What Product Managers need to succeed in 2021 - with Luca Criscuolo Head of Product @eBay

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. As usual, I'm here today with my co-host Christian and we have a guest Luca Criscuolo. So I have two Italians in the call today. I will try as well. Luca Criscuolo, is that correct? Amazing. This is even difficult for the Italians. I mean, you really spelled really perfectly. I'm not only Swedish, I'm also Italian meanwhile. We recently talked to Emily, I think her as well, Luca, from Outfittery and I was just practicing my Swedish skills back then. But okay, Luca, before we talk about the hard questions, I'd like to quickly introduce you to our audience. So you started working in product management in 2007 as a product manager and very quickly moved your way up to head of product and you worked for several companies such as Nokia, Borneo, Outfittery and lately you're working as head of regional product Europe at eBay. Next to that, you are an advisor, consultant, coach and speaker. And I remember when we met the first time, I think it was 2018 at the product management festival. I liked a couple of topics you were discussing on stage and that's why we thought we should invite you today to have a couple of tough discussions. There's one more thing that I haven't shared yet, which is you initially studied environmental science. And I have to say, if you would have become an engineer, I would have said, great. And understanding your environments and the dev environments is great. But what made you move to product? That's not a straightforward question. The reality is that my background is indeed, I have a PhD in climate research and climate research is actually a lot of mathematical modeling and software and supercomputing. And I enjoyed it very much. But after finishing my PhD in Hamburg, I still worked one year as a researcher, but then usually you have to decide what you want to do in your future. And science became a little bit like repetitive to me. And I wanted to get very close to other people instead of just being closed in a room and doing my mathematical modeling. And then I found a position for a company located in Berlin that was at that time producing software for researchers. And they were looking for a product manager. And then since my background, during my PhD studies, I used a lot of MATLAB, C++, FORTRAN, basic software development. And I reused my skills to move into software industry. And I think it was a good choice at that time. But when you saw this positioning or disposition or this opening for product manager, was it clear to you what to expect from that role and what your role would look like? Oh, no, no, no. In fact, if you look at my CV, you see that I actually started a PhD in Italy. I mean, I was going to start a PhD in Italy and I had a standard ready life in Italy, but I felt like the need of seeing the world. So I left everything and I got that very good position, PhD position in the Max Planck Institute. And I jumped basically into the dark and moving into Hamburg. And then after my experience in the research, I felt again this pressure of changing direction. And I was without knowing very well what was software industry and product management. Then I jumped again in the dark and it's the way how I am. I need to learn new things. And I get this pressure of moving around, exploring and learning and growing. And you never know in the future, maybe I will jump in the dark again. I don't know. But it's actually a good topic because many people who get started with product management eventually don't know what they are committing to and what product management in general is about. I think it's maybe a good starting point to kick it off with a $1 million question. What is product management? Where does it start? Where does it end? It's actually a very good rhyme. I'm just realizing. Alex, I think we can maybe add some scratching DJ music to that. No, you're right. So basically in my career, I worked with product managers that were originally coming from completely different experiences. I had in my team very good product managers coming from design. They were former designers and they had a very good experience in interaction with users, understanding how users think, what they want to do, how they look, how they interact with objects. I had also very good product managers coming from crazy, but customer support. Customer support is another place that you get a lot of insights about the problem that the user have. And now a new generation are basically analysts, product analysts, people that get into the numbers and they grow into knowledge that other people do not have. And that means it's not only about interaction design, it's not about the problem, it's about the numerical quantities that actually are behind the business value of the users. What do you guys think about this? I think that's a really interesting topic because I especially also remember when we last had our first get to know call and you said this thing about product management doesn't necessarily come with the title. So I think this conversation also that it can be like broader. You can come from different areas and you don't have to necessarily, and I think especially in the past, people did not have, there was not a product management school, like you couldn't like study product management and you have something. It's the nature that people would come, is it from software development and so on and so forth into this area. And I love hearing when you say that you have even people from customer support moving more into that direction, because I think the diversity that this brings to the product management role is super helpful because what I would also say and where I would also love to hear your opinion on is when you have a very diverse range of product managers, like they also bring different mindsets to the table, like a software engineer might approach product differently than a designer might or a product analyst and a customer support agent. Not sure what your thoughts, like tensions are. I completely agree. So here there are two dimensions, right? There is one dimension is how you build a functional and efficient team independently from product management. And the other one is what are the skills that you need to build a good product management team. So those are actually two different topics. The first topic is how you build a good, efficient and functional team. And I think any leadership coach will tell you that the most important aspect of a team is having a diverse group