Corinna Stukan
Using Metrics to Make Better Product Decisions
Corinna Stukan shares with us her journey from UX Design to Product Management, how metrics can be used to make design decisions easier and how ruthlessly manages her time.
Highlights include:
- What is a North Star metric?
- How do you find your product’s North Star?
- How does your North Star help you to make better decisions?
Who is Corinna Stukan?
Corinna is the VP of Product at Roam Digital, one of New Zealand’s largest and most awarded full-service digital consultancies.
In just five short years, Corinna went from the only product manager to leading a product management team of 17 people.
Having been both a developer and a UX designer, before becoming a product manager, Corinna brings a unique mix of experience to this conversation and to her practice.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to the pieces of the product together. I do that by interviewing world class UX researchers and product management professionals, and they share with us the expert knowledge, learnings and advice. Mike, yesterday is Corinna Stricken. Corinna is the VP of product at Roam Digital, one of New Zealand's largest and most awarded full service digital consultancies. She's also the virtual CEO of Villo. A recently launched Roam product that helps businesses to more effectively manage their visitor arrivals. Corinna joined Roam in 2015 as their very first product manager. At the time, the company was only 20 people and it's since grown to over 100 In just five short years. Corinna has built the product management practice from scratch to a team of over 17 people.
- Before moving to New Zealand, Corinna graduated with a bachelor of engineering from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology where she focused on software development and human computer interaction. Having been both a developer and a UX designer before becoming a product manager, COR brings a unique mix of experience that helps her to navigate the complexities, constraints and challenges of delivering world class digital products. A generous share of knowledge. Corinna is also a regular speaker at Meetup such as product tank and product talks here in Auckland. She's also a mentor for product league. In mid 2020, Corinna launched a blog on sub called Products and Systems where you can find spreadsheets, frameworks, and simple systems to help you organize your product life and to become a better product leader. Described by her colleagues as an ultra organized systematic type a super German, I'd say that we're in for a very good conversation today and I'm not surprised at all that Corinna has been able to achieve what she has or that two of her favorite topics are product analytics and productivity. More on those soon. Corinna, welcome to the show.
- Corinna Stukan:
- Thanks Brendan. That was the nicest introduction. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Look, it's great to have you here and just sort of touching on that super, super German comment there at the end of your introduction. It strikes me, and I don't have a whole bunch of experience with Germany myself, but it strikes me that New Zealand is possibly the least German place that I can think of. So super a Tae Superman here in the first place.
- Corinna Stukan:
- That's a good question. I was meant to come here just for a year. It was kind of New Zealand was the furthest away from Germany. I could go love Germany by the way. But yeah, I just wanted to get out there, get uncomfortable, see something new and New Zealand was kind of always on my bucket list and yeah, seven years later I'm still here. I clearly got stuck here. I think on a personal level it really amazed me how friendly people are here, how approachable they are. And I think from my previous super type A approach, Kiwis have helped me to soften it a little bit. So I would say, well, I would hope and I'll have a bit more of a balanced approach to everything I do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, wonderful. So what is it that's kept you here? I mean you said you came for a year and now it's been seven. What has it been about this place that you haven't been able to leave?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Oh, I think it's just the people here. I was met someone here, so that's obviously a big contributing factor. But also I just loved, I mean grew up in the city and typical busy city life and just coming here, spending more time in the outdoors. I mean New Zealand is really one of a, I think I watched your last episode with Spotify's full Gordon and he said he traveled to New Zealand and found that the green is kind of green ahead and everywhere else and the blue is blue and everywhere else. And when I heard that 100% resonated with me, the landscapes and nature here, I was never much of a nature person. But somehow it's just fascinating to be here and I absolutely love it. I cannot imagine actually going back to busy Europe right now. [laugh] right
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now. Officially right now, yeah, a hundred percent. Now tell me you are quite an active contributor back to the product management community and one of the things that I discovered when I was preparing for this interview was an organization called Product League. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What is product league and what is it that you do as a mentor for them?
- Corinna Stukan:
- So product league is an amazing product management mentorship program. So they kind of give you a four month time window and tell you how much time to spend with your mentee. So you obviously match with the mentee and they focus on product managers who are already in the product management world. So it's not so much a super entry, how do I get into product management kind of mentorship, but it's more I think the mentees have a certain requirement of a couple years of experience and then the mentors like myself are required, I think it was five years or more experience in the product field as well. So it's kind of, I believe tailored a bit more towards more experienced people in that field. And then they also do a lot with events. I just actually joined one of their Ask Me Anything sessions yesterday, which was super fun talking about product analytics which I know we'll get into as well, [laugh]. So they're just super active, lots of events and then they have a learning platform that comes with it and supports the mentee throughout the four months. So it's awesome. It's the first round with them. But yeah, I can highly recommend it both for mentors, I mentees, I always say as a mentor I feel like I'm sometimes learning just as much if not even more than the [laugh] mentees as well. So I absolutely love it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what was it that originally attracted you to it? Why have you decided to invest your time in this and you such a busy such role that, why is this important to you?
