Great Products Need Closer Collaboration Between Product, Engineering and Design

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with Maria Fernandez-Guajardo. Did I get that right, Maria?

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: That's really good. That's really good. Yes.

Shane Hastie: Welcome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Well, thank you for having me, Shane. It's my pleasure.

Shane Hastie: My normal question to start with is, who's Maria?

Introductions [01:08]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Maria is a product executive, a product manager. I specialize in emerging technologies software. I am currently a senior director of product management at Google. My current responsibility is Gmail, you know that product that some people may have heard about. But before working at Google, I have been for a couple of years, before that, I was at Meta where I had different roles. Some in the video and entertainment space in the Facebook app.

And before that, I worked in virtual reality. I started virtual reality for business work in Meta. Before that, I worked in startups in several of them, Series A, B, C type of size, always working in emerging technologies. And before that, I worked in silicon and hardware. I'm an engineer by training. I have a bachelor in electrical engineering and started in silicon. Then, I worked my way up the stack, so started with silicon, then did hardware, firmware, software, the whole stack.

And that first part of my career, I developed different roles. I started as an engineer, then I did project management. I moved into business development and marketing. And I think that when I landed in product management was really a revelation because it includes all of the things that I liked working on executing and developing products, talking with customers and understanding what they need, and the pain points, and the business side. So, product management really was a love story when I found that maybe 12, 13 years ago.

Shane Hastie: So, what does good product management look like today?

Good product management today [02:41]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Oh, today, product management, we are living a little bit of a revolution. Especially with AI, I think that a lot of the things that we were doing before are changing. The basics of how we develop products are very much the same. So, let me tell you what stays the same, and then what has changed a little bit for the function of product managers like me.

I think that what has stayed the same, it's a lot of the things that I mentioned in my book that we launched last week. It's called Sail to Scale, and it's traditional mistakes that startups do when from launch, pivot, scale, and exit through all of the phases. And if you look at the launch phase, which is when you create your first product, a lot of the things that we mentioned in the book are still the same, no matter if it's AI, no AI, rapid change, it doesn't matter.

The first one is that a lot of the times you are too focused on the short-term, and you are not having a longer view of where things are going. There's a tendency to not think about it, especially in the AI world because things are moving too fast, and it's like, "Oh, my god. I cannot think. I don't know how the world is going to evolve in a month, how can I think about in six months?"

But actually, it's the opposite. I think that you have to train and you have to force yourself to think about the long-term. You have to be an avid information seeker and anticipate where the market is going to go because a lot of the startups that even started like a year ago or 18 months ago, they're no longer providing value because the world is changing so fast. So, you do have to have your lights of looking at the longer timeframe to anticipate those changes.

But a lot of the things that is slightly changing is that in order to create a good starting team or a good product, you need to really work with a product thinker, an engineering builder, and a storyteller or a designer, that it puts all of those things together. And those roles are absolutely necessary, but in the world of AI, they have to work even closer together.

Actually, I was listening to your podcast to the previous episode that I think was called the State of Engineering, right? And they mentioned that it was encouraged that the software engineers think more like product managers. And I found that very interesting, and I think that is even more pronounced now in the age of AI. Engineers have to think more like product managers.

Product managers have to think more like engineers. Designers have to think more like engineers and product managers. Everything, it has to work closer and closer together because technology has a lot of limitations, and the expectations of the user are being very fluid. So, all of those three functions have to be super in synchrony if you want to develop products that are valid.

The minimum viable team [05:15]

The other thing that is mentioned in the book, you have to have the right minimum viable team when you start doing these things. In the book, we mentioned that if you want to create a startup, we encourage people to find entrepreneurial archetypes. And an archetype is a world to say, "Okay, what are your core strengths? What are the things that are absolutely required for the job?" It's not about your years of experience, it's not about your resume. It's about who are you? What are your core things?

And people who have an entrepreneurial archetype are great for startups because they thrive in ambiguity. They are hardworking. They connect the dots. They have a lot of diverse experiences. They're very comfortable in those very, very ambiguous areas. They're comfortable changing lanes, being a little fearless, and that is highly encouraged for startups.

