Grounded: Product Management Lessons from the Southwest Airlines Fiasco

Introduction and Webinar Overview

Robyn Brooks | 00:00-01:10

welcome everyone I think we’re going to have a a very Lively conversation today about um lessons from the Southwest Airlines Fiasco we’re going to be speaking about uh technical debt and internal customers um things that are on a lot of folks Minds right now I believe so we have uh two panelists joining us today here at Productside former Productside we have Joe Ghali and Elad Simon I believe um why don’t you uh both just take a moment to introduce yourselves

Joe Ghali | 01:10-01:40

hi everyone my name is Joe Ghali I’m a principal consultant and community group I’m calling in from Milwaukee Wisconsin and the product management space for 20 years and I’m really excited to be part of this opportunity

Elad Simon | 01:40-02:10

um hi everyone I’m Elad Simon I’m the CEO of craft.io um been in the product management space and the management space for about 15 years or so and excited to be here as well and talk about technical debt and also as you can see my beard is a little bit trimmer I’ve decided to uh to work to work on that preparation for the webinar

Robyn Brooks | 02:10-02:30

all right uh I’m Robyn Brooks director of product management here at Productside former Productside and uh excited to be your host for today

About Productside and Craft.io

Robyn Brooks | 02:30-03:20

all right so at Productside we offer full circle product management and product Marketing Solutions um and uh we are excited to host today just a little bit more about us we offer training and workshops into team and individual coaching uh product lifecycle templates strategic Consulting uh foundational training and certifications um all centered around our optimal product process methodology if you’re interested in learning more about us there’ll be a link in the chat and uh just a little bit about craft i o you like do you want to speak to this just for a moment

Elad Simon | 03:20-03:40

yeah sure so thanks for that Robyn um so craft.io is a product management platform uh which empowers product teams to build great products with confidence we are uh excited to to be here today and hopefully and and hopefully interest you with uh talking about technical debt and internal customers great

Robyn Brooks | 03:40-04:10

all right and we are eager to hear your questions as soon as we can get that working hopefully any minute now and also the main question we always get is can you watch this later we understand everyone is busy um yes you will receive a link if some of your colleagues weren’t able to join us live um and uh yeah we’re looking forward to circulating this after the session is over and with that why don’t we uh why don’t we jump in and I will hand it over to you Joe

Setting the Stage: The Southwest Airlines Fiasco

Joe Ghali | 04:10-06:10

yeah hey everyone uh I think some of you may have seen my my blog post if you had we’ll we’ll follow up uh so I was one of the many thought one of the many that were stranded uh over the holidays uh taking a flight back from from Providence Rhode Island to Milwaukee and you know on the drive back it made me think about you know some lessons we can gain from uh what happened with Southwest Airlines over the holidays you know in terms of really understanding you know what what can we what can we leverage or what can we how can we be better as product professionals and you know when we look at Southwest I don’t want to dive into the details you know there were there are really two things that really stuck out to me as a product leader and one of them was hey you know their infrastructure could not handle uh what was happening during that time of the year with the bad weather the holidays the increase in demand we had many flight attendants and Pilots con and sick so their system just couldn’t handle uh what happened and as as a result they had to shut down for a couple of days and reset so craziest as it was it was inspirational for me and I’m really excited for this uh opportunity because we’re going to cover two big topics one is around you know how do you manage technical debt and the other one is around you know how to understand your internal customers

Robyn Brooks | 06:10-06:30

all right and it looks like the Q a works or the chatworks and and the chatwork everything works yeah so I think I think we’re set so thank you from the folks behind the scenes that are helping us out know that is not me with the backpack but that could have easily been me

Joe Ghali | 06:30-06:40

all right the next slide all right so so Tech debt right what is it uh you know it has a bad name you know I was thinking about this today and I’m like gosh I wonder what would happen if we gave it a more friendly name I know in my previous experiences I’ve used the term product life cycle but for those who are newer to this concept you know Tech debt as the slide says it’s the interest you pay to keep your technology current uh it’s something that just isn’t avoidable right it’s always growing it’s think of it like uh buying an item on a credit card there’s always interest that’s accumulated and so much like you know uh making sure you stay current with your credit card bill or making sure you stay current with visiting the dentist or the doctor you it requires ongoing a little bit of 10 to 11 care right there’s constant refactoring um it’s not exactly the glitziest work for any engineer but if you manage it from a from a from a budget perspective it can definitely be manageable because ultimately you know when I try to work with leaders and different organizations in our workshops and our classes it should never be an either or discussion it should be an and I want to do the big new and shiny and I want to be able to pay down our Tech Dot

What Is Technical Debt?

