Kris McKee of Optimizely: Product Management is a Team Sport
Having a strong collegial team helps you be a better product manager shared Kris McKee, Senior Product Manager at Optimizely, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #73
What was your path to product management?
My path was not typical. I do not have a tech background and 10 years ago I never would have thought I’d be in a technical role! After finishing my undergrad at Northwestern, I followed the crowd and moved into investment banking at Lehman Brothers. Lehman had an amazing culture and I learned quickly how important mentors can be in your career development (shoutout to Vishal Misra!).
But then came the crash of 2008 and I had to make a decision: continue in a field about which I was not passionate, or start from scratch and find something new. I chose the latter and decided to use my severance from Lehman to travel the world.
My first stop was Hanoi, Vietnam, where I worked for a year as an international development consultant, supporting a non-profit that was fighting to alleviate issues derived from human trafficking. Next, I joined the Clinton Foundation in Lusaka, Zambia for two years as a government consultant embedded within the Ministry of Health. My work focused on developing and expanding programs to alleviate the shortage of healthcare workers in Zambia. Zambia has roughly one-third the number of doctors and nurses it needs to serve its population, and there are provinces in Zambia with less than 10 doctors in a region as large as the state of Colorado. It was all about problem-solving: how to prioritize existing health resources to serve the greatest number of people equitably. I then moved to Zimbabwe to work for the American NGO TechnoServe to do small-business consulting within the agricultural sector. After my MBA, I joined Jumia.com in Nigeria, the first e-commerce company in Africa, as their head of operations. I worked with tech teams based in Berlin to improve our internal systems and make our warehouse more efficient. I was the business owner of our internal systems and saw first-hand how a small tech improvement could pay huge dividends in team efficiency and, ultimately, cost savings.
That is what got me interested in product management! After moving back to the States, I joined the startup BlueCart as their first product hire. BlueCart is a B2B marketplace for the restaurant industry and has a similar business model to Jumia — so my skills transferred well. I really cut my teeth in product management there. I am super thankful to the head of engineering, Dave Lee, and learned a lot from him. He gave great feedback on how to be more customer-focused and experiment. After a year and a half there, I met Claire Vo of Optimizely at a Women in Product event. I was looking for a more data-focused role and that led me to Optimizely.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
The job of a product manager is to prioritize day in and day out: your time, what your team works on, customer feedback, experimentation opportunities, etc. My products is within the ‘enterprise experience’ umbrella of Optimizely. I have small and large customers using my product, high and low velocity (experimentation velocity, that is) customers, and a wide variety of use cases to consider with every decision. Every decision requires prioritization based on revenue potential, customer impact, usability improvements, and our firm’s strategy.
One thing I love about product management is that nobody is the perfect product manager. I still feel like a baby after four years in the role, but even the most experienced have something to learn. No matter your background, you have value to bring to the team. Showcase it! The things you do not know now, you will figure it out. Trust yourself!
I believe in diversity of thought. It is important for a product team to be diverse in skillset and background. A diverse team encourages everyone to be more thoughtful in the decision-making process and increases the likelihood of innovative thought.
Product management is a team sport. You have to build a culture of pushing each other to stretch, grow and learn.
At Optimizely, we are structured around constructive criticism. Our Product Requirements Review meetings can be tough, but always collegial and focused on a common goal: driving customer value. We trust each other and are focused on continuous improvement.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
Optimizely is an experimentation platform that enables product managers, marketers, engineers, and data scientists to conduct A/B testing, do controlled feature roll-outs and allows for personalization.
One product we recently launched at Optimizely that I’m super excited about is Accelerated Learnings. One of the key limitations of experimentation is that it requires a large amount of traffic for an experiment to reach statistical significance. For sites with fewer visitors, the time required to reach that threshold can be a barrier to increasing experimentation velocity. Accelerated Learnings tries to alleviate this barrier by using Machine Learning to adjust the audience conditions of an experiment mid-experiment. As soon as the system knows that one variation is not going to win for a particular audience, the system will move the audience off of that variation and redeploy it to more successful variations — helping our clients get results faster.
Accelerated Learnings is just one example of how Optimizely is leveraging its history and knowledge of experimentation across industries, platforms, use cases and audiences to help our customers experiment more, better, and faster. A second product we are currently considering is using machine learning to systematically develop experimentation suggestions and improvements to our customers. We have done this before, so let us use that history to help our customers experiment better!
I work on Optimizely’s Program Management product, which helps our clients build a comprehensive experimentation program and supports them as they increase their experimentation velocity. We believe that the more experiments you run per day, per week, per month, the more learning’s you can extract.
Some of the problems I am working on today are: how do you capture the learnings from each experiment in a format that can be shared widely within your firm and can be quickly referenced when you need them? How can we help our clients quantify the impact of their experimentation program in the metric that resonates with their executive team, such as revenue, gross profit, conversions, leads, etc.? With so many personas and client types using my product, how do I create a user experience that helps our users find what they need when they need it in as little time as possible?
What is your biggest product challenge currently?
Prioritization. We have such a diverse client set, from IBM that runs thousands of experiments a year, to small companies that run fifteen to twenty experiments at the most. How do you design a product that fits both? A large company has enough tech prowess and people to do experiments on their own. How do we focus on our strengths and make the product easier to integrate with other systems a large company uses or has developed?
How might we build a stronger product and tech community in Austin?
Always give back. Austin is small and is still fighting for its spot as a tech powerhouse. We need to support each other to help ATX tech reach its potential! There are folks that will approach you for advice on how to get into product. Be there to talk and network with them. The more supportive the product community in Austin is, the better for all of us committed to tech in Austin.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
I love the idea of the transformational consumer — an idea that I first heard from Tara Nelson, the former head of marketing at Under Armour. There is a large and profitable consumer base that is willing to spend on products that will bring personal improvement, be it learning, musical skills, athletics. etc. One of my favorite products right now is Mimo — an app that helps you learn technical skills in a “gamified” atmosphere. It is low commitment — I can spend just ten minutes a day in the app— but it helps me feel like I am working towards improving my skills. It is broken up into small pieces and you can fit it into the small moments in your life where you have time.
Thank you, Kris!
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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