- Corinna Stukan:
- This was actually the second mentorship program I've joined this year. So it was quite ambitious [laugh] this year. The first one was a more local one called One Up, one down it's tar, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's targeted more I think just women but in the wider technology sector. So my mentee was actually in a design role but yeah, what got me into it in the first place was I think after a while if you do something, if they're passionate about something and you do it for a while at some point I just felt this desire to share and to help others with it. And obviously my role as I started to actually coach people and hire people here at Roam I just realized how much I enjoy helping others do a great job and help others be successful. So I just wanted to extend that and I kind of on the line of giving back and sharing and helping other people in this industry and I think specifically as a female in this industry it's probably also worth talking about.
- I think I've been thinking a lot about what can I do specifically, and I'm not as a controversial topic, but I'm not the biggest fan of creating all these separate groups just for women because ultimately we are trying to just not even have this as a topic and point of discussion anymore, why should it be? So I've been thinking what can I really do as a woman in Tick? And I think one of the key things for me is just to be visible out there and talk to other people at different stages, maybe earlier stages in their product careers and show them just be kind of an approachable person. I'm just a normal person like everyone else as well. So it's totally doable and I just hope it might encourage some people to get into product management even though yes it's in tech and it might be scary for some people. It's the same with data. I think I've seen a lot of peers in my field be kind of afraid of data, so I just wanna go out there and say, it's not that scary. You can all do it. I'm not any smarter than you guys are. So that's kind of my way of hopefully helping a few others in this industry
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's so important. I think the motivation is critical for passing on that knowledge. And also, I mean I really connect with what you have said about encouraging other people to give it a go by putting yourself out there. And I think that's a thing important for anyone that's watching today to realize is that it doesn't take a lot of confidence to give this a go and you won't regret it. Whether it's talking at a meetup or whether it's doing a podcast or writing a blog. It's really important that you give this a go if you believe that you have something worthwhile to share. And I'm also, for this show actually I would really love to hear from a more diverse range of people that are interested in coming on the show as well. Personally, I found it much easier to find generally white males, which is probably no surprise to a lot of people in tech because they're actually, as far as I can tell, anecdotally more actively putting themselves out there.
- So I'm more likely to discover them and then more likely to invite them on. But I really want to rebalance the guests the guest roster a little bit as things go on. Now in your introduction, I mentioned that you'd also been a developer and a UX designer before you got involved as a product management manager in the industry. Now that that's a really interesting career progression. Is there anything, what is it that connects those leaps together to eventually found product management? Which seems like it's now, I wouldn't say forever home, but it's certainly the area that you've really got into the
- Corinna Stukan:
- Most. Yeah, yeah, I do think I've found my [laugh] my spot. Yeah it's an interesting question. I think my study or just how I got into it in the first place was already somewhat diverse. It was a really kind of newish path at university back then. So I studied at home in Germany and like you said in the intro, it was kind of like this mix of, there was some development but there was also some human centered design in there. So I definitely learned some basics of coding and I was really not the best at it, but I found it quite kind of cool and interesting. But then at the same time, my first job was actually at university. They had back then they called it a usability testing lab and I started there. I thought it was a really cool opportunity for me to get some hands on experience, not just theory during my uni days.
- And so I feel like I've had this mix of both the technical aspect and then the design and really the user experience aspect from the start. So I always love the combination of both. So that has carried through throughout my career. And then at some point I realized that just the technical skills and just the design skills is also not everything I would really found that I didn't really have financial literacy or much knowledge about basic financial concepts and economics. That was this whole area that I always thought, oh, that's not for me. So yeah, I tried to just upscale in that area a little bit and then actually how I got specifically into product management or my first product manager role was actually quite a funny story. [laugh]? Yeah. Yeah. Our CEO at Bro likes to tell some people [laugh]. They were actually looking for a UX designer cuz when they approached me I was I was still a UX design role so I interviewed Ed Roam for that role and probably didn't hit the mark there [laugh], but they're pretty high standards. They have an amazing design culture here. But then they joked that I came prepared with all these questions about their business and this prepared list that I worked through throughout my interview. So they were like, wow, you're super organized and you know, really try to understand the business about have you thought about product management? And I just didn't think it would happen that soon. So that that's kind of how the whole transition happened. I don't think I've told the story in this forum yet. So yeah, it's kind of a funny story
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's good to hear this and I can actually think of some parallels with my own story, but we're not here to talk about me. Oh,
- Corinna Stukan:
- I'd love to hear no
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Another time. Let's just say developer either. And I found the management side of things was my, I think it's great. That does it. Who's the ceo? Is it Ben?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Chris, yeah. Yeah, but Ben actually interviewed me before.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. So it's great. I mean it's great that Chris and Ben were able to recognize that in you. And I suppose that sort of ties back to your super super German type A personality, the structure that you brought to that. And that's obviously worked very well for you in this role. And look, it's only five years ago and I just want to talk about building the practice a little bit because you've done that from nothing to 17 or so people at the moment and an incredibly short amount of time and it's, it's pretty impressive the growth curve that when you came to Roam you didn't even know what product management was. Well you did but you didn't have any experience in it. And now you are leading this impressive team of 17 people. I know that people watching this are gonna wonder how on earth you've done this. What is your secret?
