifting. It's to me a mix of this in-house work and this consulting works on steroids, because you're working with a team as a team for companies on projects. But that's what a lot of agencies and freelancers also do, right? So I would put it almost, okay, there's like a coaching aspect, there's like a kind of third party working aspect, but then there's like a first party working aspect, which is like the in-house team. And another thing, and I think Rich Mironov mentioned it when we talked to him, there's more or less like this fourth part where you are doing an interim job. So for example, you're getting hired to be the VP product for a certain time to be able to build up a product team, work out a product strategy and a product roadmap for a certain timeframe, or where you help the company to go over a tough time of, I don't know, not enough skilled people on the market, but where still expertise is needed that educates inside or trains people or helps people from other departments to transition into product. So there are thousands of requests and thousands of problems companies have. And there is this another layer of working as a freelancer coach agency where you can support a company with. Yeah, totally. I fully agree. But maybe back to the initial question, especially to give a little bit like also of guidance on what to pick and where to go, because you said something earlier on, which when it comes to coaching, you mentioned, okay, books are one aspect, but obviously also a big one is like having the experience. Would you say, can I have a fresh start in the industry and work as a freelance consultant, independent coach, or how do I get this initial experience? You don't Alex. It's a tough question. It's also, what does it need to become a product manager with no experience? No, but do you think like you could do the job that you're doing now without having worked in-house? No. Okay. Definitely not. For the simple reason, you need to have had this experience of working in-house to be able to support in-house better. That's my opinion. I know. I know lots of freelancers who do, for example, freelance product managers, freelance designers, which, yeah, it's maybe a little bit like this agency work, like third party work, but they also do like some coaching. And they're, believe me, there's a lot of people out there who have never seen a company from inside, but still help companies. Yes, absolutely. And there are also very good people outside, but it depends on what you're asked to do within the company. So that's a key point for me. And for sure, you're definitely a good designer because your job is to design a product, right? If you know how to conduct interviews, you can definitely conduct an interview without having worked inside. That's fully clear. But if you're asked to build up product structures, if you're asked to share your expertise on a product, for example, we worked in point of sale. So if someone hires me as a product consultant to consult them, to build a point of sale system, first of all, my experience is required. And at the same time, my experience is required to build up a team that fits into the organization within its structure. So you need to be able to dig yourself into the company structure and the company culture and to work towards. I'm not saying that you cannot do this perfectly when you have never done it, but I see this as a kind of blocker to get inside. And I guess there's this difference that you just mentioned, which is also a lot of like coaches, consultants, and so on, needs like work on leadership topics, right? It's like organizational design, team structures, processes, and so on. And obviously that's something that independently, if you work in-house or as a third party, you only acquire it with some experience. And that's the reason why I said at the beginning directly, no, because that's my focus at the moment. I'm strongly focusing on this topic. So therefore, I think if you want to do that, you need some experience. You need to have had some successes. You need to have had your fails. You need to have had bad launches, good launches. You should have seen a company growing or even the opposite, getting smaller. I also went through a phase within a company where things went bad and people got fired and we needed to change the plan and the roadmap. So these were all bad things at that time, but on the other hand, it also felt really good. Fully agree. What made you move back to working in-house? Yeah, fair question. In the first place, I went to consulting because I was really curious to see that. I think if you look at my LinkedIn profile, there's one thing in my description, which talks about the value or the power of like collaboration. And that was also a little bit like the one thing that I missed by changing projects and clients a lot. And that's this whole aspect of relationships building. And I think me personally, I work mostly with people and working with people and working with building relationships and so on and so forth. And I feel like when you, or at least when I do it in-house, I can do that much better. I can, over time, I can really build trust with all the different stakeholders, understand all the different relationships. And I do think that as a coach, the way you do it, you do that similarly. But as I was mainly focused on the delivery aspect, and I do feel like there is a lot of ICs out there who are doing a better job when it comes to building a prototype and an MVP in a short amount of time. Yeah, I don't know. For me, it felt like the right thing to go back, focus on a company where I really believe in the mission, in the vision, in the product as a whole, with the goal to really shape it for some time and to also have this ownership to really see it as being part of the product and having the possibility to shape it. Yeah. And I love what you said because when I'm coaching people, whether it's a product team or individuals, I'm always just touching a little small piece of group within the company while you go much broader. And that's also what I love doing when I was an individual contributor. And that's at the same time also my motivation in, I don't know, one or two years to found my own company and build up my own team. Yeah. But so how should we close it? I feel like there is no real suggestion that we can give to people, but maybe you can share what your experience was so far, how you're working and why you picked a specific field or way of working. And where do you see yourself in the future? Yeah, absolutely. Let us know on social media or write us an email, drop us a comment. We are available 24-7 on the internet. Sometimes we sleep. Well, you sleep. Obviously because you're working in-house, Alex. Consultants don't sleep. Nine to five.