of people working together in the right way. This means that having people that look like the same, act as the same, will decrease the strength of that team because there would be vulnerabilities that are not covered by other people. So having a diverse team means having people that actually think differently, that have different experience and that can cover each other's and support each other's. The other dimension is what are the skills that they bring with them. And what I think for product managers, there should be, the more I work in product management and the more I work in large companies at the size and scale of eBay, or also companies on the scale of 200, 300 people, maybe startups, I think it's becoming, the more I work in that tech space, the more I understand that we need people that focus the attention on the customer problem and they do not really compromise on the customer problem. They see the difficulties that the customer have with a product and they try to find the right viable solution to the customer problem. And when I say so, viable solution, something that is actually feasible under a technical point of view, that bring a business value, that at is connected to the brand of the product and try to pull all the pieces together to bring the best possible solution. So if you talk to business people, you see them, they also want to bring a solution for the users, but they want to say optimize around the business. Or if you talk to technology people, they also want to bring a technology, a solution, but they focus on optimizing the technical solution. And I think we need that type of profile that actually is in between all these solutions and says, hey, that's the right one that satisfy the user, satisfy the business, satisfy the technology and so on. So that's the core part of a product management profile. Talking about this, I think there is another emerging generation of product managers that I currently see. And these are the people with a strong marketing background. So these are the people who are very open for growth hacking initiatives, building prototypes and thinking more of let's face an idea with the customer to really see whether we are addressing the right problem to be solved or also to see what is the acceptance and how quickly can we go to market via, for example, surveys or a certain number of traffic on the webpage, email addresses we can collect, et cetera. And this is something that I would like to dive a little bit deeper because we're talking now here about the interface. And I was just wondering on a high level, it makes sense to serve all these different areas of technology, business, customer problems, but how can we translate this as product managers into our day-to-day life? So first of all, I completely agree with you. And I think what today, what we call very often what we call a growth hacker or an expert marketing manager, digital marketing manager, I think that profile is very close to a definition of a product manager too. For a very clear reason, those guys know very well the users. They spend an incredible amount of time on trying to understand how to catch the users, right? What the users are looking for, what they are Googling. So what they are searching in Google, how can they trigger the interest of the users? What are the product and the benefits that they are looking for? So if you know all these insights pretty well the customer, and so the step to start the technical implementation and the design implementation is not that far away. It's something that you can learn. So if you come with that user knowledge from a marketing perspective, and you combine later on with the knowledge of technology design and data, then you are very good product manager. Yeah. I think it's actually also a very interesting combination when we speak about user insights, the user insights that you get from such a profile, more the marketing side of things, what's interesting to the user. And then you combine it with more traditional, let's say user research is like ethnography and so on, where maybe you even try to figure out this level below. Okay, why might this be interesting? What is the underlying problem that we can solve to address their needs? Because then you already know how to reach the market. You manage to figure out what the problems are that you can tackle and you can even build around that. Yeah. We are just right now covering the second part that you mentioned, right? Which is the skills that we need to go forward with product. But if you look at the communication and how to build a team and how to bring those people together, what would you say, Luca, are the key things to look at when you start building up a team and start up hiring? Is it necessarily that you should just look for people with different backgrounds or can I also bring together people who are in similar backgrounds, but empower them, for example, to enhance their mindset or to enhance their focus on certain things? Yeah, so of course there is no one solution that fits all, right? So what I'm going to tell you is my experience and the type of teams that usually I like to build. For me, this is something that I tell every time I talk about how to build a team, I say something that is a little bit unusual. I tend to hire cool people. And exactly, that's the reaction. The usual reaction. With that, I mean, for me, it's very important that the people working in my team are comfortable with uncertainty. They are curious. They have a desire to grow and to learn. They are ready to work within a network of other people. So basically, if you look at this, you do not hear from me something like they have to be strong expert in something. I don't know, like business or design. I think this is a secondary skill for me. There are plenty of examples of people that work with me that they had a relatively small experience in, generally speaking, product management. But they were very good fit in the team. They were very strong contributor. They were smart and intelligent. And they were able to learn pretty quickly. And they contributed very much to the dynamic of the team. And so that was an added value to the team that was not only important for me, but it was important for the growth of the entire team. So for me, this is usually the thing that I try to catch in job interviews. How do they fit within the team? How do they fit within the culture of our product team? How much do they look for learning? And how can they survive with high level of uncertainty? So that's very important for me. Now I'm curious, because I