Joe Ghali | 07:30-08:20

so I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to kick off with our first poll question and we want to know you know from the audience how do you handle Tech Decks

Robyn Brooks | 08:20-08:40

okay the polls should be active it is excellent

Joe Ghali | 08:40-09:00

and this is just as a reminder as we’re doing the poll question we want to take your questions throughout the webinar so please we have Robyn on the call here she’s going to help keep uh Elad and I as honest as possible and all your great questions

Robyn Brooks | 09:00-09:20

okay drum rolls results are in are in and uh it’s a it’s a really interesting split so let me share these results so everyone can see and uh yeah so it looks like nearly half allocate capacity during Road mapping planning at least some capacity which is great uh many uh about 17 allocate that capacity during Sprint execution so kind of having a rolling list it sounds like and then uh 29 deal with it as it arises and take a velocity hit and I think that’s fairly common um and I love the seven percent who are honest enough to say they ignore it very long as possible there are much there’s many more than seven percent they’re just they’re just a brave seven percent that’s all that’s that’s the seven percent bravest folks I think on the call so kudos to you that’s fine

Poll: How Do You Handle Tech Debt?

Joe Ghali | 10:30-11:00

so Robyn why’d you go and kick us off with some of the questions I know we had something right now during the call yeah we we do have uh we do have a few coming in so uh let’s take a look here um

Robyn Brooks | 11:00-11:40

okay so uh what is the uh the right percentage of a Sprint to allocate to Tech debt uh that is right I’ll let you start off that one sure sure that’s it I I think like like I think like many answers we’re gonna we’re gonna answer in this uh specific thing about tech that the short answer is gonna be it depends um and I really think it depends on the maturity of the product and where you guys are um from uh at that perspective I think in a lot of companies especially when you start a new product um things are not as um let’s say as uh like detected is not as prevalent or not as dramatic as as one as you will see in more mature product so I don’t think there’s like a a magic number I mean you know the number I have stuck in my head but really is just a random number honestly it’s like anywhere between like you know 15 to 15 to 30 percent like for me that’s like a that’s like a ballpark number of what you would put in for you know anything to do with like bugs and is like ongoing technical debt uh the technical that work but you know if you’re in a company that you know stack is super old um and if you don’t do refactoring um you know you’re gonna get stuck in the mud and you’ll not be able to change anything and you’re not gonna be able to do any progression because you’re stuck from it from it from that perspective then it might take 80 of your Sprint and you know on the on the flip side of it if you are um in a company you know if you just started a new product from scratch you know in the latest and greatest you know front-end and back-end Technologies uh Etc you might not have any so it really is kind of like unfortunately it depends kind of thing at least for my from my side perspective with a again as a ballpark uh as a ballpark I would say uh anywhere between 15 15 and 30 percent would be a common response you hear rather than the right answer for you specifically whoever asked that question I don’t know

Robyn Brooks | 11:40-12:20

um so it sounds like you need to do a little bit of uh of internal um uh discussion around where your product is in the product life cycle like Joe mentioned right and determine kind of what is the interest rate on your technical debt

um so you make sure that you’re that you’re paying it down um I’m curious go ahead no no no no so uh a couple folks are interested in knowing what uh how do you convince your leadership to invest velocity in paying down technical debt because that sounds like something that uh that some folks struggle with I know we’ve all experienced you know having to make the case for especially if you want to pay down some of it use a larger number amount of velocity to uh to actually pay down some of that technical debt so you can lower your interest rate

Making the Case for Investing in Tech Debt

Joe Ghali | 13:30-15:10

yeah I’ll take that one so you know we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our stakeholders and and realize when they’re questioning us they’re not doing it out of spite they’re doing it because probably there’s a there’s a strategy that they’re they’re being held accountable for you and so um you know if we get pushed back we have to we have to almost empathize with our stakeholders like we empathize with our users and our customers we’re going to talk about that a little bit later on so what I’ve seen work well for me in the past is you know as we are in that planning process as we begin to figure out what our plan is or how we’re going to solve for a particular problem I’ve always found it helpful to bring your stakeholders and your leaders along with you in the journey you know help them understand how you know a shortcut today will have an impact in the future in terms of hey yes we may make some shortcuts and and you know hack to get to a certain delivery but then on the back end of that that means in three to five months or six months we’re gonna have to fix it so the more that we can be transparent build trust and really explain the impact you know um you know Southwest isn’t the only company that’s ever suffered from I’m paying you know from not paying attention to their Tech debt there are hundreds of companies that we deal with on a daily basis we just probably don’t realize it so the more you can be transparent the more you can bring them along in the journey um you know there are definitely articles out there that talk about the impact uh I think those are some of the best techniques at least from my perspective Eli anything to add to that