- Corinna Stukan:
- I dunno if there's a secret or a silver bullet for this. I think my previous experience has really helped and I think especially, and you might be quite familiar with it from my last role in a user experience role, I actually already did a lot of research and user testing and then ultimately there was no product management role in that team I was working in. So I kind of started to really fill those gaps. So I feel like I had a bit of an unfair advantage and didn't have to start from scratch. So that definitely helped. But no, I think I had some amazing mentors and people I learned from along the way. I mean specifically Chris has a product management background himself from overseas. So he gave me kind of this bible, which is Marty Kagan's book inspired when I started. And that was just a fun, fantastic foundation.
- But then of course it's also just exposing yourself to the practical side as well, which is important. No reading can really teach you all about product management. So at first I just actually did the doing for quite some time before I started to actually grow a team. I think that's also really key. Obviously as a manager or as a coach, you don't always have to be the absolute expert on every single field. Coaching is actually quite a different skill set to doing it yourself. But of course I had to build a basis myself first to know how does product management at volume work and how do we actually scale this and how do I work with tech? How do I work with design? So I had to kind of establish that foundation first. But yeah, I mean I would say for anyone going through this journey having one or two people and they don't have to be in the same role, especially if you are the one growing a team, that usually means that there is no one like you or doing the same thing as you're kind of by yourself.
- So you have to be kind of comfortable with that, but then try to learn from other people as well. So let's say at the start, I didn't know, I haven't done interviews before, that was a complete new area for me but I realized some other people for the tick and the design area have done it. So I just asked them about some advice and how they went about some hiring decisions and do you do two interviews, three interviews? How do you structure those interviews? And I actually learned a lot from that. So if you're not in a position where you have a direct mentor off your skill, there's still a lot you can learn from other people at the same level with the really similar challenges no matter what the skill is, right? Because growing teams, leading people I think it's ultimately about the people more than it is about the skill.
- So that has really helped me and it sounds cliche, but really reading a lot and immersing yourself with not just how people do it maybe in your local community I found yeah, obviously New Zealand, the product community there's still a lot of work we have to do I think. So I also made an effort to look at how do you know a larger successful product tech companies run in Europe or in the States. So that has really helped me get this kind of more global view to really progress the product management practice further to what it could have been or maybe some other companies in the early stages did.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think this is important as well, what you've talked about here about looking outside of our local industry cause Roam is engaging with global brands and building products not just for New Zealand companies and having the ability to lift your perspective and learn and import some of those the knowledge and learnings from overseas, I think it's really critical. What is the biggest mistake you feel that you've made in the past five years? If you could do it again, what would it be?
- Corinna Stukan:
- I think at the start as a manager, we've just talked about the transition from doing yourself and then leading others. It is a very, very different skill and I definitely focus even in the hiring but then also in terms of the coaching too much on the technical skills isn't the technical product management skills rather than also the human or the soft skills to the role. So I was very focused on having the right documentation and having all the tools and frameworks and me just being me [laugh]. That was kind of the main thing I focused on. And I think if I had to do it all over again, I just listened to, there was this amazing webinar or book club session from Kate Lito, I don't know if you've read about her latest book on hiring. She brought a book about hiring product managers and she describes as like 50 50 split of actual product management versus human skills that you need to A hire for and then B also coach for. And that is really something I just didn't know when I started on this. And I think that's where then with early hires the most of the problems were more on the people side because I didn't hire maybe the right people for the human challenges that come with the product management role and I wasn't focused enough on also if there is a gap coaching them on how it's a much harder area to coach on human skills than on very tangible product management skills. So that would be my number one area.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, very good. And the complexity in managing other people and leading other people can't really be underestimated and product management is a fairly new professional area. And just looking at your background, I mean you came from design, UX design immediately beforehand. A lot of other people come from various different backgrounds before they become product managers as well, generally in tech, but there's no sort of product manager finishing school as such that you can graduate from. Getting really practical here to you is the role of a product manager and what makes someone a great product manager?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Yes I think I've absolutely, yeah, absolutely agree with what you're saying. There are so many different flavors and definitions of what a product manager is especially here in the local market. I've found there are still a lot of people who think that the product manager is more of the old notion of a product owner where you just administrating and looking after a backlog, the requirements kind of trigger from the top down and then you are there to actually flesh up requirements and then prioritize within that and then execute. I think looking at the global product management scene, we have really moved on from that mindset. I think there is a lot more understanding now of the importance of product management and also I guess the level of ownership and the level of experience and skills of real product manager needs to bring to the table.