think the cultural aspect is like growing so important in companies. But in an interview, it's always super easy to assess, okay, a developer, can he write the right lines of codes? A designer, has he a strong portfolio with the right aesthetics and so on? Does he know how to perform the right research and so on? But how do you assess this cultural aspect? Yeah, so usually I use a defined set of, let's say, behavioral questions. Like, can you please provide an example when you had a conflict in your team and you managed to solve that conflict? And usually I'm very strict. So it's about an example. It's not about a theoretical situation. Please tell me what happened, who was involved and what you did. And so in that way, you can grab some sort of information. Yes, I agree with you. Of course, we will never be able to job interview to perfectly define a profile. But that's part of the game. I think also looking at the other side, there are many people who want to get started in product management. And if you are in some communities or Facebook groups or whatever, people are asking always this question, how can I prepare for an interview? How do I answer a question from Steve Jobs? I don't know how to explain product management to a five-year-old child or whatever it is. And I believe it's way more important to really be yourself and be pragmatic and try to, first of all, understand what problem is the company solving and how could you contribute to that? Apart from all this methodologies and things you eventually need to know as the secondary skills you just talked about, Luca, I think for everyone who's listening in and want to transition into product or is looking for a new job, whether as a junior or as a senior, ask yourself how can you contribute to the bigger picture of the company? How can you bring yourself in? Because I would rather hire someone who has eventually never launched a product but has full engagement and full motivation and a full understanding and dedication to a problem instead of someone who has developed or delivered hundreds of products but just thinks in his or her own silo and believes he doesn't need to learn anything new. I think this is true, but definitely I've seen a lot of companies who are far away from such a, let's say, more open and cultural-focused hiring process. And I'm not sure, like, I've seen all sorts of different practices with use cases, whatsoever sessions, but also just if you look at job descriptions, some job descriptions are very detailed also on the skill level. So maybe the problem is also a little bit there, that some product teams are also not ready to actually hire for the right mindset because either their leadership is not there yet or, yeah, I don't know, but I think that's a whole different problem. I completely agree. So, of course, the leadership is usually expressed in the team, right? A team reflects always the type of leadership that drive that team. And I can bring you an example. I was just about to ask you an example. Yeah. Sometime ago, a few years ago, when I was looking for a job, I went through a couple of interviews where the first question was, how do you define priorities? So how do you select tasks within a priority list? Every time I get shocked by this question, I mean, is this a, something that is, it's so interesting to ask a job interview for a product manager asking as a first question, how can you define a priority in a to-do list with no context, we don't, we're not context. And when I hear this, I say, if this is the most difficult problem that you have to discuss with a product manager, man, I'm not the right person here. Sorry about that. On the other hand, the sad reality is that a lot of non-product leaders, and I think like a lot of like business leaders who are, who haven't worked like in tech or with product managers and so on, they look at product managers and they're like, oh yeah, this is the guy that makes the prioritization for me and makes sure that it's delivered at the end. So I think it's maybe a misperception of what product management is. So this is part of the product management, Alex. I think sometimes we product managers tend to, I would say to detach ourself from reality. Project management is part of product management. So I fully agree. There is no way to get out of it. If you have to deliver a piece of software, a project, a machine, there is a component of project management where you have to assign priorities. There are tasks, you have to go Gira and all this relatively boring thing. And the other reality is that there are our stakeholders, usually business or people or something, is that they have no understanding of technology and they need someone that does this job for them. And so they expect the product managers to be also actually mainly project management, which is acceptable. Now, the difference here is that there is this new culture of product management where we say, yes, project management is part of our professional life, but that's not only our professional life. We bring an additional value to the company and that's why I, me, myself as a product manager, I can bring an additional value to the evolution of this company. That's a clear, so it's something that we have to make somehow clear. Now, if a job interview, the first question is basically how you manage project, then this is a very clear indication about the expectation of product management. Absolutely. But on the other hand, I would be curious about, these companies are still out there and at some point they need to be a shift in the mindset and let's say you would have taken one of those jobs where you got asked how you prioritize a non-existing backlog. How would you try to initiate change towards a more open mindset? Yes. Yes. That's a very good question that I think this is, this is one of the most complicated questions and I faced this, this situation a couple of times. I tell you my approach. Okay. My approach is first of all, to deliver some sort of very good project management. So I usually get in a pragmatic way and I see, okay, those guys expect from me that I deliver a piece of software and I have to make this as transparent and efficient as possible. Okay. So let's do this in order to conquer a sort of trust position. But then from that point on, I start building a sort of new approach that becomes an advantage for this, for the stakeholders too. I give you, I give an example. I had a few, just a few days ago, I had a very good conversation with a there is two very smart business guys. And I had the impression that they were very