Christian MacLean of Auctane: Product Management is a Deeply Human Pursuit
Product is human pursuit where you understand intersectionality to uncover hidden needs, shared Christian MacLean, Director of Product Operations for Auctane, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #107
What was your path to product management?
I have been in tech for 23 years. My dad got me a computer when I was five years old. He had a teaching job in a Mennonite community in northern Canada and there was only one other kid that really spoke English. Apple sold computers to teachers for a pretty low price so my dad got me one. I completely fell in love with it and learned to program from Scholastic books.
I was a terrible student in high school (they now call that being an entrepreneur) and snowboarding was my passion. But my attempt at making it a profession did not pan out. I joined a startup in the late 90s which I loved, then moved to a corporation just as the bottom fell out in the dot-com bust, and then went to work in oil & gas companies (didn’t love that) and then consulted for a decade.
Then the iPhone came out and I was at a telecom company and I saw the potential it had — and they did not. I got tired of pitching my ideas that fell on deaf ears and went and did my own startup and I was hooked. In a period of about 5 years my wife and business partner started and sold a company, opened a co-working space, and started a nonprofit that’s still thriving today. We used that momentum to start a body positive community for women . (before it was a thing). We raised around a million dollars, but no white male investors particularly cared about that space — once we burned through our venture capital, Tony Hsieh invited me to come down and be a formal product manager at Zappos. So we moved from Canada to Vegas and that is how I officially became a product manager.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
Advice is a funny thing. In the past, I would have said there are some practical things like ‘get really good at understanding the difference between activity and achievement. That is a really core skill set for a product manager.’
Now though, when I think of product leaders, I lean more into the word leader and what that means. It is very easy for us in product — because we are all so busy — to over-index on the work aspect and not enough on the people aspect. For example, PMs mistake using documentation for communication. Communication is very different from writing things down and assuming people will connect with it. Aligning motivations is a really important part of making your product successful. I see a lot of people, still tend to double down on what they already know and their individual contributions. They do not recognize that fundamentally the product is about empathy and understanding and that is a very human pursuit. Understanding peoples’ intersectionality, challenges, and their differences is where you uncover needs.
If you lean into understanding people and the human condition and really listen, you will be a much better leader and much better product manager.
People talk a lot about empathy as product managers but most just scratch the surface. For example, I need to empathize with the fact that shipping for ecommerce is complex and confusing — but that’s not really enough. Empathy is talking to a small business and understanding that the bedroom they are in is also where they ship from, and understanding that the reason that they’ve moved to e-commerce is because they are only able to make so much in their current job, and perhaps feel like it is a dead-end — but what they are really passionate about is homeopathic remedies — and they see a path to the great American dream of owning their own business and being their own boss.
That kind of empathy requires you to have a quiet mind and actually listen without thinking ahead and applying your own assumptions and your biases. It requires you to stop worrying about whether this is an efficient use of your time because you are an incredibly busy person. It requires you to understand them at a level that helps you create truly great products.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I have been reading a lot of books on leadership and leadership principles. I like to read about other industries and how they work. I am fascinated with for example — showrunners and how television shows get made. It is interesting to learn how they get things done in producing a TV show: writing a script, putting it together and going through the production process. The notion of a showrunner is really a product manager but in a different domain. I think you can learn a lot from different industries. I am trying to absorb these lessons and see how that changes my approach to thinking about products and organizing product teams. The really great showrunners are thinking about the long term story and the narrative arc. They are thinking about how to work with the production team to set a visual tone, how to tie monetization to what they create; how they work with other writers to keep a consistent voice.
I also enjoy design documentaries, shows about architecture like Grand Design, and I recently enjoyed a documentary about David Geffen. I love stories about people with grit and determination — it really inspires me.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
What I am really enjoying the most about Product Operations is that we are able to look at and build some methodologies and processes that fit us at Auctane. We just built a new framework based off of RICE that we are calling DICEU. So we have an opportunity to try things, learn things. I feel really proud that we are creating some cutting edge ideas and sharing them with the community so that we can grow our product operations community in Austin and potentially internationally.
It is exciting and interesting to work on fundamental problems like crossing organizational boundaries, developing a really deep understanding of other functional parts of the business and turning that into inputs and outputs for product managers. We are using Conway’s Law to really identify where problems with communication are across these organizational boundaries and how to solve them so that our teams can be more effective in building products.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
I always think it is really important to build a community in Austin that is as welcoming and inclusive as possible, and recognizing that at some point, somebody took a chance on you — and you have an opportunity to leverage the platform that you have to take a chance on someone else. For example — I have friends and family that are transgender and non-binary. These are people who show an unbelievable amount of courage, desire and grit just by living authentically and truthfully. That is not an easy path but it surely is a righteous one and when I see that, I see somebody who has qualities that are really valuable in product management. That is just one example of how you can change the narrative — by changing people’s perception of intersectionality and how differences in background make you unique and bring qualities that are intangible but can really correlate to impact as a product manager.
Understanding these differences and advocating for them makes you a better product manager because it forces you to understand and empathize. Building that type of product community builds a space for trust and diversity in Austin and makes us all better at what we do. I think we have to be active allies and create those opportunities for others because someone did it for us.
We need this in Austin because we are growing and there is a divide between people who have and don’t have. When I came into tech, it was the great democratizer, an opportunity for people to change the world. It was all those things, but at some point we lost the beat and I would love to see that come back.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
Right now, my single favorite product is my ’64 Chevy. I think great products are the ones that really elicit an emotion more than anything and it just makes me really happy. We live in a world with so many impermanent things that there is something about the analog and the tangible that I really do love. When I get into this truck, it has a distinct smell that elicits an emotion that brings me back to my childhood. My wife is an artist — pottery. She would not use that term artist, but she recently had somebody who saw her work say — Oh my God, I love your art; it’s absolutely amazing. I really aspire to do what you do. If you can make people feel something, you are an artist, right? And to me, that’s what product is about. I think that emotional piece is really important, and especially these days, where it is hard to work on products that don’t excite me. I think that is what keeps me in this game.
Thank you, Christian!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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