- And it's actually, it's probably one of the hardest roles I find once you actually set the expectation of what it is that a product manager should do. But yeah, at a high level really as a product manager you are there to combine all the aspects, the business viability, the user viability, the technical viability and just making sure there is an actual demand and business opportunity for your product combining all these four areas to build successful products. So it does require a good technical understanding, it requires a good focus on the end user working with design really closely, but also bringing the whole product design and product development closer to the business goal to really impact the business success. And I think especially that last bit has been a massive gap and I think we're still all on this journey to make sure that product managers link the product features and efforts closer to really impacting business success.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So when we were talking about your biggest learning and the journey from being a product manager to the leading other product managers, you touched on the importance of managing the softer and the human side of things. Now as the product manager you are managing the tension between those different dimensions of product as we were speaking about, and there's often some very colorful personalities and forthright personalities that are involved in their own professions in these areas. What advice do you have for aspiring product leaders, people that are stepping up in their career perhaps with an eye to where you've got to be able to manage those softer human factors more effectively as product managers?
- Corinna Stukan:
- So I think one of the biggest areas would be probably initiative and that business understanding or that empathy for the business stakeholders. I often find today product managers, they now have a really good understanding and focus on the user needs and really want to solve problems, work really closely with the design team to build usable products that solve real problems. But I think there is still this kind of divide between the business people and the business needs and the user side and the product needs. So I think for a product manager on the more technical skill side, it's really important to build that strong understanding of how a product can lead to business success to really bridge that gap. And then on the more human or soft skill side of things really trying to speak the business stakeholders language and empathize with them. There are a few techniques that one of them is from Ken Sandy I think which I really like is just rather than presenting, here's the product, here's the roadmap, here's what we are gonna do they call it shuttle diplomacy.
- So you go from stakeholder to stakeholder and get their thoughts and feedback early on, really bring them on the journey. So then when you present the final, here are the product goals, here are the priorities, here's what we prioritize on the roadmap, it doesn't come as a massive surprise and you get massive pushback. I think that is where I still see a lot of the tension coming in. And that is really something that product managers I think need to overcome with strong communication skills as well as empathy for the stakeholders, what are they trying to achieve? And ultimately also then sharing this back to the product team who are working on or designing and developing these features, how are those features actually gonna impact the business success and why is this important? Again, I find often there is this big divide between the business goals and what the product team is trying to do. So this is really something I think aspiring product managers should focus on
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's really interesting to hear you describe this empathy that's required for people outside of your existing professional practice. In this case with a business stakeholder, it's bringing up a lot of parallels to conversations that I've had with UX researchers about their relationship with product managers, which is an area that I've been interested in exploring in this podcast. And it's fascinating that we seem to be so comfortable in our own practice areas and yet we forget that we have the sort of superpower of empathy more broadly in technology cause we have a lot of it for our users that we would be more effective if we were able to turn that inside the organization towards the other people that are important in making world class products. And I think I just want people to really zero in on what you've just said here because what you are saying is that if you're gonna become a leader of product within your organization, you really need to understand that a lot of that relies on other people outside of your VP area or your domain are buying into and bringing them along the journey to what it is that you're trying to achieve with the products and that's really one of the key parts of your role.
- Corinna Stukan:
- Yeah, I think that's a huge skill and it's a heart skill as well [laugh], but it's absolutely critical.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. Now let's turn our attention to something that is very, very close to your heart, which is data and analytics and products. Now this is fascinating and an incredibly deep and wide area to talk about and most people I think it's fair to say probably don't get super excited about this. So I'm excited about this. I know you're excited about this and I'm sure at the end of this other people will be excited about this too was so why are you so passionate about data driven decisions and analytics and product?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Well first of all, I love that you're excited about it too. [laugh], I don't know, it's really not as dry as people think, but we'll get to that [laugh]. I think also going back to those tensions sometimes with stakeholders, often this is because people come have strong opinions, our stakeholders have strong opinions. The CEO company might have strong opinions about where the product should go. You as a product manager, you think it better because you're so close to the customer so you have a strong opinion. So really the key for me is to bring more data to those discussions, which I think will really help with a lot of the tensions that we have in the day to day. So that is kind of the very first part. But also before I got really into product analytics, I didn't know what I was missing, but once you see it, once you get more comfortable with it it was the same with me with maths during my study.
- I was like, how the hell am I gonna get through these semesters of engineering maths? And it sucked at first, but then once you get more confident with something you start to kind of enjoy it. So the same I think goes for analytics and dealing with data. The first step I think for people is probably the hardest but once you get better and more confident in it, it's actually quite enjoyable. And then just some of those insights I have found through data on some of the products that I've worked on that otherwise we would've just kept stumbling in the dark or throwing out opinions and it really kind of shaped the conversations and suddenly everyone was on the same page. And of course I don't think just looking at data is the holy growl and you should not look into anything else. I think a strong case also for a certain product judgment and intuition but also obviously just talking to your customers quality data is just as important.