Elad Simon | 15:10-17:00

yeah I mean absolutely I mean the topic of like let’s say positioning technical that in the company and helping people understand why it’s important is really is like you know it’s a fascinating topic because it’s a little bit like going to the gym it’s like it’s the thing that you know we all know conceptually it’s right and we should do it and it like you know it’s good for us but you know if you look at the humanity on average I guess you know a lot of people don’t go to end up not going to the gym and it’s because of that kind of like um or there’s a very clear tendency for for all of us to uh to uh prioritize short-term gains over long-term gains right so that’s really kind of one of those one of those big issues with technical debt because it’s not always imminent I mean in the case of Southwest it became very imminent right so everything broke down but in many cases when you look at technical debt actually you know sometimes there is a healthy balance right so it’s like it’s not like you always have to over invest in it over it and this is why I think from it I mean to to Joe’s Point absolutely taking taking the the leadership and the executive team through the Journey um of explaining you know if we don’t invest you know a healthy portion and whatever that number may be that you know could be the 10 or the 15 or the 20 or the 30. if we don’t invest a healthy portion of that on on an ongoing basis um there’s gonna be a moment in time where we’re going to have no progression or extremely extremely frustrating progression what do you want to do do you prefer this model or do you prefer that model and and by the way it is eventually a choice like everything else it is eventually a choice you can also decide you know you ignore it for a bit and then you overcome it and you know there’s like you know you can do this on an ongoing basis you can do this in Peaks and troughs it really is like at the at the hands of the in my mind eventually the hands of the leadership there’s not like one recipe that fits all sometimes you know I’m a CEO of a growing startup and sometimes you have to do progression because if you don’t do progression then you know you might not get your next customer in you know and that’s and that might be tactically right and strategically wrong from Attack that perspective but you know that’s the thing you have to do right now and so this is really one thing and really to Joe’s Point really something you have to bring the balance to the leadership team to say hey these are the options these are the Alternatives I think ignoring Tech that take that you know and you know the bravest we we spoke about in our poll ignoring it completely is something that you know I just wouldn’t do you know wholeheartedly because eventually it will bite you it’s just a question of when but eventually it’s gonna it’s gonna bite you I mean I was in a company at some point that any any feature progression like anything literally anything if you want to add a column into a into a table view that would take three months to do like anything would take like three months of development and it was it was because the technical that was so big and it was you know the the system was so old that you know it was just it just couldn’t handle any more changes and so you know and that’s really kind of like the the place you really don’t want to get into but absolutely take people for the journey and to just again to to the point you mentioned earlier using stories like Southwest and others by the way the Southwest is really an extreme version of you know you know like a a big kerfuffle that happens because of technical debt but there’s a lot of there’s a lot of other you know mini horror stories that you can also share with management not to necessarily you know terrorize them into decision making but really into um kind of understanding the implications in in a in a more storytelling way not just in terms of like you know this is the right thing to do sometimes that’s sometimes that’s a motivator

Robyn Brooks | 17:00-18:00

there was another really good question uh that I think kind of speaks to this overall category that we’re talking about around technical debt um you know how do you differentiate between um you know what is considered traditional technical debt you know things that need to be in invested in the uh uh the product itself versus infrastructure right or architectural debt um as some call it uh is that all the same category and are they related and then how do you differentiate when you’re diagnosing the sale failure has happened like it did to Southwest how do you just determine whether it was you know technical debt on the product or uh you know related to the infrastructure that hasn’t scaled correctly

Joe Ghali | 18:00-19:10

I mean I to me they’re one in the same right it’s the foundation it’s like if you think about your home you have your plumbing and your electrical right you have to if you want to add the man cave you first have to upgrade the electrical or maybe even the plumbing right there they they work they work in tandem with each other so in the case of Southwest uh and and they and I know this because I worked with them many years ago they were Frugal with their platform you know they’ve you know to their credit their focus was on providing value they were a low-cost carrier you know they were Penny Pinchers you know her color was a genius um but as we sometimes forget they also acquired air tram um they acquired air Trend because they wanted their technology because they knew their technology was getting Antiquated and so you know where a lot of organizations sometimes struggle as in even in those mergers and Acquisitions is you know you’re trying to figure out how to get these two systems together or you’re trying to figure out how to retire an older system and I think you know in the case of Southwest you know they forego uh you know they looked at the new and shiny and what they didn’t do they didn’t keep their infrastructure current it could be the code base it could be the security patches it could just be the technology you know when I worked in funtec uh we used a solution called bootstrap to build a responsive web we had to upgrade from bootstrap 4.0 into 6.0 right there was inherent risks to the business if we didn’t their vulnerabilities and so technical technical debt is more of a umbrella term whether it’s on the front end side or even on the back end side

Internal Customers and Why They Matter

Elad Simon | 19:10-20:10

yeah and to add to that Joe and I one I completely agree with you and to add to that I I it for me that question almost indicates like like um different responsibilities and that’s what I’m really worried like that like that’s where this mindset really worries me in the in the sense that you can think of technical debt on the product side and then technical debt on the r d or development side where it’s like more architectural but the reality is that eventually the um unless there’s a really big architect like unless there’s a really big infrastructure team that does completely it works completely separately from development but even in that case product and this is why why we’re having this conversation you know with product folks product eventually needs to look at the big picture and say like these are all eventually risks that can like drag me down slow me Slow Me Down prevent me prevent me from progression and sometimes you know bring bring to my demise or collapse and so it doesn’t really matter is is that because I didn’t upgrade to the latest technology on the front end or back end or is that because um you know I haven’t I haven’t thought through my you know my feature set as of yet it’s really not about um this is the responsibility of this team and this is the responsibility of that team technical that really is this umbrella kind of concept and I I actually I like the term because I mean it resonates well with me in the concept of death because it’s like it’s one of those things that you have to take care of it’s not like that is something that you really have to take care of rather than you’re just gonna you know you know if you if you ignore death for too long eventually you’re going to be in trouble kind of thing and I think that’s where the analogy kind of works and so I wouldn’t I definitely wouldn’t separate those two um into like you know different things

