YouSaid · the spoken record

Christine Itwaru

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-02-16
most recent: 2023-02-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, we partner with the program management team in the tools that they use for product development stuff. I would say it's more what are the things that the product manager needs in order to be successful? And so we look at Pendo, right? We do use our own product, like I mentioned quite a lot. Salesforce is another thing. So how does that all plug into our own product and what data are we looking to get out of there? So RPMs have a complete picture in Pendo. Trey is another one I mentioned. Zapier was another one that we had used. So it's more about the PMs tool stack versus the PMs planning tool stack if you want to draw that distinction.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very long time. I'm seeing a lot of noise around guides, so I take all of that, we pull it all together, and we give it to our head of research and say, all right, let's all make sense of all this together, right? Is this something that is in line with the direction that the product team is going, the guides team, or is this something that we're going to need to dig a little bit more into to see if their efforts right now where they're growing are not where they should be going?”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Report into our head of UX, and they are responsible for proactive research and making sure that we are aligning to our strategy, right? And saying, okay, here's what our folks are saying, here's why we're going after this market or this new thing that we're doing. Let's start going out there and validating or checking with some of these key personas, right? And what we need to do. And then they are also a part of the ongoing development process or product development process. you know testing stuff out making sure that they're doing user interviews and all that good stuff so they sit as a partner to us we work very closely together and again i'll give you that example of voice of customer which is we have all of this input coming in from our customer success or post sales teams and we know we're about to invest in our guide's area of the product we have all of this what do we do with it will we couple that with i'm personally responsible for nps or was for”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and again, I'll say there's probably several times every company is doing it in their own little bit of flavor. I'll tell you that here and from a couple companies that I'm seeing outside Appendo, our user research team sits with our UX team.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't know if other companies are doing it like that, but I was very proud of the way we ended up doing that here. But the PM, yes, got risk data, high priority deals, feedback from our feedback product. What are we hearing from prospects versus paying customers? What segments are saying what? All that stuff got fed over to the PM and then validated through our research team or disputed through our research team, which is really cool. This is a really good partnership with our research team. But on the other side, what was really nice too was We were able to educate our revenue team on behalf of the product team and say, you know, guys, like not everything requires a product change. So if you're saying there's customers that have friction around this one area of this product, maybe it's enabling. Maybe it's something that we need to help you guys understand a little bit better so that you can make their experience better. Or maybe we need to update our just very simple things like that that just ended up coming up this voice of customer process.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one part of it. We actually developed this really cool way of doing it here at Pendo, which is the transparency is a word that we Love here. And what we found that there was just not this need for the revenue org to be transparent and say, hey, this is what we're hearing. Product people please listen or vice versa. Like here's what we're doing for your customer. There was this interesting moment where we realized that our sales team was screaming for something and our success team was screaming for something else, but our TAMs were looking at something else, right? And so they're all wonderful, relevant things that our customers wanted. But we were like, wonder if they're aware that like they've got all these amazing things and they're kind of, you know, talking, they're talking about it separately. And RPMs, they would get the whole readout, you know, with us, but we brought those folks in a room together. And it was really cool because it was like, I think our head professional services team at one point was like, whoa, like this could truly impact what we do from an onboarding perspective. Now we have this data and then how do we then strengthen this area in the product? So it wasn't just about the”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and facilitating the product development lifecycle? Are they doing things with the rest of the organization? So I feel like this one's a little bit up in the air. Some are actually agile facilitators as well. But I am seeing emergence of some companies that have the program management team under the products umbrella to help with this massive amount of things that they have to manage across the board.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ultimately drives our experience for Pendo ourselves. You get very meta here. That person was responsible for that. And that's all also a part of the data component. The other things that we're seeing are more along the lines of content strategy and being really intentional about making content and education a part of the product process, right? And the delivery process. So taking a look at how they maximize the outcomes from the outcome that the product manager is driving so that they can help increase retention, growth, and all that good stuff for the product. Those are some of the things that we're seeing. And then there's also this component that happens, or this piece of it that happens in the beginning when you're standing your product ups for a product team that does not have much process in and that's the process piece and that's the bit that's a bit controversial because folks are like is this just program management is this just a different flavor of agile and so what we're seeing is this you know what are these folks doing are they managing”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do voice of customer in two ways you can do it one in like this process way where you're feeding it to a really mature long standing product team who has mature product or you have this voice of customer thing that you have to do for teams that are actually building something new and they're really trying to move fast. So how do you really get them what they need in order to experiment and iterate on the next thing that they're doing? That's one aspect. Another one is tooling. We see this more for folks who don't yet have tools under control in their product org and I'm not saying everybody has this right. We had someone at one point handle whatever tools connected to Pendo and make sure that those systems are set up for maximum outcomes for the product manager. And so Pendo's connected to Salesforce were connected to Looker, we're connected to all these tray, all these different. And so what does product manager need to achieve out of all those things?”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything else still has to get. And so I think that, yes, there was a point of friction, but I feel like now it's been a nice change where I'm seeing people in products say, no, I want to do product jobs now. Who was a former product? And the second part of that, you said, let's go through the list of tactical things. And yes, voice of customer management is definitely one of the things that we're seeing more, I would say, I don't want to say mature because then I feel like I'm saying mature your peak. But the ones who have matured a bit, I feel like they are focusing more on the voice of custom element. So quantitative analysis, qualitative, bringing all of these different inputs that would traditionally be handled by product manager through, you know, looking across the aisle at their PMM or looking at different data sources to the surface when they're going through their product development lifecycle. And really figuring out to what that balance is, I think there's an art.