Season 2 Episode 12: The Future of Product Management is Data and AI

In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Rina Alexin, CEO of Productside, joins Mark Baldino, Co-Founder of Fuzzy Math, to discuss the state of product management today, including challenges like misaligned strategy, poor stakeholder management, and data utilization. She emphasizes the need for clearer communication of strategy across all levels of an organization, enabling product teams to focus on valuable discovery and execution. Rina also shares insights on navigating the complexities of data, enhancing team skills, and leveraging AI to empower more effective product management.

Key Takeaways

Misaligned Strategy: Many product teams struggle due to poorly defined business strategies or prioritization, which ultimately affects their ability to deliver impactful results.
Stakeholder Management: A key challenge is the lack of proper governance in decision-making, which leads to difficulties in aligning priorities across the organization.
The Value of Communication: Clear and repetitive communication from leadership to product teams about business goals is crucial to ensure alignment and strategic focus.
Overwhelmed Product Managers: Product managers often feel overwhelmed with tasks, which highlights the importance of balancing stakeholder communication with delivering product outcomes.
The Role of AI: Product managers should learn to effectively use AI to increase efficiency. Avoiding AI will be detrimental to productivity in the future.
Data Utilization: Lack of data or mistrust in data quality can lead to poor decision-making. Gathering reliable metrics is essential for driving impactful business decisions.
Enabling Product Managers: Providing product managers with the tools, training, and clear expectations helps them excel in their roles and contribute to the organization’s success.

About Our Guest

Rina, the CEO of Productside, believes that Product Management is a crucial lever for growth, as it provides the input to everyone else’s work. She worked at McKinsey & Company and MetLife prior to joining the team at Productside. Rina repositioned Productside to build proactive, innovative, and strategic product teams through a combination of advisory and targeted training services. They help product leaders implement a repeatable process to make high quality product decisions that achieve business objectives. Her leadership is characterized by a strong emphasis on continuous learning, team development, and a commitment to exceeding client expectations.

Rina holds a BA with honors from Amherst College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is also a member of the Association of International Product Marketing and Management.

Resources & Links

Chapters

02:58 Current State of Product Management
06:08 Leadership’s Role in Product Management
09:03 Challenges in Product Management
11:56 Stakeholder Management and Governance
15:08 Overwhelm in Product Teams
17:58 The Impact of AI on Product Management
21:03 The Importance of Data in Product Management

Tags

#ProductManagement, #LeadershipDevelopment, #StakeholderManagement, #ProductStrategy, #CommunicationSkills, #AIInProductManagement, #DataDrivenDecisions, #ProductTransformation, #DesignLeadership, #LeadershipPodcasts, #UXPodcasts

Transcript

Mark Baldino (00:01.536)
Rina, welcome to the podcast.

Rina Alexin (00:03.955)
Hi Mark, thanks so much for having me, excited to be here and to talk about product management.

Mark Baldino (00:08.854)
Yeah, no, I'm thrilled. I'm really excited to have you on the podcast and I know the audience will enjoy it. As we always start on these podcasts, give the audience a sense of kind of who you are, your background role. I know you're the CEO of ProductSize, so would love to touch on kind of your company and your set of service offerings.

Rina Alexin (00:29.107)
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Great place to start. So hi, everyone. My name is Rina Alexin. I'm the CEO of ProductSide. Some of you may know us as our former name 280 Group. I started my career actually in finance at McKinsey & Company. And then I decided, although I love spreadsheets, that's not my calling. And I came across 280 Group after business school. And Ryan Lolley, who's the founder, and I

We got to know each other and I just saw something really special about this company. What we were doing, the people, our approach. I fell in love with it and I took it over just over six years ago. And it's been just amazing, really taking the company, now product side, to be a true leader in the product management transformation space. And we do that by being by the side of product leaders on their journey to helping their teams do product better.

Mark Baldino (01:27.714)
Fantastic. Now, are you telling me that you don't have to deal with spreadsheets anymore? Because that could be the topic of this podcast if you've gotten out of the spreadsheet business.

Rina Alexin (01:36.507)
I, you know, that would be a really sad day in my life because I think some people do call me the spreadsheet queen. I really like them. I'm still learning PowerPoint. That's probably the bane of my existence. But luckily Robin Diaz on our team is an amazing designer. So she makes me look really good.

Mark Baldino (01:39.551)
Hahaha

Mark Baldino (01:43.508)
I do too. I do too.