Joe Ghali | 20:10-21:10

yeah yeah there was a question in the chat Rob and I saw you know in terms of um how do we establish that this the problem was technical debt I can go a little bit deeper on this just briefly so uh so basically their scheduling systems right this is where they were trying to figure out where to place pilots and the um the flight attendants their scheduling system wasn’t on an older platform like it hadn’t been updated right it was you know behind the scenes it was working but it couldn’t handle the size of all the changes that were happening at once you know I I know it’s the um I think the term gets used a lot but the perfect storm but you know when you look at the weather changes you know flight crew being out uh and then um you know their system you know all those things happening at once it couldn’t handle it so when we talk about you know the root cause I don’t want to say and this is not fair of me to even say this it’s not the only reason but it’s a contributing cause to what happened to them over the holidays right we’re gonna we’re gonna go into the internal customer piece of it that this was not anything no no one that was an employee itself was was frankly surprised by this because they knew that their system was older right many of us have worked in organizations where we’re coming in real life goodness gracious this is you know was this built during dos you know was this Windows 3.0 I mean many of us still work at companies where the technologist just hasn’t been updated because you’ve been up you’ve been able to skate by so that was one of the causes to what happened to Southwest

Robyn Brooks | 21:10-21:40

yeah so this seems like a good segue to start talking about internal customers and how Southwest um even when they were investing in their platform and their technology and their products to keep them up to date their focus was more on their their external paying customers than their internal customers um so it seems like a good time to transition into that conversation because that definitely weighs when you’re trying to talk to leadership about where to invest

Joe Ghali | 21:40-22:00

yeah yeah so you know we talk about internal customers let’s let’s first kind of levels up a little bit this is customer service customer service are your representatives they are your front line they’re your internal customers it could be people and accounting people and finance your sales team anyone that you enable them the ability to deliver value to your external customers those are your internal customers and as the slide says they are extremely critical to your success right because their ability to delight and serve your customers you’re paying customers is really predicated on your ability to make their life easier right uh how quickly can they get back to that user how quickly can the user complete their task or get help is really predicated on the internal customers and I think again just based off of what I’ve read you know this type of feedback has been have been given to Southwest upper management for many years the system is slow they were they were doing some um some items behind the scene to try to get by but ultimately this was feedback that was ignored for a long time and they they paid the price for it uh over the holidays

Poll: How Do You Prioritize Internal Customer Work?

Elad Simon | 22:00-23:00

yeah and and by the way Joe and for me that’s really a one is a good segue but it really is like um not the same as technical it’s related of course and that’s why we kind of bundle this this together uh when we talked about this uh the Southwest issue it’s related but it’s not specifically Tech like you know the issue of the internal customer is not just about tech debt it really is it’s on its own a thing um and you know and while we can of course connect connect the two dots together um there’s something about that internal customer and I guess um that’s kind of like what we’re talking about that there’s something about this intern internal customer that is almost by um definition or like almost always at least in a lot of companies I see is kind of neglected right so left to side or like you know that’s not that’s not the priority and so you know I’d love to talk a little bit about about that I don’t know if we have questions about that we can I can just like jump in into it but you know that’s it for me that’s one of the things that is really fascinating about about the internal customer um problem and if you have any more slides on this but um I think that’s always like cool so right let me uh let me launch the poll here we’ve got another question so how do you prioritize your internal customer work uh at your organization whether it’s your direct responsibility or not um how uh how do you how do you prioritize internal customers versus uh versus external customers

Robyn Brooks | 23:00-23:40

foreign

we have about 60 percent allocate that capacity during road map and planning about 10 percent who do it during Sprint execution about 23 percent who deal with it as it arises and another Brave seven percent saying they ignore their internal customers for as long as possible I’m really glad we have some honest folks on the uh on the webinar today I wonder I wonder if it’s the same people

we’re just gonna do progression and we’ll just see how it goes

Prioritization Frameworks and Balancing the Roadmap

Robyn Brooks | 24:30-25:10

so another good question in chat is how do you how do you design a product process that handles this really well how do you prioritize and uh you know technical debt how do you empathize with internal customers like you do with external customers and reserve the and allocate the right amount of capacity to paying attention to each of these things while balancing the velocity that the business expects to achieve uh the the business outcomes