well used to a standard project management approach. So they were used to communicate a to-do list and say, okay, that's what we need. Now you go back to your product team and you deliver this piece of software. But then I started to say, look, I can do this. We can do this. That's not a problem. But maybe there is an added value if we actually work together as a cross-functional team to build the right solution to the customers. So basically if you are part of the, so to say of the software development, you will understand where are the problems, what can be achieved, what we can deliver, what can be optimized in order to deliver the best software solution for the user. And it's also an advantage for me to, to get very close to the business discussions so that we can like build a cross-functional approach to solve the real problem of the customers. And they were actually very happy because they said, you know what, maybe you're right, maybe it's not about a to-do list, but maybe it's about understanding first of all, where the problem is. And then try to find an agreement around possible solution and then develop the solutions put together. I just love what you're saying because it's very interesting, your approach, because I'm driving a similar approach when I'm consulting companies. Usually when you hire a consultant, shit hits the fan, you need help. There is some stuff you want to improve. You want to get faster, whatever. But you are in this like the devil's circle where you just want to build, build things without asking the why. And what I like doing is to really start with the project management approach by making sure that you have good processes and streamline them with involving the stakeholders. And within a couple of weeks, people start realizing, Hey, when project management is working well and communication and progress gets more transparent, we have way less stress and way more time to ask ourselves the important question, which are, for example, should we really build that? And I'm always saying, it's not a problem. If you start building something that you should not build, these two or three weeks of investments speeding up building the wrong things are worth it. Because from there on, people just start really realizing there's something we should change. And sometimes you need to pay that price of doing the wrong thing in order to help people to really wake up and understand that they need to ask the why first. It's a learning, yes. So what I'm hearing is also a little bit this approach of, first of all, focusing on giving the stakeholder the peace of mind that you are actually delivering and that you are actually helping them achieving it and not having this initial no approach. And I think this is also very dangerous when you want to follow a different approach, for example, and not necessarily sure if it can be entirely applied to product management, but what I see, for example, in design, sometimes you have stakeholders and they're like, okay, we need to do X, please deliver a design, and then the designer is like, no, wait, we first need to do research. And I think it's a little bit like this, where you then have this clash and then the stakeholder is unhappy, the designer is unhappy, the whole team gets unhappy and you don't deliver, but from this approach I'm hearing, it's more about, okay, first like building also the relationship and the trust we are doing, we are shipping, and then slowly like also adding more and more to the mix. Because once you have the trust, you can also extend the process and bring in additional value to the mix. I see this actually, Alex, you're right. I see this happening pretty often also in the design space, where design can be very personal. It depends a little bit on the maturity and experience of designers, especially young designers get, feel really on a personal level. Oh yeah. Hell yes. It's understandable. You know, they are creative people. They really handcraft something. And if someone enters the room and say, hey man, what you're creating doesn't look really cool. Of course you get really, wait, wait, oh, what, who are you to say me, to say that it doesn't look cool? But it gets, first of all, with maturity and experience that when you reach a certain level of design experience, you understand other people have different opinion, I have my opinion and it's fully normal to have iterations around design work that converge to a solution that maybe it's not exactly what I have in mind, but maybe satisfy all of us. Yeah. Especially because within product design is not only about the personal aspect of aesthetics and taste and like, it's not comparable to art in any sense. And I think that's often also mistaken. It's still a very functional kind of role. And I think like collaboration comes with the maturity. I think it's definitely like a progress that every, or a process that every designer has to go through of also understanding different functions. Depending on their education, they might not have business backgrounds, development background, and so on. And then you have these culture clashes with a developer, with a stakeholder and so on, and maybe they still don't empathize enough with that role as well to understand where is this person coming from if he's telling me that my design sucks and so definitely this is also a part of like maturity and growth. for a designer. I have a question to both of you, actually, because what we just discussed applies also in my opinion to product managers, because if you as a product manager work, for example, on a front end project, you will be similar biased like the designer. You stick together and you don't want to make any changes. My question is, how do you coach such people into a more open and more mature mindset? I think generally speaking, it is a human problem. This is like you, I see this also in technology. You have engineers that have a background in some software languages and they get really attached to that language or to a framework. And if the head of technology comes and say, look, we have to change something, we have to use another framework, they can get a little bit defensive. One thing that I just want to throw in that comes to my mind here as well is I think also in the communication and I think last week we talked to Ryan about leading with context, but I think like generally like when communicating and also when raising why you want something to be different, whatever, is it the stakeholder or is it the designer and so on? I think the context aspect is also super important and some people also miss