- So I'm not here to say data will solve all your problems but is a really, really critical part. And specifically product managers I find often see this as someone else's responsibility. They might think, oh, it's the product analyst job, but not every company has the lUXury of having a data analyst, a data scientist. So then it just gets overlooked and no one picks it up and ultimately the product manager is driving all those decisions and the day to day and is there to prioritize and justify to the stakeholders why they're prioritizing what they're prioritizing. And so really product analytics is one of the key data sources that I think a product manager should take into account together with the human kind of insights through qualitative research together with sales and marketing insights. So product analytics is not all in everything, but it is one of the critical parts that I think is often overlooked.
- And I looked through, actually I did a talk on this, this was part of my talk earlier this year on product analytics. I went through I think nine or 10 years of talks at the product, which is huge, probably one of the biggest product management conferences. And there was zero nada, nothing on data and product analytics. It's just kind of this assumed thing that you make data driven decision but no one actually tells you how to. So mm-hmm [affirmative] that very long answer to your question, I think [laugh] many reasons why I'm really excited about it. And also I think data really helps you with some of those tensions with your stakeholders, which is probably one of the biggest complaints I hear about product management and the challenges that people have.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I think that point's really insightful because what it sounds like you're saying is that if you have a good grasp as a product manager or anyone in the product team, quite frankly on the analytics and what it is that you are tracking and why that helps your business stakeholders to feel more comfortable with what it is that you are saying or trying to do. It's the language of business almost is numbers and a lot of people in business, while Q is really important and a whole bunch of UX researchers breathe a huge sigh of relief when you said that. Yes it it's often seen as softer and analytics is what provides people with more certainty.
- Corinna Stukan:
- That's exactly right. And it comes back to the speaking the language of your stakeholders, which of now the business stakeholders and at the end of the month they look at their balance sheet, they look at their profit and lots. So if you can come to the party and show that you understand that this data's important and link how your product impacts those numbers, I think you'll yeah, you'll make really good progress with those relationships with your stakeholders.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the recent conversations I had was with Luke Hay who's a UX researcher but also has a big focus on analytics and in his case he provides training in Google analytics and he was telling me that there's in GA the most basic or be it very complicated and complex analytics product that you can get, the most successful one is 500 default reporting views. So when it comes to product, and obviously there are specific product analytics packages and you've written about some of those on your blog, there are almost an endless thing, a sea of things and metrics you could track. And one of the posts that I read of yours though, you talked about this notion of a product North Star. What is a product North Star and why is that helpful to a product manager when deciding what it is that you should be tracking?
- Corinna Stukan:
- So Product North Star is something that I've been starting to actively use earlier this year on various products and I've helped other product measures in my team adopted as well and it's been a huge step forward I think. So our product North Star the concept I think has been thrown around for a while, but especially this year the product analytics tool Amplitude has really started to evangelize the use of product North Stars and they did a great webinar on this. John Cutler was running that he's a great advocate of product analytics and product intelligence for building products. So the concept is really that it all comes back to the product and the business and how do you link it back together. So it's funny that we're talking about analytics now, but it comes back to some of the same themes we already touched on. So usually you have a business goal that is a financial goal.
- Let's say you wanna hit X amount of revenue growth for the year and then the product manager somehow has to prioritize features based on what we think will hit those business goals. And that inherently is a really, really tough thing to do. So the product Northstar is a framework that really helps you create this link between the business goals and the kind of product metrics. So you might measure in the day to day, what is my signup rate, what is the churn, what is the engagement, and so on and so forth. But that doesn't help you to connect it to the actual business goal holders, this activation rate or this engagement link to the revenue goal that's not usually quite very clear. So the product Northstar kind of sits in between the day to day product metrics you measure and the financial business goal. So think of it as a leading indicator because waiting for the end of year report to see have you hit your revenue goal or not, the year has passed, there's nothing you can change anymore about it.
- You either find out you've hit the goal, you missed it. So the product North Star is a product goal or a metric really that is your kind of guard metric that everyone in the company should understand and this product metric should be an early indicator that tells you throughout the year whether you are on the right track to hit your business goals later on [affirmative]. So that's very abstract still. So as an example below the product that I look after to visit a management system it's kind of one of these when you visit a business and there's usually this old clunky system that you sign in and tell who you're here to see. So it's basically a way nicer version of it for an iPad app that you can put on the reception and the value of our differentiator is really the experience. It's the first thing that people see when they come into your office.
- So the branded experience and the good user experience is really our differentiator. So that's how people get the most value out of the product. So in our case, the product North Star is the percentage of customers who have set up the iPad, installed the iPad app and branded it with their brand colors, their brand logo. So there's this whole bunch of customization you can do to make it look super awesome. That's kind of what our product North Star is. So in the day to day when we are discussing different ideas or different opportunities or different features we could build, we think about will it help us reach the product North Star? Will it help us increase the percentage of customers who connect an iPad and set it up in this awesome branded way? So that's kind of the God metric, that one overarching thing that we strive for and that doesn't change.
