Transcript
Alex Smith: Where product meets design is brought to you by Fuego UX, a UX research strategy and design consultancy. Hi, Sarfraz. Thanks so much for joining the show today.
Sarfraz Nawaz: Thanks, Alex. It's great to be here.
Alex Smith: Yeah, for sure. And to get started, can you give the audience a quick insight into your journey in product?
Sarfraz Nawaz: I've been fortunate enough to you know, be part of like early product teams when people, you know I believe it was back in the day at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, if I'm not wrong, coined the term program, then, you know, Microsoft had this third discipline outside of development and testing called program management. And the goal was, you know, some flavor of product leaders, you know driving initiatives and doing a combination of longer term vision as well as execution. So I've had a chance to experience that early at Microsoft, you know, getting into search engines and working at Bing and then, you know, have seen how the role has evolved over a period of time with, you know, the likes of Google and others and startups here in the Bay.
Alex Smith: Awesome. Yeah. Are you ready to hop into the lightning round questions?
Sarfraz Nawaz: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Alex Smith: All right, let's do it. What's a common myth about product management?
Sarfraz Nawaz: People assume the role of product managers for the most part as project managers, which is all about driving features, shepherding people, herding cats, you know, whatever you call it. And I think some of that has changed here in the U. S. with tech companies, but continues to be the case with SIP, you know, like the product owner role. In Europe, especially, right? So, which is all about agile based execution. And, and I think that's not the right definition for a product. A product manager, you know, on the flip side should be about driving value and defining viability for your product. So value in the sense, why should customers sort of go for your product versus competitors? Viability would be, you know, having a really strong case and a framework to define why should the company and your team work on a product? How do you sell it? Is it viable in terms of monetization, from a legal context compliant, so on and so forth. So I think that's the core.
Alex Smith: What, what's the most important lesson you've learned?
Sarfraz Nawaz: I started as a product manager. You know, having worked as an engineer, I did computer science, information retrieval, search engines back in the day, got into program management and then product management essentially. And I think the biggest learning for me starting out early in my career was, you know, acquiring skills on empathy and, you know, being able to delegate.
Alex Smith: Definitely, definitely relevant. What's one thing about product that nobody agrees with you about?
Sarfraz Nawaz: For me, it's the trade off between. being detail oriented versus, uh, you know, paying, paying real attention to finer details and, you know, thinking bigger picture and connecting dots. I, you know, probably you would debate on where a good product manager sits in that spectrum, right? I think this varies as you grow as a product leader. But for me, it's like, you know, product management has to do a lot with resonating with your customers. What you're trying to do resonating with your customers, having the, you know, the bigger landscape in mind, a good artifact to think in this context is what is referred to as a service blueprint, for example, not many people talk about it. But it's like, okay, these are the touch points, this is the customer journey for your product. What are the different layers underneath it, right, from an operation standpoint, from a product infrastructure standpoint, from analytics standpoint, from ops standpoint, that are required in meeting full fledged experience for that product, you know, within your customer base, right? So having that view, having the competitive, competitive landscape. So, that's a bigger conversation. But something that, you know, people do not pay enough attention to, I believe, right? When you're down in the trenches, if you will.
Alex Smith: What's an underrated or indispensable tool for product management?
Sarfraz Nawaz: Tools which are useful in sort of design thinking and, you know, connecting these bigger problem spaces together. I think they are going to be more and more relevant. The other part of that, you know, the other element to that tool set would be. You know tools which are highly collaborative. So product board for example is a good mix of all of that. You know lay that, you know, there's a strong focus on product value, which I like leading up to portfolio definition and you know portfolio level value and benefit to the organization. I think I think that's good with kpis. Mural is another good tool around design thinking. It doesn't have to be a product tool, but you know, more or design thinking when you think of strategy than laying into design and execution. So I think those are good and not to mention the Miros and Jira. So probably didn't pick one tool for you, but I, that's how I think.
Alex Smith: Love that. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone starting out in product?
Sarfraz Nawaz: To focus on your superpower, I think as a product manager. Whether it's closely engaging with engineering at really being able to define that engineering infrastructure with data science, maybe in this case with AI, having the right skill set to, you know, to basically say, okay, here are the design choices we need to make with, you know, your AI hardware compute versus fine tuning and all of these concepts there. Or it could be on the marketing side. Your, you're great at marketing you know, with product, but I think I would sort of think of all of these as, you know, essential superpowers to have and choose which ones something that you stand for. Right?
Alex Smith: Awesome. Well, thanks for, thanks for doing all the, the rapid fire there. I think one of the things that keeps coming up through what you're saying is like gen AI or, or AI in general. What are the implications of AI? This has very much been the year of AI on product management going into 2024 and beyond.
Sarfraz Nawaz: You know, like any other discipline, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, the AI based experiences or Gen AI based experiences will refine some of these tools and hopefully help optimize product processes you know, processes that are relevant to, you know, product managers, how you build products and how you engage with your stakeholders. So hopefully that'll help refine some of this and, you know, drive efficiency when it comes to product management. And I think that that's going to happen with tools like Productboard and everybody else, you know.
Alex Smith: I want to switch gears here because I think you have some unique perspective to lend. I think, you know, product management, if you're on LinkedIn or if you're in the Bay, everyone's thinking SAS, everyone's thinking tech, but there's a lot of large legacy regulated industries that also have growing product management functions. And, and you're, you have a lot of experience in that realm as well. Tell me about growing adoption of product, or I guess like almost leveling up the product maturity, um, within an org that might be regulated or might not be like a SaaS company where it's, it's expected. Right?
Sarfraz Nawaz: One critical area to think about is you're not functioning like, like a large online product, like a Google or a Facebook at this point, right? So there's only so much you can experiment. So that's number one. So being really cognizant of the fact that, okay, it's a highly regulated industry. There are certain products you could probably experiment with, others you probably cannot. Right? And having that early view of what your customer pain points might be, what, what's, what, what room do you have to play with the product rather than just throwing something like, you know, on a search engine on a media platform. And you, you could get feedback and, you know, it made that you cannot do as much right with the regulated, with these kinds of regulated products. To your point around large legacy companies again especially in banking and finance and healthcare probably auto as well, is you've got a lot of stakeholders to deal with. So, more often than not, your product success is very closely tied to your stakeholder success, right? Which ultimately, yes, will be customer benefit, but you have to be really thinking and focused on stakeholder management. I think that's a core skill you know, within these companies, not to mention it is as important in a Microsoft or so, but I think so much more here with different lines of businesses and, you know, different product play product areas. I think that's a big skill to have. Number three would be, you know, not just these legacy companies, but just you know, companies which are focused on hardware and, you know, code manufacturing and, you know, maybe logistics, R& D, you know, there are, there are, I mean, these could be startups, these could be big companies. So I think the way to approach it would be slightly different than a legacy web based company, right? Building SaaS products or building mobile applications. There's so much more focus on deep sciences and, you know, R&D. So the, the, the execution periods might be different. How do you still try to have an agile, adaptable culture? I think those are questions to, to, to think about.
Alex Smith: Sarfaz, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these insights.
Sarfraz Nawaz: Thanks Alex. Yeah. I've listened to some of your prior interviews and I'm super grateful for this opportunity.