Elad Simon | 25:10-27:10

foreign

yeah I’ll I’ll start I’ll start if it’s okay so I think by the way this is a really interesting point about priority basically about prioritization and how do you prioritize and how do you prioritize I mean technical debt and of course internal customers part of as part of this process um the way I saw it happening and you know there’s a lot of personal methodologies out there in in the world right so you know if there’s a device or ice or West Jeff or or Moscow or you know there’s quite there’s quite a lot of them um the one thing I would say is that um I would I would at least have like one of the one of the prioritization let’s say permutations around kind of buckets and I like the buckets kind of Concepts um because I really believe that that really helps um at least float if there are any gaps that you are willing or not willing to live with right and what I mean by that what I mean by the buckets concept like for example imagine your breakdown and this is something I saw in an article uh on on reforge recently like if you if you if you break down an article if you take an article Etc if you take your work and you break it down to four buckets um one is like Feature work one is pro like a growth work one is um one is around um like scale or technical debt and one is around uh like you know like things that you know help you with like catching up with competition Etc if you have those buckets and then you break down your work to those buckets you are then able to um you’re able to visualize to the people who are who are you know responsible for decision making are you know are you taking anything are you doing anything on this this or that right so because the challenge with a lot of the prioritization methodologies I’ve seen in the past is that you know if you look at it line by line perspective you know sometimes you know in many cases the progression kind of features always win you know like the new shiny features they might always win on any type of protection methodology to do because in many cases they you know they’ll get a lot of you know kind of perceived value because people always are optimistic about you know how much value this feature is going to bring in the future and all that kind of stuff but when you use the bucket methodology then you’re saying hey I know that I’m not neglecting anything you know so that’s like I think for me that’s like a really nice approach to do that um an alternative by the way and again I’d love to hear your thoughts on this Joe an alternative is to also embed within your prioritization framework always embed things like Risk like Risk Management um as part as part of your as part of your priorities so that if something is an you know proposes a potential inherent risk it gets bumped up in the score because in a lot of cases if you just do the simple you know must-have should have could have won’t have kind of prioritization the internal customers are always going to be on the you know they’re going to be on the on the bottom at the bottom of those at the bottom of the right hand side of those lists I don’t know what you think

Joe Ghali | 27:10-28:30

yeah no no uh I I could not agree with you more I mean one that comes to mind again you know everyone who has their own preference but uh the prioritization that method it comes to mind is wisdiff um for those who aren’t aware it’s a weighted shortest job first and it it takes four criteria and one of those criteria is something called risk reduction and opportunity enablement and so what I when I work with product leaders and product managers I tell them that hey although this item that’s packed it may score low on business value it will score much higher in that risk reduction or opportunity enablement which is why I’m a big fan press personally just from my own experiences at you know previous organizations that’s why I like having that particular method for prioritization now the key is and I think Eli would agree with me prioritization is more art than science you can’t just take the number and say well this this one is higher than that the other one you get to look at the Strategic goals of the organization you have to account for dependencies so it’s a little bit it’s a little bit more complicated but I’m that’s why I like incorporating that risk component into any prioritization method

Elad Simon | 28:30-29:40

yeah I agree John and I think that’s kind of what I was kind of alluding to that I think eventually prioritization needs to be needs to be done with multiple lenses yes right so like if you just use a single lens whichever lens is going to be by the way it’s going to lend itself towards something and and you see that in a lot of cases and and of course we work with a lot of product teams here and and and it’s obviously it could be a very like nightmare kind of exercise to say no instead of just like adopting one methodological you need to have multiple methodologies of prioritization to your organization right that’s like agreeing on one with a group of product managers it always is difficult enough kind of thing but the reality is that if you don’t do that and if you don’t actually slice you know kind of slice and dice the data in different lenses you’re gonna miss out on things you might end up doing things that are completely off your okrs for example or you might or you might completely neglect your internal customer for example right so and that’s really kind of one of those things where um having those multiple lenses is so critical for the success for the success of the product organization and rather than just like having a very like single dimensional kind of approach to to doing prioritization the other thing I would say and by the way and and we see and and Joe you and I have been you know we know each other for quite some time and we’ve been seeing a lot of companies uh jointly I would say uh in some companies you actually have people dedicated teams to handle the internal customer right so exactly exactly for that reason because I think there is an understanding and I think probably Southwest got got the balance somewhere wrong in you know in in that sense there is an understanding that uh if you bundle it all into one team that does you know both the consumer let’s say the consumer experience as well as the business internal business needs of the organization in all likelihood the shiny cool consumer glitzy stuff is gonna get even even if you got all the prioritization methodologies right eventually because it’s glitzy because Senior Management loves it because it’s the consumer you know like people are gonna have a more Affinity towards that and that’s why some sometimes again I’m not saying it’s always right for every company but sometimes the right thing to do is to actually segregate a team dedicated for this thing otherwise you know it might get neglected I don’t know if you have any I mean I’m sure you’ve seen this

