A little over a year ago we embarked on a bi-weekly journey to learn from some of the best and brightest product and design leaders through our series called “Product Hero.” After 30 interviews we figured it was time to pause, collect our thoughts, and see what we’ve learned from these fascinating conversations.

1. Product Heroes:
What We Learned From Interviews With 30 Top Product Professionals

2. A little over a year ago we embarked on a bi-weekly
journey to learn from some of the best and brightest
product and design leaders through our series called
“Product Hero.” After 30 interviews we figured it was time
to pause, collect our thoughts, and see what we’ve
learned from these fascinating conversations.

3. 1. Product Hero background & experience
2. Getting started in product, skills needed, and advice
3. Gathering user feedback and measuring effectiveness
4. Failure and what’s missing from the discussion
Contents

4. 01
Background & Experience

5. Before we dig in, let’s take a look at what’s behind
these Product Heroes. We looked at things like,
demographics; Time practicing their craft; Their
experiences and background; The size of their
companies.

6. Design
20%
Product
80%
The majority of our Product Heroes are
responsible for leading product at their
companies…
Manager
13%
Sr/
Director
17%
VP/
Executive
70%
…and serve in VP or executive roles

7. Doctorate
3%
Masters
40% Bachelors
57%
Scan a collection of job descriptions,
and you will likely find a bachelors
degree as a requirement. Forty three
percent of our Product Heroes have
earned an advanced degree.

8. There is no formal product
management school, major, or
degree, so most come from a
variety of backgrounds. Heroes
feel this only adds to the role as
it draws in people from different
backgrounds and experiences.
0
2
4
6
8
10
Engineering/Dev
Business/M
ktg
M
usic/Fine
Arts
Design/UX
English
IT
M
gm
t
Law
&
Philosophy
PsychologySocialW
orkSpeech

9. The majority of Heroes have
5-10 years of relevant
experience, and almost half
have been product leaders for
>10 years.
0
3
6
9
12
15
<5
years
5-10
years
10-15
years
15+
years

10. 1-50 employees
51-500 employees
501-5,000 employees
Company Size
No. of
Product Heroes
9
12
5
45,000+ employees
Our Heroes’ companies
range in size from <10
to international
corporations of 10,000+.
The majority are in the
11-50 employees range.

11. 02
Getting Started, Skills &
Advice

12. Few Product Heroes started out in product. Some end
up there almost by accident. The one common thread
is an intense curiosity about the “how, why, and what”
of building customer-centric products. With an
intense focus on user experience, they value
outcomes over outputs and delivering value over
shipping features.

13. “I got tired of doing things that never saw the
light of day, so I started asking ‘why’ and
never stopped asking.”
- Marco Mirandize, HomeAway.com
“I was a software developer for about 10
years, but the intersection of technology and
business was always my focus, so product
always seemed like the best home for me.
Now I’ve spent the last 15 years in product.”
- Jason Moens, Flywire
“I was always more interested in
understanding why people were using
technology. I was really starting to ask
more and more questions about not
only how people were using the
technology but more about why and the
bigger business problem.”
- Barbara Dumery, Imprivata

14. The ability to establish and nurture collaborative
relationships between Product, Design, and
Engineering are important skills for product leaders. A
leader must be able to bridge the gap between
experts in each of these areas.
Domain expertise, while helpful, is less important than
being relentless about understanding what motivates
users.

15. “At the end of the day it’s a generalist type
job that requires strong leadership, extreme
curiosity, the willingness to assume that you
don’t have the answers, and actually
reveling in that.”
- Hill Ferguson, Doctor on Demand
“As a user experience designer or a product
person, you have to think of how you can
help people when their attention span for
what you want to do is two seconds. Giving
people a meaningful experience when you
only have these tiny moments.”
- Joe Ranft, Cinch Financial
“Communication is an important and
challenging component of what we do
as product managers. Communicating
with your audience, your customers,
and your stakeholders is one thing, but
communicating to people who really
don’t understand product management
as a discipline can be tricky.”
- Vanessa Ferranto, Zipcar

16. Be the voice of the customer. A product leader has to
be that voice. You are going to be their advocate, so
you really need to be able to walk a mile in their
shoes. Take more time to make sure you are asking
them the right questions.
Data is very valuable, but data on its own isn’t helpful
without qualitative research.

