Katie Reilly: Winning is when all boats rise

11/01/22 • 61 min

Katie Reilly, long-time product management leader, describes how product management is the glue between technology, sales, and go-to-market and how any organization can benefit from product management. Katie and Tom discuss how the discipline of product management is needed to make sure a product meets the needs of the market. Tom asks Katie how she applies product management to her own life. Katie tells how winning is when all boats rise - helping others achieve outcomes and how improving the offering of a business leads to better outcomes for the business. Tom and Katie talk about how parenting is like running a start-up. Katie talks about listening first and making a decision based upon those inputs. Katie tells why she loves product management, how it's central to a business but always has new challenges, and how having a direct impact on the business is important to her. Tom and Katie talk about kids and sports and having fun. Tom suggested not making kids play sports if they are not good at sports. Katie tells how series A and series B companies are where she has the most fun. Tom asks Katie about how to close the gap between founder vision and what customers want to do. Katie talks about prioritization and creating business cases for development, building a customer success team to manage inbound requests and to do outbound support and research, how she assess product managers, how she helps an organization move from web to mobile, and why knowing why something needs to be done is so important. Finally, Katie tells how she wishes she had thought bigger with her start-ups even though things worked out great.

Previous Episode

Robert Carroll – Interface design and asking, "What do you want to achieve?"

Robert Carroll, successful entrepreneur and product leader, tells Tom about his journey as a father and how he’s approached different stages of his career based on his personal needs. Robert tells about an early digital video product he built that sold for $300,000 a unit, and then discusses how a technical advantage can evaporate quickly. Tom asks if it's better to be consistently bad in software interfaces than to be uniquely good. Robert talks about how markets define standards like the QWERTY keyboard. Robert tells about creating one company to help people with physical disabilities use computers effectively and another one that helped Fortune 500 companies apply principles of product management to their sales processes. Tom and Robert talk about the psychology of pricing and why companies choose expensive options. Tom asks Robert how he decides between self funding and getting outside investors when he starts a new business. Robert talks about how understanding intent when founding a business is critical for knowing how to fund the business. Robert tells about the founding of his three businesses and how different ideas about what he wanted to achieve affected each. Robert tells how product managers need to understand the capabilities and deficiencies of the technology their products use. Tom and Robert talk about learning styles and teaching strategies, managing technical teams, and being a servant leader. Robert tells about defining clear goals for teams and his resistance to "embracing ambiguity" instead of being clear about objectives. Finally, Robert talks about being in the “fourth quarter” of his career and how he's defining what he wants to do next.

Next Episode

Ben Kettle – Why product and sales are the same job

Ben tells the story of how he started his sales consultancy. Ben talks about getting laid off and how he helped his team, many of whom were also laid off, through the process. Ben says if you're not getting pulled into working for yourself then maybe you shouldn't do it. Tom talks about how anyone who is in the arts like an actor or a writer is in business for themself. Ben and Tom talk about how getting your first customer is what marks the start of any business. Tom and Ben discuss how we take what we're good at for granted and often give it away. Tom tells how effort is not correlated with value. Tom and Ben talk about how paying for a big outside name helps win internal arguments you can't win on your own. Ben and Tom discuss private equity minders and dumb questions from smart people. Ben talks about the managing by spreadsheet crowd and why they are often over valued. Ben admits revenue levers are critical to understand but not sufficient for success. Ben quotes Marty Cagan about how quantitative data tells what's happening and qualitative data tells why. Ben and Tom discuss how to impress someone by doing them a favor. Tom tells how his mother-in-law Betty has a super power for listening and putting people at ease and how that power translates to business success. Ben tells how he interviews people and what he looks for in sales people and why he loves YouTube. Ben asks people, “How do you know you work hard?” to discover if someone is outcome motivated and competitive and what kind of feeling to they have for their own effort. Tom ends the interview with discussing resistance, a concept Steven Pressfield writes about in his book “Do the Work.”