Personas, UX, and Stakeholder Empathy

Joe Ghali | 29:40-31:10

yeah you know it’s still it’s really interesting I’m actually teaching a one of our public uh OPM our our introduction of product management and you know as you’re talking about this it made me think about and this is a question uh gentleman named Sean in the in the chat asked this about you know stakeholders and their eagerness for profitability you got to start with the basics like I always tell uh product leaders you know do you have a Persona build for your internal customer do you have a customer Journey map you know where in their journey to complete their work are they getting pain points you know where they struggle and then the key is is the uh is the quantify it right because I think when we look at profitability this is where some stakeholders get tripped up and even product leaders get truck they look at profitability only coming from the new shiny object that they have to build when in reality the the profitability can come from saving money because your internal processes are more efficient you’re you’re able to get done more with fewer people and then this economic climate that’s humongous so we almost have to to you know shift the mindset away from profitability comes not just from coming up with a new idea but that profitability can come from how can we take our internal processes and be more efficient at it we can save time we can save money we can save head count and that’s that’s got a pretty big impact on the bottom line so to to that question in the Q a that’s how we have to think about it but in order to get there again going back to even the basics of product management you need metrics right you need to understand how long does it take so that way you can answer the question how much time am I going to save if I make that an answer

Elad Simon | 31:10-33:00

I don’t know thoughts yeah I think by the way Joe on that point um and there’s quite a lot of questions coming in especially around the I mean Robyn correctly from here like a lot about how to convince stakeholder like it looks like that’s like a really it’s like it’s it’s a bubbling up theme of like uh so it looks like we’re hitting it we’re hitting a nerve but how do I convince my leadership that the Baseline that we have today is not gonna stay there right like let’s let’s keep building on top of it but what is the risk how do I how do I express the risk of doing nothing to our existing Technologies and infrastructure and products um while we uh while we are attracted to that new shiny thing um so yeah any any additional Insight on on how to have those conversations what data to present how do you how do you help them really understand that risk so I I have a lot of thoughts about stakeholder stakeholder management in general so I I am a it’s a bit it’s a big talk Topic in my mind and I think one of the things that a lot of products and a lot of product teams get um I don’t want to say wrong but you know our challenge with is the notion of like data is going to win everything and you know I’m gonna yeah I might be I might be slapped you on the wrist for saying that in a group rule product managers who love data and I’m I’m I I love data myself so just don’t get me wrong um but in many cases when you when you deal with senior stakeholders data could be confusing for them in some cases they could be feeling that you know they’ve seen a lot of data but you know it might not be as convincing and so I think the key thing and this is like you know good all stakeholder management 101 kind of thing is to understand who your stakeholders are and what actually motivates them and really before you decide on a single-handed you know I have a one size fits-all way of convincing everybody in the world that I’m right and it’s with data and there’s a lot of people in the world who are not as data driven as the other others and they might be more persuaded with stories with anecdotes with you know potentially with horror stories um or with like you know actually taking them through the experience right so I know for example you know Amazon does this thing I don’t know if it does it anymore but it used to do this um in the past at least that uh you know when you join Amazon you had to do I think a week or two weeks in customers in customer service like every employee in Amazon had to do that I don’t know if it’s like still the same and so and one of the things one of the reasons I love that is because um it provides people with the actual experience that their end users are feeling um as part of and so what I strongly recommend for the product team is to try to find ways to animate let’s say we’re talking about the internal customer you know you’re trying to convince people to invest in the internal customer take them through the action forget about the data for a moment take them through the actual journey in in the case of Southwest for example of booking flight attendants and uh like just show him so that they feel the pain and potentially even the shame that they’re you know they’re leading a company whose processes are so messed up and that might and again I’m not saying this is the wisdom of hindsight is not you know sub-brilliance um but that might be more convincing than heaps of graphs and data points and you know any types of prioritization scoring or any or any of that nature like just take them through the actual pain show them the experience and and I think so for me if I were to recommend one thing is really flex your muscle when it comes to how to convince and you know think of your own life how do you convince your you know your partner or your kids if you have um to do stuff and it’s not just with data it’s fine at least not with my kids I don’t know it’s like I can’t control this adjustment data so um so for sure try to flex your muscle in that sense um Joe any thoughts on that

Joe Ghali | 33:00-34:10

yeah no I mean uh you know her Keller who was one of the founders I think he was the original CEO of Southwest that’s what he was known for that’s why people love working for Southwest because herb would take the time to spend with the bag of town with the flight attendants with the people that are handling the scheduling system and so uh you know as they grew that leadership grew further and further away from their internal customers so I really love you know we don’t really know someone until you spend a day walking on their shoes right he likes from the greatest one of the greatest books of all time to Kill a Mockingbird it’s a quote that’s that’s you know we’ll live on forever and I think it it’s it holds true in this case you know absolutely and I think one one other thing coming to make about this is that [Music] um um the internal customer case is not just for like companies as big as Southwest like this is in all and I see that in all sides of companies and I really think that’s like for everybody on the audience I think this is something that I’m sure everybody feels this like a lot of people feel the pain in your company as well even if you’re like a 50 people or 100 people company there’s always an internal customer that can benefit from product and so make sure that you are to Joe’s Point make sure that you’re in their shoes make sure that you feel their pain and and I think once you do as a product manager then you might have more empathy and you might think you know longer and harder when you do your prioritization you know whether you want to do um just progression just this or you want to mix it up and add some stuff that will help alleviate some of the pains inside the company and it really is a balance right so it’s not it’s not an easy balance to to hit but it is a balance that you need to hit in that sense but a couple questions come in as well around um uh user experience and user interface compared to we’ve talked a lot about sort of that that technical infrastructure type of debt um but how do you measure uh the cost of a poor ux that’s maybe it costs an internal customer three extra clicks to do something when it could be done in one and how do you measure the cost to a large organization like Southwest Airlines even if you don’t have a catastrophic failure because your employees are having to spend an extra 60 seconds to do a task you’re paying them for that 60 seconds and how do you how do you quantify how that adds up over time be a lot I’ll let you take this one I can add on to it