that one. If you as a stakeholder manage to explain why you want it differently and can give the context and especially in your stakeholder role, for example, like more context also around the business decisions behind it, that might also help anyone else working with it to better understand it and work within these limitations and work with that context. Going back to my initial question, how to coach people into this direction, it sounds to me like a two-sided sword, right? So on one point, making sure that you as someone who requests change, giving people the context and tell them the why. And on the other hand, as someone who receives those requests to kindly ask why and to try to better understand the other side, is that correct? Yeah. So I think that's the point. The question is how to coach this transition, right? I think that was your initial question. Yeah. Well, yeah. What I, for example, always communicate to my team is that we are in a fast and volatile environment and that's actually, it's good to see how things are changing fast and not only we have to get used to it, but this is a great advantage to be able to change. Now I can go for the tangent here because I'm thinking about something like why some companies, there is this books from good to great and so on. There are books about why companies don't really, are not able to get with a new pace, with new challenges. And at the end of the day, this is exactly the point, right? So there are companies that in their DNA have a logical process of saying, you don't get stuck into something fixed in time, but you are actually constantly adapting to the new environmental challenges that you have around yourself. And so they have in the DNA, this constant change compared to old structures where you have companies where they have a management style of high efficiency and low risk. And so that's the difficulties in changing things. And this can be applied also to a coaching discussion where you see that someone has difficulties in adapting to the changing environment. You can always try to visualize that actually these new adaptations are a way to create an evolution and a personal growth in a way. Yeah. And it's also when we talked to Andreas Urban from Threat Republic, he just said the same thing. You need to pick up people where they are and from there on bring them to the point where you just confront them with the reality. Yeah. Cool. Maybe on, as we've now also spoken a little bit like around how to get into the sweet spots, how to coach people, how to get them also to maybe even change the mindset. Like one thing that I'm curious to hear from you, Luca, is thinking about product management. You've grown teams, you've coached people and so on. What would you say have been the biggest mistakes from product managers that you've seen during that time? Well, one of the things that a few years ago really impressed me in a negative way was a conversation I had with one product manager who told me that he wanted to have a sort of product management manifesto within a company, in a company. So this person was, this guy was super smart, he's a very good guy. He felt like, what is the definition? What is my role within this company? And I think he wanted to solve this question, this node, by creating an official statement of what is the role of a product manager. I find this extremely dangerous because this basically tell, I don't know, defined in a very unflexible way what you are supposed to do and what you are not supposed to do. Now, the question is. We are there to solve the customer problems and the problems of our company in a way. Now, what if we are required to do something that does not fit into the actions that we are allowed to do? What are we going to do now? What are we going to say? No, I'm not going to do this because, because. Just drop it. Exactly. So it's rather for me like maybe it's about defining what is the added value that we bring to a company rather than defining what is the to-do list for us, the allowed to-do list for us. And I think this is like a dangerous mistake that product managers can can do when they start in a company. I believe values should be always implicit and not be written down. And whether it's a product manifesto or company values, I rather like to see it instead of having it somewhere documented. Yeah, but I think values are probably another layer again, because like values don't necessarily include or exclude like tasks and responsibilities. But one thing that you mentioned is also the added value to a company. Maybe to summarize, what is the added value from a product manager? I think I mentioned this at the beginning. I think the only thing that a product manager can do much better than all the other roles in a company is identifying customer problems and working every day to make sure working every day to solve those customer problems in the most viable way that basically get together all the interest of all the dimensions of a company, the technology, the viability, feasibility, the business impact, the strategy, the brand of a product, and put all this information together in order then to provide the solution that is the best possible, given the constraints and the environment. I think that's a great summary that we could write on a manifesto. You know, you know what, if you work for a very large company, the actions of a product managers are very different from the actions of a product manager working for a startup. But there should be always the same underlying logic. So imagine you're working for a company, I don't know, 10,000 people distributed all around the world. Well, it's very likely that you're going to be very far away from your customers. Maybe you are a product tech product manager. You are building APIs. Maybe your customers are engineers. And in that specific case, for example, it's about understanding the requirements and the problem of the customers. Yes, but maybe it's a lot of technical project management, right? So it's a lot of combining all the requirements of different technology groups that had to fit together to streamline the output of an API. This could be right. And so the actions that you do as a product manager in such environment are really different compared to a startup where a product manager has to do a little bit of everything, has to create a UX research, has to build, I don't know, a design thinking workshop, and maybe has to talk also to the technology. guys and to the business people. So it's very, you have different roles, different responsibilities, though you are still solving