Ep 33 - Leveling Up as a Product Leader with Smartnews, 1stdibs, and Storyblocks

Strong product leadership impacts every part of the organization and can help foster an overall culture of innovation and growth. But if you’re a product leader, you understand how difficult it is to find avenues for continuous growth and learning for both yourself and your team.

In this episode, we discuss the unique challenges and opportunities product leaders face on the path towards growth, with three industry leaders, Jeannie Yang, SVP of Product at SmartNews Inc., Katherine Fischer VP of Product at 1stDibs, and Lucy Huang, VP of Product at Storyblocks.

Here’s What We Discussed: 

• [00:20] Our panel of experts introduce themselves and share their backgrounds
• [03:05] The importance of impact over output when measuring success as a product leader
• [07:51] How product leaders can grow people and gauge their impact on their teams  
• [10:46] Katherine talks about the keys to managing stakeholder expectations: Be explicit with timelines, outcomes, and the impact on the bottom line 
• [14:43] Jeannie brings up the importance of not creating Frankenstein solutions that are aimed to please stakeholders and how to realign with product vision 
• [21:03] Lucy gives her thoughts on how companies can balance innovation and risk 
• [27:17] Our experts share defining moments and lessons in their careers 
• [38:18] Handling the highest paid person’s opinion as a product leader and tips for keeping a product vision from derailing  
• [45:06] What resources our experts go to for inspiration: Having conversations with people in other functional areas, and one-to-one coffees with people in the industry 
• [50:27] Katherine shares the initial challenges she faced when transferring to product

About Our Speakers 

Jeannie Yang has been creating successful products at the forefront of social, mobile, and media for two decades. At Smule, she led product strategy and scaled the platform to over $100 million run rate, increasing users from 50K users to a community of 50M people. Today, she leads Product at SmartNews Inc, the first unicorn news startup since 2015. 

Katherine Fischer. Until recently,  Katherine was the VP of Product at 1stDibs, a global marketplace for one-of-a-kind, luxury goods. Over her 7-year tenure, Katherine held various leadership roles focused on the seller experience, logistics, e-commerce enablement, trust and safety, and the iOS app.

In Katherine’s next role she will lead the Product team at Made Renovation. Similar to what Opendoor has done for home buying or Carvana for car buying, Made is creating an e-commerce-like experience for home renovations, bringing this $400B market online.

Prior to 1stDibs, Katherine held product roles at growth stage companies (SinglePlatform and Seamless/GrubHub), launching numerous key products.

Lucy Huang is a product leader with experience across enterprise and consumer businesses.  Lucy has held product leadership roles at companies ranging in growth from $0-$70M+ in ARR such as Storyblocks, CB Insights, and Marketing Evolution. Lucy is passionate about building great teams and sharing her lessons learned with the product community.

Quotes

“One of the most important things for product is to make sure you're measured on your impact versus your output… At the end of the day, it's really about how the product team impacts the business as a whole.” – Katherine Fischer

 

“Managing up is being really explicit about  things that take a little bit longer, what the outcome will be, and what the impact will be on the bottom line.” – Katherine Fischer

 

“We're all problem solvers. We want to try to solve problems and take all the feedback… But it's okay to not address all the feedback, as long as we're clear what the expectation of the milestones is now, and what it will be in the future.” – Jeannie Yang 

 

“I am very adamant in terms of carving out one piece, at least, for innovation because you have to. If you're not investing, you're actually losing money because there's inflation going on. And if you're thinking about this whole business as a way to invest in product, you should be investing in something.” – Lucy Huang

 

“As the product manager, if you don't believe in a vision, then you can't really lead it.” – Jeannie Yang

 

“For product teams to be empowered, what I do try to do is educate the rest of the organization. How do we set up the product development team for success? A part of it is defining roles and responsibilities.” – Lucy Huang 

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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