Elad Simon | 34:10-36:00

yeah go ahead go ahead I’ll go ahead and finish no no go ahead okay so so I I think in terms of uh uh in terms of I mean again to kind of echo also Joe’s point we’re we’re an error now the profitability makes makes a lot of difference right so we’re an error now that you know making sure the bottom line is uh uh is important and so actually doing some groundwork of quantifying how long does it take to do a task and then doing the multiples that’s actually where data can actually be very beneficial right so actually doing you know if I have whatever 100 sales support Representatives who are doing something that can take them a minute and it’s taking them 10 minutes and it’s because I haven’t invested in in internal in my in my internal customer then that’s a very easily quantifiable kind of thing to bring to bring to bring up and say like hey I think I can find a solution for this that would really save us a lot of time and Hassle and by the way don’t forget also and that’s one of the things that I’m sure Southwest is now learning or learn the hard way it also prevents churn like from Cut like actually like you know like employee churn eventually eventually if your internal customers as in the employees of the company are using archaic painful tools on their day-to-day life you know to just to do their job and I can think of many jobs that have those tools um at some point they might say well you know what I I don’t want to do this anymore this is like too painful for so and and that that that cost is also massive for the company as well so I would really take those two points in terms of like you know kind of like time saved and then quantify also the risk of churn and kind of like disgruntlement within those teams that we use systems that are that are old and try to quantify that into into a number that you can put in front of in front of people right so I think that’s really the that’s really where actually data kind of like pops up and like becomes like a really powerful tool for for convincing people

Joe Ghali | 36:00-37:00

there was a question in here I was kind of as as Eli was going through that there’s a question here about personas I want to go back to that one sure uh and the question was you know I thought personas are only for your external customers and actually you know what we stress is you know personas can come in many different shapes and sizes they can be your external your person that’s paying for your service or your good but PreSonus can also be for the buyer the person that’s making the decision because personas are also for your internal customers so they may not have to be as elaborate you know when we talk about building personas in our in our workshops and in our training you know we have a nice clean template we have a picture and a quote but at the end of the day you know when we when we emphasize you know getting to know your customers it’s really what are their goals and motivations and whether pain points we’re human right and so getting a good understanding of what those pain points and those goals and motivations are I even you know you don’t have to publish it like you would publish an external persona but heck I’ve done personas on the site for my stakeholders so that I know what are their hot buttons I think Eli had even mentioned this uh earlier in the in the in the discussion there’s nothing wrong with that they can be for anyone that’s getting value from the product or service you’re providing to them okay

Elad Simon | 37:00-38:10

yeah no I I couldn’t couldn’t agree more Joe I mean Persona is definitely not just for the end user of a system or or external customers absolutely an amazing really amazing amazingly powerful tool for product managers to just like and and the extended teams that they’re working with to understand who are you building it for what’s the value that they’re supposed to get from it what are the pain points you know all these things are critical for building products and it’s it’s a very powerful tool which is in many cases neglected right so and we know that you know the joke that’s like one of the things that we we see a lot in companies that they just like skip it you know and they just like I know the user I know the Persona you know like I get it and and really that’s the piece within product management of strategy that is so critical so so critical and you don’t have to it’s not like and by the way it isn’t like a piece you do like on every week you know you’re gonna update your personas on a daily basis on a weekly basis but it is critical to do it and to make sure that you cover a everything everything around that so that you have it and that when you’re building things you’re always going to revisit you can revisit it and you can train people to revisit it so that you can use it well and to that point you know we you know as product leaders we represent the voice to the user you know the voice of the user to your organization and so what we have to do is we build that Persona or that prototype person and then we go back and we validate it you’ll be going we talk to them we walk in their shoes for a day or two you know we do customer visits do internal visits go visit with your accounting team or your legal team or your sales team I always uh my previous organization I would Shadow our sales team you know there’s always conflict with sales for whatever reason there’s conflict with sales and you know at the end of the day you get a lot of value just just Shadow them see what drives them see what they’re getting tripped up on and see if you can make their life a little bit easier so you you build that persona but then you have to go back and validate and update it through those voice of customer techniques that we talk a lot about in our in our workshops in our terrain yeah absolutely and I would say and I I think I mentioned this in the in the previous webinar one of my recommendations and it’s not always possible but if possible not just Shadow do actually absolutely do their job do like go like you know if you’re like let’s take the example of sales because it’s a very easy one if you’re I think a lot of product managers they come to client meetings but when they come as the product manager as I always like to say nobody wants to insult the guy who built the feature by saying to his face you know this is a terrible feature like I think this is horrible it’s very rare that humans would say that to a product manager sit you know put yourself in a position of somebody else have a SoDo it’s still the personality just for a couple of hours and then try and try to see how people react to your to your to your speech then really powerful really I believe really really powerful thing to do for for product managers and and something that not commonly used at least from what I’ve seen

