Building A Unified Product Team In The Midst Of Accelerated Growth

Betina Evancha at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZzG0vrPUs

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Six years of highs and lows at Peloton

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Betina Evancha, and I'm here to talk about building a unified product team in the midst of accelerated growth. I am so happy to be here with all of you. Okay, a really, really quick intro. I am currently the VP of product strategy at Peloton. I manage a team of about 50 amazing product managers, analysts, user researchers and product documentation folks.

[00:00:27] Peloton currently has over six million members. Also, six is the number of years I have worked at Peloton, so it's been a journey. A few things from that time: as in any long journey, there have been high highs and there have been a few lows, so I'll go through a couple of both.

[00:00:51] Some of the highs. On the left there you'll see the Peloton Tread, which is an industry-changing product. It truly makes running on a treadmill fun. On the right you'll see the Peloton Guide, which is about bringing connected strength to many, many members, and we'll talk about a story there later on today. On the bottom right you'll see Peloton Lanebreak, which is our first gamified experience, actually launched this year. And over that time we have grown the product management team by about 10 times. So it's been a lot of change, a lot of organizational change, and a lot of great products we have launched along the way.

[00:01:39] And then we've also had some challenges. Here are some of the more public ones, in PR and social media. But as you can imagine, in any company you've also got challenges on the day-to-day level, and I'll talk about some of those as we go forward.

Why mistakes feel so uncomfortable

[00:02:01] So I'm here to talk about making mistakes. Does that make you feel a little bit tense? Because I can feel that it makes me feel a little bit tense just saying the phrase "making mistakes." So it's not just you and it's not just me. There's a whole book about it; this is not the only book, of course. But the reason it's so uncomfortable to think about making mistakes is a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. Basically, holding two ideas that conflict in your head at the same time is psychologically painful, and so you try to resolve it by changing one of the beliefs.

[00:02:45] In this case, it's something like: "I am a smart person" is one belief, and the other belief is "I did something not so smart; I just made a mistake." There are a couple of ways you naturally try to resolve this cognitive dissonance. The first one is you try to make the mistake not conflict with being a smart person: oh, it wasn't actually a mistake; it looked dumb, but it was actually smart. You could change the subject: it's not me, it was someone else's fault. Or you could change the verb and say, oh, I didn't make the mistake; I didn't actually have any control over that. The problem with resolving it this way is that you don't fundamentally learn from the mistake and move forward.

[00:03:41] The other thing you can do is question your first belief: maybe, because I made a mistake, I'm not actually a smart person. This might seem like the humble or introspective way to approach this problem, but it also means you don't fundamentally learn from the mistake.

[00:04:04] So I'm going to talk about a different way of thinking about mistakes, which is to think about them more like a Girl Scout or Boy Scout badge. When you were growing up, you might have been in Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts, and you get a badge for learning something. That might be first aid or hiking. What that badge commemorates is not only the fact that you are an expert at that thing, but also the trial and error along the way. I really liked this concept as applied to the working world. So my framework for talking to y'all today is going to be three mistakes I've made along the way, each in the context of a learning badge that I will award myself, and we'll talk through it that way. Bonus points if you can guess the mistake during the story.

[00:05:14] Okay, so you can tell I'm a product manager at heart, because I will start with my goals for building a product team. The first one is to ship products and features our members love. This is what all of us, cross-functionally, are focused on. The second two are about my role as a leader of that team. In order to enable my entire team to ship products and features our members love, I need to make sure that team is empowered in the larger organization. They're only as powerful as their ability to ship features. And third is nurturing and challenging the people on that team. Our team is only as good as the people on it, and keeping them means we need to continue to grow them over time.

The Tread knobs and the molehill badge

[00:06:09] Okay, so let's start with a story about shipping products and features our members love. This is a picture of the Peloton Tread knob. The Peloton Tread is a treadmill designed to support interval workouts in particular; that's one of the reasons it's a fun way to run on a treadmill. When we talked to people early on in the product development process for the Tread, we heard that doing interval workouts was extremely frustrating on a traditional treadmill, because it takes so long to change the speed or the incline. You really can't do a 30-second interval, because by the time you get up to that sprint speed, the interval's basically over.

[00:07:02] The knobs were the result of our working on that problem. The way they work is that they're close to where your hands are when you're running, so you can easily turn them to bring the speed up or down, and the same with the incline. During product development, there was one thing about these knobs that drove me crazy. On the Tread, the speed goes up to 12.5 miles per hour in increments of 0.1 mile per hour, and the incline goes up to a 12.5% grade, but in increments of half a percent. So, math: the speed takes much longer to get to the top than the incline takes to get to the top of the incline.

[00:07:52] When I was testing this product during development, this drove me crazy. And when I talked to members about the controls specifically and interviewed them, they would say the same thing: "Oh, it's kind of weird that they don't totally match up." Being a high-ownership product person, I did what I usually do when faced with something I believe is not right, which is to throw all my resources at it. I wrote documents, I set meetings, I made a whole pitch for how it should be different. I did this for probably six months. I drove everyone on the team insane. And it became clear that we were pencils down and this was the product we were shipping, so I got on the bus and we shipped.