- So assuming your product strategy doesn't change the product North Star is really around the value that your users get out of your product. But then underneath there's Product North Star you then have certain metrics that contribute to it. So again, one is the, the key categories we use is the reach, how many sign ups do you get? The other one is the activation rate. So there's usually some sort of feature that you want your customers to use within the first 30 days of using your product. That means they're activated, they understand this is what they can do with the product. Then there's engagement, which is how often do they come back and use whatever the most important feature or way to engage with your product is. And then there, there's your long term retention how long do they keep using your product on a monthly basis or when do they turn?
- So those are the four areas that all kind of impact the product North Star. So bear with me, I know this is a very lengthy answer to your [laugh] question but basically it just solves a whole bunch of friction points I have seen over the last few years because it gives you focus. Most product teams really track too much [laugh] rather than knowing what to really look for. So that product North Star really gives you focus on, okay, let's try to tweak these metrics and see if it impacts a product North Star and if it impacts a product North Star, we have the hypothesis that it will impact the business goal in the long term. And then obviously at the end of the year you'll see is this true? You might have to tweak the product North Star, but generally this is a good way to find those early indicators and it also removes the need to focus on is a just acquisition that you're after is just retention. It's a very common discussion I hear almost every product team has [laugh] every now and then it actually shows that you know kind of need both. In the end you need, and depending on your product cycle stage, the focus might shift, but this framework really visualizes very well how you need both the initial reach as well as the activation, which is actually a very overlooked metric and the engagement in retention to all contribute to that North Star to then create real business impact.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds incredibly useful and it makes you talk about it as the God metric and the way that the other metrics feed into it. How do you find God? What does that it look like? What does that process look like?
- Corinna Stukan:
- So it depends on your life cycle stage of the product. There was one example of a B2B product that I've been working on which is a data aggregated tool. So without naming any names I try to give you a bit of context. So the value is really rather than logging into seven different tools to get different bits of data, you have it all combined in a really nice feed of easy to digest insights. So at the very early stage before we launched, I had a hypothesis that the value is really the aggregation part, right? It's meant to save you time and have you understand your data. So my hypothesis was that as you connect more integrations and more apps into the product, the more value you will get out it. And usually if you have a strong value proposition defined for your product and there's really a clear pain point you're solving, there should be a fairly easy question to answer for your product.
- But then once you actually launch you can do some simple data analysis to find and actually a lot of the product analytics tools do that for you. Back then, that was one thing where I asked data scientists to help me cuz I had no idea how to run this kind of analysis. But now by Mix Panel and Amplitude actually have this feature where you can find a correlation between so they analyze who are your most engaged or long-term retained customers and what was the activation step that they took in the first place. So basically you can ask the product analytics tools tell me how many of the people who used feature X or did this in this timeframe, whatever it is, and then stayed long term retained customers. So it kind of tells you this correlation and does not causation. So it doesn't tell you this is just a data, it can tell you this is an indicator, this could be true.
- You still need to actually validate with customer interviews later on. This is really true. So basically back then when I had a data scientist help me with that, he ran this report of basically trying different events in different user actions and how have they led to higher retention in the long run. This is what you want to find and that's why I also shared just before that activation is really key. What is that activation action that you want your users to take within the first six days of using your product so they can really understand what the value of your product is?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things that you've covered there. One of them is the fact that you're looking for a leading set of indicators that are tied back to a north star so that you can actually make informed decisions on product sooner rather than waiting for the end of a reporting period and then trying to figure out what hasn't been working. I think that's really, really important. You've also talked about the need for a hypothesis in the first place is that there's sort of no mystical magical answer here. You've gotta engage your brain, you've gotta put out some assumptions and then you've gotta be able to validate that both within the product analytics but also then to ask the why question, is this true causation by doing some qu or some customer interviews? And I think that's also really key. Before we move on to the next topic area for us to cover today, this is obviously quite an important area as the product management fields matures and you kind of threw yourself in the deep end here and didn't really have a lot of help to begin with, what can you say to people that might be at the beginning of their analytics journey?
- What sort of things should they be asking or doing to get a better grasp on analytics so that they can be more effective product managers?
- Corinna Stukan:
- The first thing I would probably recommend is to get a good basic understanding of what good metrics look like. I think historically I've seen it a lot, people chase a lot vanity metrics. So that's really a critical foundation I think to read up on first. So there's book I can highly recommend. It's actually from the Lean Startup book series, which is amazing. All of those books are great but there's one on lean analytics and I read that many, many years ago the first time and it was such an eye opener to me, just some really basic stuff that I didn't know first. What are good metrics? So one of the things being like don't look at total numbers, you always try to find ratios. You do that actually in financials as well. You look at the profit margins, those are those percentages that really give you a better indication of whether something is good or bad. So yeah, just understand first what are good metrics. I think also one of the first mistakes I've made was to just track absolutely everything and then look for useful insights later on.