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, I've got this question a lot from product managers who are concerned about the rise of this role or product leaders who are concerned that it was going to create some sort of controversy or friction between product ops people and product managers. And the way I coach people to get around that is really, what are your people responsible for? What are you holding them accountable to? Are you holding the product manager accountable to elevating the strategic insights so that they are going to elevate it to everyone else and then everyone else is going to go out there and build the thing and drive the value? Or are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the customer in whatever way possible, especially going on and talking to the customer, please don't anybody ever take that red? And really spending time with their engineers and the customers in order to drive a better experience, right? And so if they've got to spend all this time, which is our most valuable asset with those two entities,”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, how do we give them the structure that they need to thrive, right? Because the CPO is in charge of so much more than product people have historically been in charge of, right? I'll probably talk about Marty Kagan several times here, but I really do admire and respect him. I think one of the things that he always talks about as future teams versus, you know, high performing teams and focusing on outcomes. And CPOs went from, okay, deliver, deliver, deliver to really increase business metrics or, you know, just help drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product. And you really have to figure out what that means for the product team at large.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Face a whole lot better. All of a sudden, we started to see that rise. But we were all experiencing this massive amount of growth across some of these startups and really rapidly growing companies. And we're also moving more towards these product-led tactics, product-led growth. And all of these things, I feel like, made this perfect storm for product operations to come in and sort of start calming things down. I personally believe there's this natural evolution that happens at any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization. So think about marketing or sales, right? This has started to happen with product managers. And for me, I was sitting there going, well, you can appoint a PM to liaise with other ops teams in the business, but at what risk, right? Their product portfolio, the growth and adoption of their product, all these goals that they have to hit today in order to build a better tomorrow for their customers. And so I feel like that was the moment to say,”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll dive in, and it's like the customers started to come up and we started to feel a little bit more. And I felt like there was this huge need for voice of customer management and synthesis of both this qualitative and quantitative data as a theme that I saw arising across our customer base or even just folks that were reaching out about this role as they saw Pendo was putting it down. There was a lot of pain around internal alignment and general transparency to stakeholders up across your revenue team members. And then for a lot of people during this time, growth was a massive propeller of the need for product ops. I remember just sitting here in this office and getting these random, every industry almost like, I'm thinking about doing this and I really need to do this pandemic. It was growth during the pandemic, especially within industries such as home furnishings and making their living.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The birth product hops and I start laughing and he was like, I'm telling you, it's everywhere all of a sudden. And everybody's just like, we need something. We need to make product better. And I thought that was awesome because we had already started talking about it, right? And so it took me a bit to understand what was going on across tech that was making this thing so big. And I'm very grateful because we have so many great customers that reach out and say, help us understand how you're doing this. And I'm like, well, help you understand what's going on. And so for me, it went beyond the problems that we would solve as a product team with the Pendo product. It went into Pain that you're feeling within your product team that trickles out ultimate business, right?”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is interesting because as a former product manager and product leader, I don't think the things are new. I absolutely, and that's what I go back to the story about Ben, it's like I'm like, no, none of this stuff feels really interesting and, you know, it's just stuff that we have to deal with in product. And so the problems have always been there. I think maybe that is because I have a product background. And so I felt that pain very acutely. But I will say for the majority of people who I speak to who don't have that product background, they're coming from consulting or from technical success or from some other group marketing maybe. Yeah, it does feel relatively new because they're starting to dive into that space a little bit. But I will say that for me in particular at Pendo, it was the summer of 2019 that this really picked up and I remember a colleague of mine shout out to Shannon. He's no longer with us, but he is one of the original people on the Pendo product team. He said You know, I think this is the summer.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had many ways of describing this in the past, and it generally centered around the ladder of what I'm going to tell you or the second part of this, but I'm breaking it down now into two simple things. One is it is a thing you do. Product operations for a VP or a head of product or product manager is the creation of some sort of system that allows you to thrive or allows your team to thrive in product management. And the second is what we've seen more of over the last couple years, and it's the more common definition, it's the emergence of the role itself is why it's so common. It's a person or the people, the group of individuals who are strong partners to the product manager, and then for more mature product ops teams end up people being more strategic advisors to the head of product, so your CPO or your VP again when it comes to data, qualitative, quantitative, anything that they feel can help the CPO or the head of”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are a lot more people that you need to talk to about this stuff. I think he connected us and he was one of the reasons I started to say one of the best things that my first Boston product always told me was you have to find a way to give back. And when he said that to me, I was like, I wonder if this is one of the ways that I can start to give back to the product community.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do. Absolute thanks to Ben for connecting us. So when he made the intro, I was super excited one because it's you. And two, because I love hearing from Ben. And I was like, oh, great. He's doing all these wonderful things and whatnot. And I just remember in that moment my first conversation with Ben, which was really early in the days of starting product operations at Pendo. And we were going through all these just really crazy things that he was going through and his team is a customer appenda at the time. And he's like, sitting there just kind of staring and just, I was like, you're okay? And he's like, yeah, I'm fine. I thought that I was just throwing him off at a return. And he said to me, you know, I bet you I'm not the only person who has these questions. And I bet you I'm not the only person that's thinking about all these problems that probably seem very normal and natural. I don't know. I bet all of us are going through it. This is why I'm building product jobs here. But what he said, and he was just like, I really.”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaking as a former PM, I would not ever give up spending time with customers and watching their pain. That's how I fell in love with product was I saw my internal customer 12 years back now fighting with the keyboard, fighting with the mouse. And I was just like, oh my gosh, what's this guy doing?”
2023-02-16 · Lenny's Podcast · Understanding the role of product ops | Christine Itwaru (Pendo) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source