problems in a way or another. But that would be my question. Is it really that different or is it just more narrowed down to a specific area? I like to bring up the explain of baking bread. I used to be a baker. And whether you work for a big company or a little bakery, the methodologies and the way you bake bread is always the same. You make the dough, you work it out, you put it into the oven. Whether you do 10,000 sorts of bread or just one or two, it's to me very similar. As you said, you are very likely more specialized or more focused on one area while you are in smaller companies go much wider. What do you prefer? Are you rather the professionalized product manager or do you like to go wide? That's a good question. I discussed this with my manager just one month ago. And my answer is it depends a little bit on, I think, on the professional stage of your career and also on the environment where you are. Of course, let's say when I started my career in product management, I really wanted to have this adrenaline kick. You really want to build those products. You really want to be hands on, you know, it's important at that stage. Of course, once you build one product, two products, you created the 10 user interfaces, you work with different teams all around the world, then of course you start to say, what is the next? And maybe the next is you want to exact, you want to enlarge, you want to work with a larger team that has offices around the world that have different product lines. And then after that experience, what is that? Maybe you want to start discussing more of a business or strategy or tactics around the product. So it's a knowledge evolution. And so that's normal that when you are more on a further stages of your career, of course, it's going to be very cool still to work in a startup. But of course, if you had an experience with teams of 100,000 people, and then you suddenly are in a startup with 30 people, it's still, yeah, you understand what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah. I think that there are probably still these two roles. And I think depending also on a person's let's say preferences, preference, especially on a person's preference, you might want to even further specialize and become the most experienced product manager for a specific area. Is it like whatever APIs and so on, and speaking about titles that you would see in the world, like all these sort of like principle roles that you see, and then you have people who are actually also more interested in going into this broad knowledge, extending, having a wide bird's eye view on a specific topic, and then developing more into that management role. Would you see that similarly? You know what, Alex, you touched a super interesting topic about career development. I actually wanted to brainstorm a little bit with you guys, at least hear your opinion. What I noticed lately is that we, in the past, when I was young, there was a certain idea of making career steps, and which was you start from a relatively junior position, and then one day you get a team leadership position. And then your team increases and you get even more reporting lines. And this is like building a career. What I actually noticed lately is that there is an increasing number of people that actually don't care about that path anymore. They actually start to say, it's not about having a 100,000 people team under my reporting line. It's more about what is the way where I can feel more fulfilled and satisfied. And so there are some people that say reporting lines for me are completely uninteresting, and I want to become a stronger contributor. I want to be an expert in my field, and I don't care about reporting lines. So is this something that you see also around you? I have mixed feelings on that. And I have a note here on something that I wanted to come back to a point that we mentioned very early in today's conversation. But like in general, I would say yes, I think there is a little bit like a movement. I would almost say what I've seen especially is people not putting work at the center of their life entirely with the goal of climbing up the ladder. I think the ladder gets always shorter, hierarchies get always flatter, and people are not entirely interested in doing the manager role where you don't actually even get your hands dirty. And some people prefer, as you say, like definitely specializing more, becoming really an expert in a specific field, and specifically in design. This is very true where you see people, okay, they want to specialize in like really on motion, micro interactions, and so on. And this is a whole world that I, when I manage a team, could never look at into detail because it's just so complicated. It comes with different tools and so on and so forth. A lot of people try to just make their passion more to work. And I think working with people, it needs to be your passion. It's not something for everyone. If you have to deal with hiring, maybe even firing, promoting people, a lot of like also interpersonal issues or so I think definitely while in the past it was like the only way to develop further, it's becoming less and less important. One additional thing here, looking at the other side, I hear and see many leaders saying, I'm just so sad and so sick of, first of all, not being allowed to do the actual work anymore. And at the same time, I'm super sick of all this, let's be frank, fucking discussions all the time about the same shit over and over again. You're just sitting in meetings and you are dealing with politics instead of doing the cool work. I just see that many leaders are also translating this to their teams and just complaining. And then on the other hand, people just start realizing maybe it's not that cool anymore to have your team and sitting all day in meetings instead of doing the cool stuff. I would say that's definitely not best practice, like leadership. That definitely means you're first of all, doing a job that you probably don't like. And if you pass that negativity down to your team. But on the other hand, let's be frank, right? It happens. Yes. But I would rather say that person is doing the wrong thing. I cannot give any names here, but I'm talking about companies with a couple of thousands of people. But yeah, still, I'm just realizing that talking to engineers or people saying, I don't want to deal with all this politics. I just want to do cool stuff. Yeah, I think that's the specialization. I saw this in one of the companies where I worked. One of the team leads working very close to me, he was and he is