- So rather than trying to track everything and then doing this kind of exploratory data analysis, which is actually super hard to do, I can ask a data scientist to do that cuz they're skilled in it, but I certainly wouldn't be. So start with a few key metrics first. I think what I ran through before, if you can at least get a good understanding and make sure your metrics work well for the initial reach, how many signups, what's your activation rate, what is your monthly active user engagement metric and what is your long term retention? Those are four areas that if you talk to most product teams they don't even have a good understanding, they can't even recall what those numbers currently are. So I would say look no further, don't try to track absolutely every possible user action there is to do just focus on getting the basic metrics and then as you get more comfortable you can expand from there.
- So I think a bit of a mix of the theoretical know knowledge, what are good metrics, and then using a framework like the product North Star and those four key metrics that you can just start tracking is probably best, but you do have to throw yourself into it. [laugh], and I think I talked about this actually yesterday in the product lead session a lot. I really think the product manager just needs to take the initiative here to get more comfortable with data and it's really not about getting super deep into machine learning and predictions or any of that or any complex queries, but get a simple tool like Mix Panel Amplitude are both amazing product analytics tools that are fairly simple to set up. You need a bit of dev help, but then you can create your own dashboards and play with it and then really just gain the confidence over time. I think the key is more to get started to make data part of your day to day conversation to make it accessible to the product team as well. And from there you'll just get more experience and more confident with the data
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just get involved. And I suppose the user researchers, UX researchers will also love you for it because you might be able to highlight really interesting areas for them to go and investigate as well if they're not already doing this work in product analytics.
- Corinna Stukan:
- Yeah, yeah, I mean back to the example I shared before with the data aggregation tool once I had the report in front of me, there was this clear correlation between people who integrate at least x amount of apps, they actually have a 20% higher engagement later on. That was absolutely eye-opening for me. And again, you still have to then go on and validate that with following up with users, actually talk to them. But that was just such a crucial moment for our product team and then we knew very clearly, okay, let's optimize our onboarding experience for that. It really gives you focus which comes back to a lot of the tensions that we have. How do we prioritize and why are we doing what we're doing? How do we explain to stakeholders? It's often because it's not a problem of the prioritization process or method, it's actually a lack of focus of what to optimize for in the first place. So yeah, it all goes full circle. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's so important and everything's so interconnected as you've said, and I really like the simplicity in that of just having this focus that analytics can provide. So systems and productivity. This is also something that you, you're really, really soon, I know that because I was reading through your blog and back in June you implemented a new system for managing your time and I believe the post started off by explaining that Bill Gates and Elon Musk schedule every five minutes of their day. You didn't go down to that degree, but what was it that prompted you to have another look at how you were managing your time and what changes did you make?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Yeah, especially as all of our lives are getting busi and busier and my role was getting busier and then I wanted to do all this upskilling in my free time and I started to do writing and there were just so many things I wanted to do. And so I realized that managing time, managing your own time is really the superpower that all of us kind of need and can benefit from. Cuz time is, it's one of those reasons you just can't buy back. So it's really, really crucial and especially I think it was the first, it was the lockdown this year for us in New Zealand here. I had a really tough couple weeks where I just felt like I've been in reactive mode for several weeks and I felt awful. It was really stressful for me. I was quite deep into some of the things we were working on the visa management system and it was all really important so I couldn't really take my foot off, but at the same time I was despite obviously the lockdown stress was one thing, but I just felt stuck in this reactive mode and there were all these things I wanted to do.
- I felt like I did have, didn't have any time for any actual focus time, real product management work. I was just kind of putting up fires being really reactive. So I had this just this moment where I was like, okay, I've gotta change something about it. And the system that I implemented, I basically read yeah, I've read about and how crazy they manage their time and I'm not that type A I cannot [laugh], do not wanna manage every five minutes of my day. But what I did really learn from it and the more reading I did was being more proactive about your time is actually this big stress reliever as well for people. If you're in this firefighting mode, you just kind of feel helpless. So it was kind of a self-fulfilling need for me to get more productive but also to reduce my stress levels simply.
- So some of the things that I then started to play with and implementing it is kind of blocking out focus time proactively. So I would think about the week coming up and what is it that is the number one priority? What is the thing that if I go home at the end of the week and I finish that I'll be super, there are some of those days where you just feel super happy about whatever you accomplish that day. So I wanted to make sure I have that every week. And so I started to block out certain hours throughout the week where I can actually spend focus time and for me or for my kind of rhythm, I found that doing this first thing in the morning was the best because if I just log into Slack and email and then I see all these things I need to respond to, I'm already the day's already gone. [laugh]
- Now stuck in reactive mode. It's a very human thing to do. So I like to schedule my focus time two, three hours max. Actually, to be honest, if you get two hours of focus time, that's already really good. Some people ask what about meeting free days? I don't really believe in that. The effectiveness of this, if you have too much free time, you sometimes just waste your whole day because it doesn't have any constraints. So constraints are good. So what I do is I block the first couple hours of my day to do whatever's the most important thing in my day and I try to be uninterrupted, get this out of the way and then I can spend the rest of my day in meetings. So all my meetings I try to schedule just past lunch and that works actually quite well. And then also any reactive time in replying to slack and email is then more towards the second half of the day.