[00:08:43] It turns out that when we shipped, this was not even on the radar of the most important user requests and challenges. Which is why the badge here is the "sometimes it's a molehill" badge. When you're making a product, there are always going to be things that are not ideal, not exactly what you want, and you're going to need to ship anyway. In this case, the lesson I learned was: yes, this was a problem members were experiencing when testing, but I was hearing the words they were saying without the tone. The tone was, "This is not that important to me as a user." But because I cared about this problem so much, I only listened to the words, and I thought it was much more important than it actually turned out to be.

The Guide price point and the always be selling badge

[00:09:42] Okay, two out of three, here we go: building a product team that is empowered in the larger organization. For this one, I'm going to tell a story about the Peloton Guide. The Peloton Guide actually launched this year. It is our first connected strength product. You'll see, just under the television, the pill-shaped product. It's got a camera in it that allows you to track whether you are following along with the instructor or not, and get credit for that, which is very motivating, might I add.

[00:10:24] Early on in the development process for the Guide, we had a lot of conversations about the reason for being for this product. A big piece of it was that we wanted to bring a connected fitness experience to more members, partly by enabling it at a more accessible price point than you could offer for a Bike, where you need to have an entire frame, or a treadmill, where you have to have an entire treadmill. When we originally made it, that was really one of the biggest focuses.

[00:11:06] Now, over the course of a product's lifetime, especially at a rapidly growing, changing company, the team changes several times just due to growth, and we saw this for Guide as well. We didn't really worry about it, until at one point during the product's life I found myself in a meeting where we were discussing the price point for the product. There was a whole range of options on the table, and some of them were higher price, higher margin, and it seemed like as a group we were leaning towards those options. And I felt, honestly, really confused. I didn't know where we had lost the vision for the product, or the purpose for the product.

[00:11:50] Then, thinking about it a bit more, I realized that we didn't know as a group where that vision was supposed to reside, which is in the product management team. So we're going to call this one the "always be selling" badge. Since then I have learned, and had to remind myself, that every time someone changes in the team, I need to make sure I spend some time with them explaining what the role of product management is, and how we help create the product and move it forward. People are not born knowing what product managers do, so over and over we need to make sure that they know.

Career levels and the journey not a destination badge

[00:12:36] Okay, the third and final badge: nurturing and challenging, growing product people. One of the first things I tackled in my current role was solving for the growth path of product managers and other roles in my organization. This was one of the biggest challenges when I interviewed people early on, and this was in early 2020. I thought we did a pretty good job. We pulled in a bunch of people from across the team, we researched how other companies did leveling and growth, and then we also thought about how Peloton's needs were different and how we should think about that as well.

[00:13:27] At the end of this process, we came up with a leveling system that had individual contributor and manager tracks, a clear skill set for each level, and a clear rubric and schedule for how we were going to bring it into hiring, performance reviews and things like that. So we did a really good job, and I was feeling really great about this.

[00:13:57] So you can imagine that very recently I was surprised to hear from my team, "How do I grow at Peloton?" I was like, what the heck? I started by pointing people at the levels and saying, "There are levels. Check out the levels, check out the growth plans." And then, as I continued to hear this, I used my favorite tool, which is to get a bit more curious about why this was coming out.

[00:14:30] The thing you might have guessed is that this timeline is extremely incomplete. There are two years between early 2020 and this spring, and a couple of things happened in the meantime. We had a global pandemic; I don't know if any of y'all noticed. We had some team changes, so the makeup of our team and which roles were involved changed over time. Most notably, the user research team joined my team, which added some new roles and some new folks to the team. We also had some growth over that period. At the peak, in January, we had a product team of over 70 product managers, analysts, researchers and documentation folks. And then, like many other folks at Peloton, in the early part of this year we had to say goodbye to some of our colleagues as a result of reductions in force to right-size the company.

[00:15:32] That's a lot of stuff to happen over two years. Thinking about why folks were asking this question, it became clear to me that it was because the levels we made for an almost entirely in-person company, one that was growing extremely rapidly but was still small, did not totally apply to a company with some remote folks and some in-person folks, working at a company that was going to be a little more mature for the next year or so.

[00:16:10] So we'll call this one the "it's a journey, not a destination" badge. This is about remembering that when you create a process for your team, or any kind of document, it's not done, because your team continues to change over time, and so those processes also need to change over time. I assure you we are coming back to this one, and we'll be redoing our thinking about leveling and growth in a way that is perfect for the current challenge and the current company.

Thanks, and we're hiring

[00:16:54] Okay, that's it. Those are all the mistakes I have today. A thing I didn't mention is that all of these mistakes happened at or around people. There are many people who have tolerated my mistakes, and even better, helped me see and correct them, so thank you to all those folks. And also, since I probably made a few mistakes during this talk, thank you for listening to it.

[00:17:24] And finally, we are hiring. We are a product team that is growing, that builds really great stuff our members really love, and we are always learning and changing. So check it out; we'd love to see you. All right, thank you so much for spending a bit of time with me. I appreciate it. Bye.