Sam Heywood of Cloudera: Product Managers Make Decisions with Low Data and High Risks

Making decisions with low data and high risks is what interests Sam Heywood, director cybersecurity product solution and strategy at Cloudera. We spoke last month for my interview series, Austin VOP, and it has been edited for clarity.

What was your path to product management?

I started out in Engineering. I was in a meeting early in my career where we were in a heavy discussion about a body of code and whether to run it on a green thread or native thread JVM. I thought to myself, “I don’t care. Someone else decide.” I realized that was the wrong attitude for an engineering leader and that perhaps I was on the wrong career track. As I thought about it and talked to peers I realized that you can have an amazing strategy, an amazing market opportunity, amazing engineering firepower, but often your teams are not aligned and that leads to failure. It was a fascinating and difficult problem and I wanted to give it a try to solve this alignment issue. I thought I was a smart guy so threw myself into the fray of product management. I realized that in engineering you have high data but low-risk decision making and I was not as interested in that.

I wanted to be in product where you have low data and high risk decision making.

How do you learn and grow in this field?

I am in an interesting position working for Cloudera which is a Silicon Valley blue chip firm. The breadth and depth of the executive team is amazing. Working for Mike Olson, Cloudera’s Chairman and co-founder is unbelievable. This team is my number one avenue for learning. I have access to this amazing group of talent so I pay attention to what they work on and how they make decisions. I was lucky to join this team through the acquisition of Gazzang — the company I worked for prior to Cloudera.

Other than that, I am a Wall Street Journal junkie. I am less focused on skills based learning for product management. I learned from my MBA that the world is a series of patterns. Those who understand those patterns and exploit them can win.

Through reading business news, I try to learn these patterns and understand the rhythms of the business world.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

Try to find a path into product that does not force you to abandon your strengths. One of the reasons I was successful in product is that I could bring my engineering talent to my work.

The number one piece of advice I give is cliched but true — the acronym NIHITO (Nothing Important Happens In The Office). You have to base product decisions on what you believe to be true in the market. If you are not, you are wasting your team’s time. No one is in a better position to spend time outside of your office understanding the needs of customers than a product manager. Way too many product managers get bogged down in internal processes. If you don’t spend time with customers, you will leave a vacuum and someone else will fill it with their ideas.

Make sure you both quantify your work as well as describe things qualitatively. Being able to back up your data with a handful of real world customer anecdotes is extremely powerful.

If you don’t spend time with your customers, you are basically running a backlog for someone else.

Tell me about the product you are working on now?

Cloudera is a machine learning platform. I work for the co-founder and chief strategy officer, Mike Olson. and am tasked to go drive success in cybersecurity with the Global 8000 who all buy cybersecurity solutions. My role is to find a winning cybersecurity solution based on our platform. Through the work I am doing, we are looking to find a repeatable pattern for finding vertical solutions in other sectors with our platform.

What is your biggest product challenge currently?

Our field sales team are used to selling platform solutions to IT leaders. We have to make that team comfortable and dangerous selling line of business solutions to CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers). So the challenge for us is field enablement.

To extend that, as we find other verticals and sectors to sell into, how can we be successful in selling line of business solutions to a CFO or a CMO. Can you be successful in a horizontal play like cybersecurity and scale that and span that into other verticals?

What differentiates Austin from other tech centers? What is missing?

Austin’s first wave of startup successes — Dell, Tivoli, Vignette — did not beget a second wave of successes. What should have happened is that this first wave should have pulled more talent in to spin off new businesses and build a second wave of successes. This cycle should have continued like a nuclear reaction — market success followed by drawing in new talent to fuel future successes. Even though we have had a few other successes in Austin, we have not done it at scale beyond the talent that was locally available. We have not had a virtuous cycle of successes leading to greater growth.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

A product that I am continually surprised and pleased by is the PlayStation. It has taken over as the entertainment center of our home. It is sleek and designed well. Everyone in our house knows how to use it. Sony has done a good job of building it out as an entertainment platform, not just a gaming platform. We are cable cutters and we can watch Netflix through it or play a blu-ray DVD. There was a lot of thought that went into it.

Thank you, Sam!

Austin VOP is an interview series with product leaders in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

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