a very smart guy. And one day he just said, look, I want to concentrate my work on around software architecture. And for me, having a big team is not important. I'm not having fun with this. If you think about something that's just a few years ago, this wouldn't be like, okay, this guy, the career of this guy is finished. The reality is that the career of this guy is just blossoming because the guy is super good. Everybody wants to work with him. And at the same time, I also think especially bigger companies that have enough different levels and areas where you can specialize and grow into, they're also a great opportunity for personal development. And I've recently spoken to someone who works for one of the massive tech giants that we have out there. And he was literally like twice switching from a managerial role into an individual contribution role. And for him, he was like, it's the best that happened to him that the company allows him to do this because this, whenever he feels like he needs a change and he needs something different, he needs to learn something new. And I think you mentioned this also at the beginning, you're probably one of such a person who loves to go into the dark and find something new. And he said, okay, this company, because it's so massive, actually gives him the opportunity to go from one area to a completely new one, from managing a team to being like completely heads down specialist on something new. And I think that's definitely a great development that not everyone has to go the same path. It's also good career advice, right? So you don't necessarily need to become a leader. If you still work as a product manager or architect, your career is just at the beginning because you're getting better and better and you can transport this knowledge to more and more projects, to new companies, build your own thing. So you are not stuck if you stay from a title perspective where you are. Most important is that you make the best out of your day-to-day business. And I think Christian, you're completely right. This would be my advice, meaning that the best way is to contribute. to the success of a company by also having your rights position, so to say. Now, is your right position being a designer, a product manager? Do you have to feel that you are actually contributing to something? So stacking to a mindset of saying, I want to be a product manager. What does this exactly mean? Yeah. And I think like back to the question that I wanted to raise for quite some time, you mentioned that you've run into a lot of like product managers with design backgrounds, so people transitioning from a design role into product management and actually like doing a really good job there. And I think that designers can be really great product managers. There was something, especially when we talk about the professional development and career development, where I've seen where some designers think if they want to have more impact in a company and to have a higher or a bigger contribution and like more freedom in terms of steering, for example, the direction of a product, they choose the way into product management, not necessarily because they want to become a product manager, but because they're looking like for more impact and have you seen this or is this something maybe also interviewing designers that want to become product managers where you felt like that the motivation might be somewhere around those lines? Definitely. And it's a motivation. It's a, it can be a good motivation and meaning that maybe they are in a stage where they in a career stage where they want to feel more empowered, they want to contribute in a different way to the success of a company and then they feel this pressure of changing direction of their work. And I think this is fully acceptable, right? So it's a little bit like once I heard, Christian, when we were at the product management festival in Zurich, there was the COO of Glassdoor. I don't remember his name. I think I watched his talk. He's a super cool guy. The talk was amazing. And he basically told us that he was a product manager for a long time. And then one day he moved into, into being a COO and a COO is a sort of organizational, it depends a little bit of the companies, but usually it's a, it's a, an organizational role where you have to make machines somehow working. It's about business. Organizational problem solver. Exactly. Organization problem solver. Perfect. And so he said, you know, I, I miss that work of a product manager, being close to the customers and finding, trying to find solution and so on, but he also mentioned that that's, it was a new condition for him where he wanted to learn something new and wanted to actually switch also direction. And so I think this is fully acceptable. And I think it's a good thing. If you find yourself in a moment where you say, look, it's finished. This time it's finished for me. I need something different than I, you find you're brave enough to jump from one position to a different type of challenge, right? That's actually a very good explanation and I totally agree. And looking at it from this aspect, it makes super sense. I think I'm a little bit like coming from the side where I've seen some great designers where I really would have loved them to, to keep contributing as designers. So it's like when you have someone that you can fully trust to kind of, to lose them because of the motivation that they feel like as designers, they, they cannot have the impact that they might have in a different role, but yeah, obviously like I can only agree it, it can be and should be also good motivation and it should also help you constantly grow and develop also, absolutely. Absolutely. Luca, we touched today a lot of topics. We jumped from coaching over the role definitions over many other topics to wrap the whole conversation up today. What would be one advice you give companies and what would be one advice you would like to give a product manager looking at the future of product management? Yes. Okay. About the company is product management. Product managers are crucial for your company. Today in a volatile environment, in a digital space where things will change overnight, customers switch from your business to your competitor in a few seconds, you just need someone that takes care of your customers a hundred percent. And the product manager is exactly that role, the person that you need. That the advice for the future of product management, I think the future is going to be more and more about quantities, analytics, and getting a sense through