Q&A With Marrisse Asuncion

Marrisse Asuncion at UXDX Community: SE Asia. Video: https://youtu.be/kdedK9vG9vY

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.

Managing a north star you were handed

[00:00:00] Host: Now we're going to very quickly jump over to Marrisse. Marrisse gave a fantastic talk on aligning teams through product roadmaps, and again, if you haven't had the opportunity to watch that, I highly recommend it. It's a great, quite thorough run-through of the inputs as well as the outputs of a product roadmap. So welcome, Marrisse, very nice to meet you.

[00:00:26] Marrisse: Thank you.

[00:00:26] Host: We don't have a lot of time in this Q&A, so I'm just going to jump straight in. You said that you had your four steps of what you need to do, and it starts with a north star as one of the first things. How do you, as a product manager, manage the north star when it's often not something that's up to the product manager? Often you get handed it by the founders or people who are already there. Have you ever had a situation where you've been handed something that you don't really agree with, and it's been up to you then to try to shift the north star a little bit?

[00:01:09] Marrisse: Great question. It really happens. In my talk I also talked about team driven, and when a CEO, for example, is driving all of the decisions. So it really happens. Sometimes you get handed the metrics that they think would measure the success of a product. I was new to product management and I didn't have my voice yet, so I just followed whatever I was handed.

[00:01:40] Marrisse: Then eventually, as I got into different companies as well, as I got more experience, I realized the importance of also trying to lay out your suggestions and then also trying to discuss that with the rest of the team, so everyone is aligned on what really should be the measure of your product success. I hope that answers the question.

Starting without personas or insights

[00:02:08] Host: Yeah. One of the challenges with that that I've personally encountered is, if you want to do — and you highlighted this in your talk, you said okay, if you want to be shifting and putting together a correct roadmap, you need to know user personas, you need to have done user interviews, you need to have the insights and foundations in place. But so many places I go to, it relies on that top down, it relies on that person who maybe has in their head all of this knowledge. If you're in that situation and you don't have those foundations, so you don't have really strong personas or interviews and insights, what would be your recommendations on how somebody should start trying to inch their way over?

[00:02:55] Marrisse: The first thing is just to come up with workshops. What I do is I lay out different workshops that our team could take, so we could discuss all of the different personas. You start with your personas, you try to build those personas first, and then you try to extend it. You get to discuss also the metrics, like how do you make sure that you're actually meeting the needs of those personas that your product is serving.

[00:03:26] Marrisse: For me it really helps when that is done through a workshop, especially if it's a design thinking workshop, because everything is visual, and we're now all working remotely. So it's better, if you're a PM, it's better if you gain familiarity with design thinking. Then once you go through that process of discussing it, not just with the top level, the CEOs and the foundership, once you discuss that with the rest of the team as well, it usually works quite well.

[00:03:58] Marrisse: As long as you also have the negotiation skills, because as a PM it's important that you could negotiate with your stakeholders as well. Because stakeholders, as long as they understand where you're coming from, they usually agree to it. In my experience I've been lucky to be part of companies where the CEOs, the founders, the top level leadership are open to suggestions. So I think I'm very lucky there.

Personas versus jobs to be done

[00:04:30] Host: Great. There are two different avenues I want to approach that on. You mentioned start with personas. I've talked to a lot of people who — and I guess this very much depends on your industry — are saying personas aren't so important anymore, it's more what are the jobs that people need to do. The example that's been doing the rounds is that Prince Charles is the same age as Ozzy Osbourne, so if you put them as a 60 year old man who lives in a castle, you get Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne, who are very different characters. So what are your thoughts on the persona versus jobs to be done debate?

[00:05:08] Marrisse: For me personas are still relevant, because when you create your personas, that's also how you come to understand the pain points of your user, and also their goals. Even if it's jobs to be done, if that's the approach you'd like to take, I think that's fine, as long as you uncover first the pain points and also what the goals of your users are. Because if you don't know those two things, then it's going to be really hard to build the right product.

[00:05:41] Host: Right, so it's all just, what are the problems that you're solving for your customers?

When the stakeholder says just do it

[00:05:48] Host: The second one that you mentioned there was that often, if you explain to stakeholders where you're coming from and what your rationale is, they'll buy into it. I've definitely had some experiences where people have been more open, and I've also been on the receiving end of "just do it," and just do it because I'm telling you to do it. So what do you do in those instances where you've gone through the process, you've tried to explain where you're coming from, but your stakeholder is still just telling you, just do it?

[00:06:17] Marrisse: I usually just do it. And then, if it doesn't work, I try to explain: this didn't work because we weren't actually measuring the right thing. They usually realize it when you show them the hard facts, like, this is the usage that we got from what we released, it wasn't as good as we thought, because we weren't thinking about the right metrics to check. I think you're really going to be in a tight spot if they ask you to just do what they want you to do.

Instrumentation and analytics tooling

[00:07:05] Host: Great, so it comes back to having the instrumentation in place to be able to track. I know you talked a lot about metrics and tracking them, but what's your view on where you should prioritize putting in the instrumentation to track the particular metrics?

[00:07:28] Marrisse: Sorry, again, I didn't hear that.

[00:07:30] Host: It's just about the importance — and I agree with what you're saying, that you track the metrics and see the outcomes — but often in a lot of places they actually don't have their system set up to track the right metrics. So has that ever happened to you, and how did you approach, okay, well now we need to start making changes to track it, versus making the changes to do the work?

[00:07:53] Marrisse: Yes, it's actually very common, because there are a lot of tools there that actually sell being able to help you track the right metrics, for example Amplitude and Mixpanel. But sure, some companies, especially startups, don't have the budget to subscribe to those integrations. Usually what we use is just the basics, like Google Analytics and Firebase. And that's fine if you start with that, as long as you know the right metrics and you put it in a place where it's visible to everyone.

[00:08:30] Marrisse: In our company we also want to invest in analytics, but right now we're still using Google Analytics and just Firebase. My plan is, once we have a more visible dashboard, a more usable dashboard, that it could be self-service, everyone could use it, that's when I can pitch to the stakeholders that, you know what, we could actually take this to the next level if we integrate with another platform, say Amplitude or Mixpanel for example. Because those platforms also get into the granularity of each of the possible user segments. So it's also something that you could sell to the top leadership.

[00:09:24] Host: Excellent. Well, thanks very much for the time. We're actually out of time now on our quick Q&A, but thank you, and I do have more questions as well that hopefully we'll cover, some of them, in our panel coming up. So thank you, Marrisse.

[00:09:37] Marrisse: Thank you.