But in a world that we are living that is changing so much, no matter if you are in a small company, middle company, big company, it doesn't matter. Those entrepreneurial archetypes are going to be more and more seek and valued because you have to be extremely comfortable with ambiguity because things are changing so fast.

So, really finding that entrepreneurial archetype when you hire, no matter what function, either a product manager, a software developer, there will be specific jobs that you have. Like if you are working in compliance, regulatory, or you're working in scaling, of course there's different archetypes that you are going to seek, people who are more detail oriented, who are more in those type of archetypes. But in general, developing new products these days, really that entrepreneurial archetype is really, really, really important.

Shane Hastie: So, let's dig into that team. In that startup world, what does that great team look like and feel like?

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: We mentioned three key skills that you need to have. It doesn't mean that you have to have three people. One person can fill multiple roles, but we feel that there's three type skills or things that you have to have in that core team.

Skills for startups [07:13]

The first one is that you need a product thinker, and that product thinker is the person who is going to really chase what is the problem that you are going to try to solve? Being really in contact with the customers, how do we build... Well, building a solution comes even later. How do we really deeply understand the problem that we are trying to solve? Have a lot of empathy. Ask all the questions.

And then, when you start building the solution, because you're a startup, you're a small team, that person also has to have some sense of the solution building. It has to be elegant, it has to be usable, it has to be friendly for people to use it. So, that product thinker, it can be a product manager or someone with that background, but it can be also an engineer who has that thinking of seeking that problem that needs to be solved and designing that solution from a user perspective.

We see a couple of cases where that falls flat is that sometimes you have people who are extremely technical and brilliant, brilliant engineers who decide to do a startup, and then they end up building solutions that don't find any customer because it is innovative, it's great, all of the things, but it doesn't really solve a problem in a way that has found product market fit, that fits the problem that you want to solve at a price point, or with an integration that is going to actually work for the customer. So, that is one skill.

The second one is that you need an engineering builder, and that's going to be your head of engineering, and that's going to be your first engineer. Someone needs to understand how we build this. Some of the mistakes that we have seen in startups is that they try to outsource engineering.

A couple of guys, a couple of gals, or whoever, have an idea. They come from a marketing background or even a product background, and it's like, "Okay, we have this idea, we're going to build it, and we're going to outsource this, and a team is going to build it for us". We believe that's a really bad idea because, especially in the earlier stages, you really need to have a very close loop of working with your engineering team and iterating really, really fast.

And as we were saying before, having that engineer also have a product mindset, a product thinking hat extremely important because some of the decisions that they're going to make, you can anticipate where things are going and make that much faster. When you have a team outside and engineering is totally outsourced, those very valuable cycles are going to be much longer, and the context is going to be lost in translation. So, we really encourage to have that skill in the founding team, have an engineering building.

And the last one is to have a storyteller, and a storyteller because it is startup, you need to live to see another day. And sometimes that means telling the story to customers, so they get you the next pilot, they get you the next contract, and sometimes it's telling the story to investors, so you get the next round of funding.

And telling the story is about, okay, what is the right balance between where do we see the big picture for this product, the big picture in how we are going to be a big business, how are we going to get, but also how do we get there? And what is the immediate thing that you can do and so people can understand and connect the dots?

Because when you are startup and you are small, your first product is going to be a minimal viable product. So, you don't want people to think that's it. You want to tell that story, both for customers and for investors.

So, we think it's important to have those skills. Again, one person can have them all or you can have multiple people who complement each other and bring those skills.

Shane Hastie: Why did you write the book?

Sharing many years of entrepreneurial experience [10:48]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Because I'm a forever learner and somebody proposed to me to write it, and I thought it would be a great learning experience for myself first. But then, the reason why we wrote about this is because we are three authors that brought this book, Mona, Heather, and myself. And the three of us have a lot of entrepreneurial experience, and we have been in technology for 25 plus years, each of us.

Heather had just sold her company to ServiceNow, and we were talking about some of the struggles that they had. They have to do a pivot and the exit. And so, we were talking a lot of the things, and we saw so many commonalities on things and experiences that we have lived through the many startups that we have gone through. And we thought that it would be interesting to write them down because entrepreneurship is a very lonely job.