an ocean of data and information that is floating our mind every day. You as a product manager, you have to get a very strong handle around numbers, analytics, logics, whether then you apply these to design, to business or technology, it doesn't really matter. But we as product managers, we are not going to be successful for in the next 10 years if we don't dive deep into quantities, into numbers. Perfect. I couldn't agree more with that. One very last thing. We have also our product bakery website, liveproduct-bakery.com. We launch for each episode a page where you can also drop a comment and interact with us and eventually the speakers. Don't miss it. Check it out. And with that, Luca, it was a pleasure having you. Thank you very much. And we're looking forward to see the product updates of 2021. Thanks for joining us, Luca. Great pleasure for me too. Enjoy the evening. Ciao. All right, Alex, there have been many topics that we have touched today. How do we want to summarize that? I don't know. I think I completely love these sort of conversations. There is so much to take away and it's always also great to hear different opinions also on certain topics. And I think Luca's perspective is definitely quite interesting. Yeah, a lot to digest, I would say. One important question we discussed, and this is something I would like to just pick up and debrief a little bit with you, is what is the state of product management in companies and are companies ready to make the next step? What is the next step? What is the next step? I'm looking at this way of cultural hiring and rather looking for mindset and having people who develop products with the right mindset in the future. But the thing is like this, this mindset topic. It's fuzzy, right? No, but it's such an important one. Yeah, it's fuzzy, but it's such an important one. And I think it shouldn't be like the product manager who needs a specific mindset. And I had one thought earlier on, which is a little bit extreme. And I would not say that it makes sense. Shoot it out. Yes, I will. That's why I mentioned it. I will regret when I say it. But I was thinking that if you really get to the point of having the right mindset and you really take like autonomous cross-functional teams to the next level, do you even need a product manager? And I'm not saying you don't need a product manager. Don't get me wrong. You will need it. You should have it. And I think like the closing words from Luca are amazing. But what I want to get to is that we've learned you can have product managers with a very wide range of experiences and backgrounds. So you can have like a former designer, product manager, business person, product manager, product analyst, software developer, QA, marketing person and so on. Now, if we say we are operating with the goal to contribute to the company and to actually create value and to solve customers problems, and you have a very collaborative mindset in a cross-functional team, in theory, and I'm just like talking about theory. In theory, if you would have all the different minds contributing and going into the same direction, you would not need someone to actually pull the information together and make sense of it to build a successful product. So this is only the theory, right? No, it's not the theory. It's the practice. And I have to say, I a hundred percent agree with you. So the things you're just describing, they are out there already. And I would not necessarily say you don't need a product manager, but the question is, let's look at the quantity and a good example, I was once listening to a talk from the VP product or director of product at Gmail and they have 150 engineers in their team. What do you think, how many product managers do they have? If you're asking it like that, and after what I said, they have very few. Exactly. They have a very few. They have five back then when I was listening to the talk. And when the engineers went to the VP engineering and VP product and said, we need more product managers. You know what they say? They said, instead of hiring new product managers, we rather give you more responsibility and empower you more. This is exactly the right mindset. But that's the thing. If you have, and you need to have people with the right mindset to empower them. You need to have people that actually want responsibility, that want to take the risks, that are comfortable with the uncertainties, and these are a little bit like also the descriptions of what do you need for a good product manager. But I would say you need the same for a good designer. You need the same for a good researcher. I don't want to speak about developers, but I would almost say you need to have the same developer. Yes, even a developer should like feel comfortable about uncertainties and actually look for them. This is to me product management in 2021. A product manager these days is in that empowering role to make sure that people get what they want to work, how they supposed to work and to deliver the most value and the better you do this, the more obsolete you get. I fully with you, but I think if we speak about hiring, it's not product management 2021, even if 2021, I think, is still a little bit too close. It's hiring, but it's like hiring and company culture. I think as a company, you need to hire for the right culture in all different roles so that you have everyone who wants to be empowered, who is empowered, who feels empowered, works towards the same goal, towards the same contribution. And then you can connect the dots and you have a small and probably very successful, fast and lean team. I think the product management role there is absolutely to identify the problems and share it as good as possible with the team and the rest is up to them. Either with you or without you to build the best out of it. With that said, we can close the call, let it sit and maybe in a couple of days, we re-listen to this and decide if we stick to what we just said or if we don't. All right. And as a small reminder, if you liked that podcast, share it, spread the word, follow us on Instagram, Product Bakery or on LinkedIn, and alternatively drop by to our website, product-bakery.com. We have a newsletter, we have episode pages, and feel free to drop a comment on the episode page to interact with us and the speakers. And in the sense of breaking the silos, if you are a product manager, share the podcast with your PD, with your developers, with your marketer, and the same goes for every other role so that we can spread this voice. Alex, have a good night. You too. Bye Christian. Bye.