Final Q&A, Offers, and Closing Remarks

Robyn Brooks | 38:10-39:00

we got time for what a couple of questions Robyn yeah so we’ve had uh several several good ones come here let’s see um really really great engagement in in chat by the way this is a good Lively conversations happening uh and folks sharing tips with each other which I love to see um and uh a good question here are um uh how good ux is about how easy it is for a user to understand something which is a combination of right good design and consistency so how do you measure how well a user understands and comprehends the product um you know how what can You observe that would that would help you with that or or if you have access to them what would you ask them you know when it comes to the usability of the product I mean there are different techniques for this right I’ll start off with this one you led you know when I was uh online publishing you know when we were releasing a new capability or feature we would use user testing and we would ask them to complete a given task and we’d watch them we’d record their Mouse and see if how long it would take for them to complete a given task so it could be as something as simple as that uh you know it’s more qualitative uh but then there’s also MPS scores you know are they referring you to their friends are they writing reviews about your product in Google reviews or if you’re a restaurant or you provide a service in Yelp or any other any any other way to get that feedback those are usually indications of satisfaction and happiness with with your product I don’t know if I do want to add to that

Elad Simon | 39:00-40:10

yeah well I I’m I was about to say I mean we’re kind of like five minutes to ending and at the start like the I mean happy to talk about I’m happy to open up the conversation as to how you do to good ux testing and and but it’s like it’s it’s probably not gonna We’re Not Gonna conclude it in in in the last five minutes but a very valid question I would say you know in the context of the internal customer um there is a little bit of the art of good enough um and and I think that’s where you know there’s there’s a little bit of which is by the way I I think it’s kind of uh interesting on its own when you have external cost when you’re building for external customers and ux of course to your coin Joe is is harder to measure then you have to do either qualitative or quantitative measurements you know either by uh measuring events and Telemetry of the product or by qualitative like you know watching recordings or even interviewing in usability testing Etc um uh with the internal customers um measuring ux in many cases is really like it would be much more I would say probably much much more qualitative than quantitative um with a lot of like um you know is is there noise and that’s really the benefit of like having an internal Customer because it’s in your organization industry you can kind of like you know talk to the leadership and talk to the people in you know at the in your company and just ask hey if this is this process painful for you guys tell me tell me more and then trust me because it relates to their life into their day-to-day job they will share as as much as you want and more about the pains uh from a ux or you know usability perspective about your internal products so I would say actually funnily enough in the case of internal customers and external customers like usability or ux is very differently measured um and and actually easier fun again in the context of Southwest it sounds kind of funny but it’s much easier to know and Joe I think you mentioned it earlier everybody knew nobody was surprised when those systems collapsed and eventually they moved into like you know actually phone booking of like staff no very few people internally were very surprised about it because they knew the system was not you know up to scratch both from a technical their perspective and from a usability perspective so it was kind of like you just have to talk to people rather than like do a massive complicated usability testing kind of thing

Robyn Brooks | 40:10-41:00

all right well we are coming up to the top of the hour so I would like us to start to wrap things up here and uh wanted to quickly mention our LinkedIn uh group uh we did have a little bit of technical difficulties folks uh folks thank you for bearing with us uh through this webinar today um but we also do have an offer for everyone uh because of that um as an appreciation we’re offering an exclusive discount on courses and self-studies to any of our attendees uh to take 25 off use the coupon code in the chat grounded 25 on any of Productside uh courses to uh to dive in more right we talk a lot about user experience and how to allocate technical debt and so forth so um join our LinkedIn Community to keep continue the conversation like I said I saw a lot of great conversation happening in the chat um and look forward to seeing it uh continue there any closing thoughts elab or Joe

Joe Ghali | 41:00-41:50

I I just think it goes back to um empathy you know empathy with your users your internal users and empathy for your tech leads your engineers and understanding you know they’re trying to help you build and innovate and we have to empathize and understand that in order to get there we have to we have to make investment in our time and that’s in in the in the in the form of tech debt so uh next time you see your Tech engineer give that individual a hug and say thank you because they’re without them you you aren’t successful in your job I can’t top that Joe I can hugging people is like you know that’s like that’s a good small hobby line I know I know we’re living it’s all good I’m just saying it’s it’s a it’s a good karma ending for this so I I think that’s I think that’s good for for me as well um so cool thank you guys thanks all right thanks everybody and thanks a lot for everyone and thanks Robyn for for uh managing a lot of this uh very hectic and cool a session so oh yes we did have several uh several comments about uh how we could we could talk we do a whole session on on user experience and uh particularly in webinar clients yeah next one all right all right I appreciate everyone bearing with us and again great conversation um really enjoy this session let’s go forth and uh see if we can be some change makers and and think about uh Tech dad and internal customers all right thank you thanks everyone