Jon Loyens of data.world: Product Managers — Own It!
Product managers understand the business and take ownership of their product shared Jon Loyens, chief product officer at data.world, for my interview series, Austin VOP. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
Austin VOP Issue #19
What was your path to product management?
I have an engineering background. Even today I say I am a software engineer. I love to build things and creativity it at my very core. Even at home, it makes me happy when I get a drill out. It is like a shark swimming: I have to always be building.
I had a circuitous route to product management. I had roles in program management, dev management, and product management through my career. I started at Trilogy and was there for six or seven years through the lean times. I took a pragmatic approach and filled gaps that came up. That is where I first learned about design and did a lot of UX work which planted the seeds for future product roles.
Ever since I was young, I was enamored by product management — these were the people that decided what was going to be built. At first, my motivation for product management was career protection — offshoring development was big in the early 2000s. But I learned quickly that it was definitely the wrong reason to be a product manager. At that time I came across Ben Horowitz’s Good PM Bad PM and realized, “Yes, this is it.”
The best product managers organically gain credibility because of the ownership they take in the product. They take responsibility for understanding the business and build a product that customers respond to as well as drives growth.
How do you learn and grow in this field?
I have grounded myself in a lot of the basics such as human-computer interaction and user-centered design. I love Alan Cooper and Dan Norman’s writings on these topics.
I read about various agile methods and pull the best from them. You have to be pragmatic about what you pick for your context.
I have been reading a few more business books now that I am a co-founder and our organization is growing. Some of my favorites here have been Built to Last, First Break All the Rules and Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I think Crossing the Chasm is another classic too.
Medium has become a great resource. And First Round Review has some great content on topics that are not often thought about like how to be a good product manager at an enterprise company, and how to run a great quarterly product review.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
Your number one job is to be accountable for delivering a great product. Immerse yourself in the business. Don’t just think about the next great feature; take real responsibility for the product and its success in the market.
Some tactical advice would be to be pragmatic about process. Focus on your customers and their requirements. If you are focusing on the minutia of process and project management, it is a good sign you are missing the bigger picture.
Hire great engineers and designers and trust their expertise and creativity. Make them your partners rather than trying to do their jobs.
Learn data-driven decision making — this is the future of product management.
Immerse yourself in data analytics. Know SQL and dashboards. Make correlations between what you are seeing in the data and what is needed in the business. Go beyond the art of having an opinion of how things should be. I like the Jim Barksdale quote, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” I like that quote because it reminds us to be data-driven.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
Our mission is to build the world’s most abundant and collaborative data platform. It’s a huge mission. We are focused on the intersection of social collaboration and data. A lot of the knowledge and context for data is distributed using social means. For example, when you email a spreadsheet to someone, they can come back and ask you, “How is this column calculated?” There is a discourse between the person that did the analysis of the data in the sheet and the person that is looking to use it. That intersection of tribal knowledge — putting the context besides the data — is what accelerates data-driven culture. How can we bring people and data together in a better way?
I spent four years at Bazaarvoice and then went to HomeAway for three. One reason I went to HomeAway was I wanted to work on a big consumer problem. I wanted to do product management from a data-driven perspective with approaches like AB testing. What I learned is that if you are going to build a consumer-oriented product, it is a game of inches. You have to incrementally tune the product to improve it.
What is your biggest product challenge currently?
One challenge is our process for making product decisions: how do you integrate a design-centric culture with the data-driven nature of a consumer business. We use data to help us dig in and ask why. Then design thinking comes in — getting inside the user’s head to understand more about the data. A lot has been made of the conflict between data-driven vs. design-driven cultures. If you can maintain an inquisitive culture, the friction between these two approaches can be helpful and produce results. If you don’t have a healthy culture of learning, of challenging assumptions — the tension can become toxic. You have to have a healthy discourse where you can argue and still walk away as friends.
Our other challenge is that there have been many attempts to do what we are doing. It is really easy to copy what has already been done. Sometimes we have been described as GitHub for data. But data and code are inherently different. Open source for software brought transparency and auditability to code. And it changed how companies built software and their culture. Data science has the same opportunity: we can copy the concept but not the product. We have to understand what is different about data science and that is quite a challenge.
Data science does not have the lexicon for process that exists for software. What is Agile for data science? People have been writing about software process since the 1970s with books like the seminal Mythical Man Month. For data, we have to invent and market a playbook for it as we develop our product. And we are taking a community approach to it. We have to observe communities such as Data For Democracy, one of the more successful data communities. We have to learn, extract these learnings and codify them.
How might we build a stronger product and tech community in Austin?
Focus on becoming a business leader. Be a salesperson for a while. Understand what a sales situation is like. Get some consulting experience. Know what it is like to sell your own services. I learned a lot while I did that. These experiences will help you empathize with all things it takes to run a business. This type of business focus would be very good for our community and would see a lot more successes as opposed to cynicism.
There is no such thing as an overnight success. Building a successful business requires a lot of hustle and pragmatism. There is a lot of fable and lore about how startups have succeeded. Like Brian Chesky sleeping a host’s floor to learn about Airbnb’s users. But what about the Craigslist ads they scraped for inventory? You have to embrace what it takes to move the entire business forward and this is what we need to talk about more at our forums and meetups.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
It is the Fender Telecaster guitar. It is one of the simplest and most elegant guitar designs around. When Leo Fender made it, he captured the 50s era in the design. It is the perfect minimal viable product (before the idea of the “minimally viable product”). Two simple pickups, slab body and a bolted on neck. There is nothing fancy about it but it has done great ever since the early 50s. It has the perfect form and function for a guitar and I constantly go back to playing mine.
Thank you, Jon!
Austin VOP is an interview series with product leaders to build a stronger product and tech community in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.
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