- And that has made a huge difference. So that technique is just simply time blocking, but also task batching. So if you switch from focus time to replying to emails to then back to focus time that's really inefficient. That's where multi-tasking is, is really, really inefficient for us. So kind of batching, this is not a very scientific term, but the kind of different mental modes that you have to have in the day to day, right? Again, replying to messages or drafting up, doing some research and some reading and drafting up a new product strategy or whatever that requires very different modes of thinking. So if you switch back from one to the other, too many times throughout the day you feel a very burnt out and B, it's not very effective in terms of getting stuff done. So that has worked really well. I don't think meeting free days is the goal, but having some constraints cuz I know in the morning I have these two hours, this is what I wanna get done and then whatever comes in the rest of the day, whatever fires I have to put out, it's fine because I've already done the most important thing in the day.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean that's really critical this time blocking and task batching. I really like that. In fact, it reminds me of a couple of things actually. Paul Graham's essay on the maker manager schedule that he wrote. Yes, we went to that in the show notes as well. And you touched on what's you mentioned, the one thing that I need to get done today. Now Gary Keller I believe wrote a book called The One Thing and what you've described is a good core part of what his philosophy is as well. So I'll link to that as well. Now being mindful of time, we are almost at time and so your alarm bowels will probably be going off and I know mine are as well, so I've gotta, I'm gonna bring us down to a close now and I wanted to ask a few questions in clothing closing, not clothing closing. If there was one thing that you wish that people in other product related roles, so the people that aren't in the product management discipline but are very integral to the delivery of world class product. If there was one thing that you wish they understood about the challenges of being a product manager, what would that be?
- Corinna Stukan:
- I think it would be the understanding of that there will always be constraints. And I think working with constraints is one of the hardest things to accept, but also the one constant thing that will always be part of building any product and to be honest, building any business.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yeah, really important. And I think everyone else listening to this, that's the one empathetic thing that you can do when you're engaging with the product managers. Consider the constraints that may be on that person. Let's play a really quick game. It's called What comes to Mind. We're gonna go through this super quick, I promise. What I'll do is I'll say a word and then you'll think of a word, the first thing that comes to mind, or it could be a picture, it could be whatever it is that you think of and then you just tell me what that thing is. Okay? Okay. You ready?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The first word is vanity metric,
- Corinna Stukan:
- Terrible
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. The next word is slack
- Corinna Stukan:
- Distraction.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And the last word is control.
- Corinna Stukan:
- Balance.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I like it. I like it. No judgment. There's no right or wrong. I should have said that.
- Corinna Stukan:
- [laugh] harder than it seems [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I'm, I've got the easy job here asking the question in the hot seat. So tell me over the next 10 years, so thinking ahead to 2030, and I know no one can predict the future, but what is your greatest hope for the profession of product management?
- Corinna Stukan:
- My greatest hope is really that I call them kind of product operators that we will become real operators of products to really impact business success and business results. Really I think it's a big challenge ahead of us. It's already been moving towards this direction which I'm really happy about. It's really not about managing a backlog anymore. It's really about stepping up, taking ownership, understanding the business side and combining that of course with the customer side and the tick side, which I think we're already doing quite well. So really linking our product teams closer to the business. That is my biggest hope. And I think it's actually wider than just the product manager's role. I think it will greatly benefit all the product teams that are actually working on these features, motivating them that what they're working on really has an impact to the business and the user ultimately. So this is kind of my greatest hope. I hope we'll get there actually sooner than 2030, to be honest. [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, let's hope so. And that's a really great place to close out the show. Corinna, look, it's been so great having you on the show. You are our very first product manager that it's been on Brave UX and I just wanted to say thank you so much for so generously sharing with us your knowledge and your experiences.
- Corinna Stukan:
- Thank you so much Brandon. I hope that was a lot of pressure to be the first PM on your show. [laugh]. I did it justice. That was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You, you've set the bar really high [laugh]. I have no doubt that today has been super useful for both the UX researchers and the other professionals that listen to the show. Thank you for helping us to put some of those pieces of the product puzzle together. Tell us what is the best way that if anyone wanted to connect with you, to get in touch?
- Corinna Stukan:
- Probably either LinkedIn or Twitter. Pretty active on both. We'll link to those to it. Do the same for Twitter. It's probably easiest.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Corinna. To everyone that's tuned in, thank you as well. Everything that we've covered included all the awesome books that Corinna's mentioned and the various organizations that she's involved in will be linking to in the show notes on YouTube. If you want to hear more of these kinds of conversations with amazing professionals like Corinna, please remember to the video and leave us a comment if there's anything you wanted to know more about and subscribe to the channel. And until next time, everybody keep being brave.