And we thought that there was a lot of books out there that talked about frameworks and a lot of big success stories, and those are one in a million. And we thought that there was missing that voice of the entrepreneur in the trenches with very practical tips in like, "Okay, this is how you see that this is going south, and this is what you can do about it".

If you read the book, it's extremely practical, and there's a lot of things that you can do. You go to the chapter and the phase that you're in, there's a lot of things that you can take and implement right away. So, we thought that it was a missing thing. And me, personally, I love learning, so I learned how to write a book and that's how Sail to Scale is now in Amazon.

Shane Hastie: As we grow from that very first core team to getting a little bit bigger, looking at now we are starting to tackle some of the... I don't want to say scaling issues, but maybe we're in a heavily regulated environment. We've got to bring in some different skills there, and we might not need everyone to have that entrepreneurial spirit. How do we find the right people?

Finding the right people in growth [12:45]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Oh, a hundred percent. I think that those entrepreneurial types are extremely important in the launch and pivot phase because that's where things are really, really ambiguous, and you really need to move fast and connect the dots. As you go into the scale phase, of course thing is changing. You are going to need people. For example, people who love to scale are great system thinkers. They see how everything connects, and they're optimizers by nature. They see something, they want to make it better. They see something, they want to make it bigger. That's where you shift the archetype that you are hiring for.

As you say, you are in a regulated industry, somebody is going to have to make sure that we pass all the checks, and we have all of the marks that we need. And there are people who love that. There are archetypes who just love that attention to detail and compliance. Those people will be great.

So yes, definitely when you go to scale, you need to shift gears and start thinking about the different teams that you have to create and find different archetypes for different areas that you are going to grow including yourself. Because if you're the CEO and the leader, of a certain time at the very beginning, you need to adapt to the new phase of the company. And then, there are people who knows how to adapt, and there are other people who have a hard time adapting.

And same thing for if you are the head of product, for example. If you're a head of product that are extremely entrepreneurial, extremely scrappy, and you just want to try, you need to be able, as the company grow, to grow with it and scale and become that different archetype.

And if you are not willing to do that or you can do that or you don't want to do that, maybe it's time for inviting someone else to take that job, and you come back to do the things that you love because I think the other thing is that, especially when you're in a startup, there's just not a lot of time to coach people, trainings. Really, your core strength, that's what you get. We're not going to change a person.

So, if somebody is of that nature, it's going to be really hard in an environment like a startup, where there's so much pressure and everything is moving so fast, to coach them to be something very, very different. So, in a startup, it's better that you hire for the phase that you are in.

Shane Hastie: So, being conscious of where you're at, and that takes self-awareness to step back.

Self-awareness to know when to let go [15:07]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: A hundred percent. It takes a lot of self-awareness, and that's what sometimes you get too attached to a product and you say you saw the inception and it's like, "Oh, I just want to take it to completion". Sometimes it's not in the best interest of yourself or the company, but it does take some self-awareness. And we talked about it in the book. Sometimes it may be you and you may not be seen, and you may be extending your welcome, and you may be miserable because it's not the things that you love to do.

So yes, it does take some self-awareness to maybe ask yourself, "What is my archetype? What do I enjoy doing?" And there's no shame in saying, "You know what? This new phase, not for me. Somebody else who loves this type of work and take it and run with it. I'm just going to do more of what I love doing".

Shane Hastie: So, that's in the context of a startup. What if I'm not in a startup? What if I'm an individual contributor working inside a larger organization and I've got a great idea that I think would be beneficial to the organization? How do I get my idea in front of the right people?

Communicating great ideas in larger organisations [16:08]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: That's a great topic that a lot of people ask me because we all have great ideas. Especially people and individual contributors who are face-to-face with the problems every day, they do come with great ideas. Sometimes organizations have the right forums for these ideas to come up and show up. They have hackathons, they have periods where people can do pitch and things like that, but sometimes they don't.

So, what can somebody or an engineer who have a great idea, what are some of the things that you can do to get ready to do that? Well, first of all, one thing that I always say is that it's a lot of timing because you may have a great idea, but it's not the right timing for the organization. So, what I recommend is that you get ready because you don't even know when the timing is going to come. It may come overnight. It's like, "Oh, we have this, we need this". And then, you have something ready. You put it on the table. It's like, "How about this idea?" So, you have to be ready and wait for the timing. Sometimes it's not in your own terms, it's in the terms of the company, so you have to be ready.