17. “The best piece of professional advice came
in the form of a concept called NIHITO -
Nothing Interesting Happens In The Office.”
- Cait Port, Zmags
“Become BFFs with your team. I think that’s
step number one. The best products I ever
created were with the best team I ever
worked on.”
- Melissa Perri, ProduxLabs
“Really understand how to communicate
across teams. That’s the other thing we
don’t talk about: how to communicate
up, across, and down an organization.
You are the person that has to
communicate through all three of those
verticals.”
- Nate Walkingshaw, Pluralsight

18. 03
Gathering Feedback &
Measuring Effectiveness

19. Product leaders collect user feedback in a variety of
ways including formal user communities, surveys, and
from within their products. Most all agree that testing
and validating BEFORE you build and all along the
way are key.

20. “I’m on site with clients as much as two to
three times a month. We become an
extension of their team. By doing that we
can get early, informal feedback on potential
upcoming features.”
- Jeremy Dalnes, Pulse Insights
“When it’s early concept testing, that’s when
we’re moving fast. It’s kind of like design
sprints, although in our company we call it
design swats, like a SWAT team, or a group
of specialists coming in to solve an urgent
problem.”
- Emily Rawitsch, Invaluable
“It’s a pretty experimental process
driven by empathy, user insights, and
data to help us reach our ultimate
outcomes. When we have specific
outcomes in mind, we look at all of the
product moments we might be able to
improve to reach that goal. We
experiment with smaller things, see how
they work, and track the data over
time.”
- Steve Selzer, Airbnb

21. Measuring team effectiveness and product success is
one of the hardest things for leaders to do, and
there’s no magic or silver bullet. The teams that are
doing it well are measuring success through the lens
of achieving their business goals.

22. “It’s really hard to pin any sort of
measurable outcome directly on the
product manager that they’re not
dependent on somebody else for.”
- Janna Bastow, ProdPad
“I think that there’s an aspect of just
making sure we’re continually delivering
the right value and that the teams
understand the “why.” That has a similar
translation into how we measure
success with our customers. Are they
happy and do they find value in our
products?”
- Vanessa Ferranto, Zipcar
“We’re always thinking how we can
shrink that process of going from an
idea through a validation process with
our customers. We have some metrics
around that that we’re setting up.”
- Tim Buntel, XebiaLabs

23. 04
Failure & What’s Missing

24. Building before learning. Coding and launching
without prototyping, testing, and validating. Not
focusing on product-market fit. These are some of the
biggest reasons for failure.

25. “Always follow the number one problem, not
the number two problem..”
- Mike Brown, PatientsLikeMe
“Our biggest mistake was assuming that we
knew our market and that we were our
market. Now, what we realized was that we
were just two people with our specific way of
working, and that our way of working did not
gel with how other people worked.”
- Janna Bastow, ProdPad
“We didn’t have a product that people
were drooling over. Sometimes we
default to, “I can make it look better or I
can make the interaction a little
smoother” but we should really be
asking is, “Is this the product that
people actually want? Is this the product
that people will actually use?.”
- Barbara Dumery, Imprivata

26. Product leaders feel like there’s not enough talk
about, well, product leadership. Product managers
don’t actually produce anything themselves. A big
part of the job is being able to inspire teams, arm
“doers” with information about the problems you are
trying to solve for your users.

27. “I think the missing pieces are humanity and
morality – we should really see those as
requirements of being a product manager.
You need to be strong in that. You need to
really know who you are when you’re getting
into this.”
- Marco Mirandize, HomeAway.com
“I would love to see people talking more
about love when it comes to product. People
also need to be a little more humble as well.
Even in product design, I see a lack of
humility.”
- Brian Brackeen, Kairos
“How do you make sure that there’s
alignment and still autonomy? The
bigger you get, there is an urgency to
have more of a top-down, command
and control approach, where then you
start to squash some of that innovation
and some of that speed.”
- Barbara Dumery, Imprivata

28. Are you a Product Hero, or do you know someone
who is?
Let’s talk —>

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