Elena Leonova of BigCommerce: Product Leaders Empower and Coach
Think about how you can empower and coach your team, shared Elena Leonova, Senior Director of Product Management at BigCommerce, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #102
What was your path to product management?
I studied economical cybernetics in Ukraine — a combination of software engineering and economics. After college when I was looking for a job, I came across a business analyst role that I thought would let me use both these skills I learned. At the time I was reading my first product management book — Inspired by Marty Cagan — where he talks about his experience working as a product manager at eBay. I said to myself: if only one day in the future I could work as a product manager at a company like eBay. Funnily enough, after a few months my company got acquired by eBay and my business analyst role got converted to a product manager role. It was like my dream came true!
I have since worked in e-commerce, first for Magento which was acquired by eBay and now I work for BigCommerce which is also an e-commerce company.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
Product management is relatively new and there is no formal education for it. So there is no clear way to get into product management. My advice is to think like a product manager every day. When you come across a challenge and you wish there was a better way, think like a product manager to understand the problem well and see if you can come up with a solution. So even if you are not in the role or have a team to work with, taking this approach helps you develop your product management skillset and mindset before you land your first PM job. And you can talk about it when you are applying for a job
If you are managing a team of product managers, you have to remember that you are no longer an individual contributor and you need to find ways to empower and coach your PMs.
You have to keep the customer in your heart because it is really easy as a product leader to start project managing features and delivery dates. And this is teaching your team by example that the most important part of this job is that a customer will be using the product. They have to develop the skill to touch back with customers and use empathy to make sure they develop the right things. But it is not just having natural empathy for the customer, you also have to explain that to someone else so that they can understand what you have learned to guide what is built.
One of the risks of someone who has worked as a product manager for a long time is that at some point they start assuming that they know all the answers: they have been there and done that and know what customers want. You have to assume that you do not know what customers want and go in to hear for yourself what the actual problem is.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I had a wonderful opportunity to read a lot of books when I was on maternity leave for three months. One of the books that actually stood out was Go Giver. It is really short but the book talks about a story of a really young man who wants to succeed in his career. He comes across a person who shows him that he needs to have a different perspective on success and that in order to succeed, you need to think about what other people want and how you can help them. How can you always put the other person in front of everything that you do instead of your own personal needs. That is how you succeed.
And as I was reading that book I started thinking about my career and realized that it is so true. I feel so lucky that I have had a lot of people help me get to where I am. I want to be able to share the experience that I have so that others can succeed and not just PMs on my team. The more of us that succeed, the better it will be for our industry. I have an opportunity to share some of my learnings and insights with those that want to get into product management. So I have been mentoring people who are at this stage and I am looking to do more of it this year.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
I work for BigCommerce and what is interesting is we are building an e-commerce platform that serves merchants across the whole world. We try to build a product that can support anybody from a smaller business to large enterprises. This creates really interesting product challenges because we have to be able to serve all these different customers in different parts of the world with one product.
We have to tailor the product to customers in these different countries with different approaches to things like payments and shipping. We build a product for a small family owned business that don’t have technical skills to get it up and running. They want to get online quickly and don’t have funding for technical expertise. This one product has to make it possible for them to get started with selling and have a successful business as well as have it flexible and customizable enough for others. So it is interesting to juggle international needs with the needs of different segments in one product. It is a lot of work to do it right, but it is the type of challenge that I enjoy a lot.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
I share your perspective about the Austin product community being giving and inclusive. I want to help us get better collectively and it is interesting to think about how to make this happen with others in our community.
It would be great if there was an opportunity for people to easily connect with other people who work on similar problems. For example, I work on a product that has huge scale and a lot of different nuances. It would be great to hear from other product managers who face a similar problem and hear how they overcome these challenges. You benefit from talking to someone else that has found a way of solving it that you have not thought of. I know other product leaders but not necessarily ones that are solving similar problems than I am. So this type of connection would be really valuable.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
There are a lot of products I love but the one that I really have been enjoying lately is the Peloton app. It is a great exercise app, but what is fascinating is how the app can actually build stronger communities digitally. It is relatively easy to create good exercise content but building that sense of community and belonging in the software is much harder.
It is amazing to hear how people rave about Peloton and how excited they are to exercise because it touches their lives. It is fascinating to me to see how the app on your phone makes you exercise and be a person you have never been. They really thought through the experience of being in a gym or in a community by using group hashtags and leaderboards. You feel like you are not doing this by yourself and it encourages you to want to do it. At the end of the day, it is technology that is bridging this gap between being at home alone on your bike but feeling like you are not.
It makes you want to come back and do it more and more. And it is especially interesting to see how there are lots of people who have never exercised before and are encouraged to start and continue because of this app.
Thank you, Elena!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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