But then, there is some ingredients that will make you better prepared. For example, it is very important that if you have a new idea and you want to be that entrepreneur in residence, that you want to bring something, it's very important that you show passion because it's going to be tough. It's going to be hard. You're going to be swimming against the current. You're starting from something, and the rest of the world hasn't catch up with you.

So, you need to have that resilience and showing passion, it's going to give confidence to whoever needs to fund your project to say, "That person, it's going to stay on it. It's not going to give up in a couple of weeks and say, 'I want to do something else. This is too hard." So, that's one thing.

The other one is that you need to know the details. It's not enough to come back and say, "Hey, maybe we should," I don't know, "build a rocket to go to the moon". Yes, like, how, when, why? You need to know your stuff. If you don't give confidence that you have done the research, that you know there is a real problem, that you can build a solution, you need to know those details. Otherwise, that idea is going to be like, "Who's this person with this idea?" Yes, idea's dime a dozen. You have done your homework.

The next thing is you need to build a reputation. You need to have small wins. If you don't have credibility in an organization that you are able to deliver, that you are able to build things, it's going to be real hard. If you come new to an organization or a new team and you say, "Hey, I have this idea. I want to build that". "Who are you? Are we going to entrust you with this thing? We don't know".

So, you have to build, little by little, your credibility. It can be in that area or it can be in a different one, but you need to have a little bit of credibility to entrust you to build something new. You need persistence because you're going to hear no a million times. So, maybe it's not the right time. We're talking about timing, right? But are you going to keep going or are you going to give up?

And then, the other thing that really, in my experience, really helps is asking for help. I think that when you go and you pitch an idea, it's like, "This is my idea, and I want to do this thing". People are like, "Okay, cool". But if you go with a different approach that is like, "Hey, I've been thinking about this. What do you think about this idea? How would you make it better?" And people will tell you a bunch of reasons why it's not a good idea, but invite them into the conversation, make your idea better, ask for their help in how to move that forward.

And I think that when you ask people for help, they become invested with you and your idea, and maybe you can enlist them to be part of your support team and help you when the opportunity comes to move it forward. Anyway, those are some of the things that can help to push your idea forward.

Shane Hastie: Shifting focus a little bit, you said you wrote the book because you love learning. What did you learn in writing the book?

Life lessons from writing a book [19:51]

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: I learned that I liked it. Okay. So, because of my past experience, we do have, both in Google and Meta, culture of writing so we do write a lot. Technical and learnings and frameworks, we do write a lot. And also, literature was my favorite subject in high school. I totally dropped it for pragmatic reasons of going to engineering, but I'm an avid reader. I read about a book a week. I love reading. I journal. I've been journaling every day for the last two years, so the dots connected. So, I learned that I love it, and I learned that I like to put things on writing and share it with others to help whoever can get a tip from that.

The other thing I learned is that it's really hard to write a book with three people because it was three of us. It was really hard, both from coordination, coordinating three people. We all have full-time jobs, so timing was really hard. Coordinating three voices, so it sounds and it reads like one, it was really hard.

And through writing the book, I did learn a lot through scaling an organization and through exits, because my co-authors are experts. We are all experts on different areas of the lifecycle of a startup. And while working with Mona and Heather, I learned a lot about how to prepare for an exit of a company. I learned a lot about how to scale a company and sell it to somebody else. So, it has been a bunch of learnings for me. It has been a great experience.

Shane Hastie: Maria, there's a lot of really good advice in the conversation we've had here. If people want to continue the conversation, first of all, where do they find the book? And then, where do they find you?

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: You can find the book in Amazon. I have hard covers of cover Kindle, like all of the things that you want. It's called Sail to Scale: Steer Your Startup Clear of Mistakes from Launch to Exit. And you can find me on LinkedIn, of course. And yes, reach out. I'm excited to talk more whoever wants to talk to me.

Shane Hastie: Thank you so much.

Maria Fernandez Guajardo: Thank you, Shane. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

Mentioned:

• Book: Sail to Scale
• Maria Fernandez Guajardo on LinkedIn