Mark Baldino (01:56.222)
I always as aside, but I always wonder how many SaaS software products went to die because they were trying to replace spreadsheets and they just didn't realize that the truth is they're really, they can be very simple in their use and then they can be insanely powerful and there's only a few tools out there that can do that. But the more you learn it, like literally we run our business on spreadsheets, even though there's a million SaaS based software tools that can do finance and stuff like that. So I just feel like it's always a mistake to get rid of this power tool because it has this scope of

entry-level users to like super power users. So I'm on your side.

Rina Alexin (02:30.485)
Yeah, well, I could agree with you there. I think it was very popular probably about 10 years ago to try to, you know, there would even be companies with slogans of, get rid of your spreadsheet. But you're right, at the end of the day, it's just a ubiquitous tool that people know, and it's very intuitive. And sometimes you need to find a problem worth solving that's a bit more valuable than just getting rid of something people are kind of okay with already.

Mark Baldino (02:58.562)
Yeah, 100%. I've referred to it on the podcast as the uncanny values of Excel, which is like, yeah, if you're do some simple stuff, maybe you can get rid of it and you increase efficiency. And on the other end of it, you have to totally change the dynamic, but there's so many tools that sit right in between. And it's like, no, no, no, I can just do this easier with Excel. And now if I'm using Google spreadsheet, I can get connected to the kind of broader ecosystem. okay, on a side on Excel, I could always talk about Excel. So product side, product management,

partners, give us give the audience a sense of like, where do you think kind of the current state of the product management process and you can paint as broad a brush as you want to or maybe there's some specific sort of themes you're seeing throughout kind of the market but what is what is the current state of product management?

Rina Alexin (03:47.763)
Yeah, great. So I will caveat this by saying my point of view right now is based on the clients we work with. And we work with a lot of enterprise clients and they are global. So there are regional differences right now in terms of the expectations of product management. But I can also tell you because product side does more than just training, we do a lot of advisory. We've taken a look at the last few.

a couple dozen advisory engagements that we've had where we actually go in and try to understand the current state of product management at these organizations. And the problems that organizations often have, they're kind of the same no matter where you go. And we're often brought in by a product leader that already knows there is a problem. There's a problem in how people are working. There's a problem often in how the strategy is being communicated to the company.

And so taking a look at all of these organizations, I can tell you the current state of product management. One is poorly defined strategy or prioritization of strategy at the business level. That's a common problem for product management is how do you prioritize everything that is coming at you from a feature perspective when you don't have a really good sense of where the business is trying to go? And usually leaders at the business level

They're articulating, let's grow. Like, let's just make more money. That's not a strategy. That's not a cohesive. Everybody wants more money. It's more about, what is the value we're bringing to the market that's going to generate that new return on creating that value? And people that I would say the business is looking to product management to both answer that question, and yet they don't give them the time or resources to do that.

So I think that's a forever problem in product management of good people wanting to create a future for their company that is strategic and that delivers value to their users and their business. But they lack the understanding at the leadership team level of what that role of product management then is, or at least a sign of prioritization of what do the leaders see because they have access to potentially more data than a product manager does.

Mark Baldino (06:08.642)
So are you helping your clients help leadership? I don't want to say do their job, that's too broad a brush, but do you see that's the role of product management is actually to step out of kind of that level in the organization and help leadership prioritize better, clarify goals, clarify metrics, KPIs, like you have access to data or is it you have this situation, it's not great, here's how to work around it.

Rina Alexin (06:13.621)
What the f-

Rina Alexin (06:32.715)
OK, so the answer is there's a few different answers here. First is yes. So when we come into an organization, so the problems that we're asked to solve, the root causes of those problems are not necessarily that our product managers don't know what they're doing. Sometimes that is the case. Sometimes it's purely skill-based. They just don't have a good process by which they are organizing their thinking across a

across a product life cycle. they might not know what specifically am I supposed to do at this stage versus this stage and how do I make those decisions in what order, what sequencing and what activities. So that is something that we do bring to our clients. But oftentimes when we come in and we see that there is this overall problem around a lack of prioritization of where the business is going and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of product management.

we come in and we run a leadership focused workshop called Critical Importance of Product Management. And that is, we can get four hours, it's great. Usually we only have access to that C-suite level for about two. And our goal there is to get them to start thinking about those higher level goals of the business. So it becomes really a strategy workshop for those leaders. And that really helps us in doing the rest of the work that we do at...

that organization because we can then now come into the product organization and say, here's what your leaders actually want you to do. And I can tell you, I've been in rooms where product managers say to us, I've been here for two years. I've learned more about my business in the past two hours than I have two years of being here. that's, you know, I have to say this, that sometimes I also think that leaders actually do this work, but they don't.

communicate it, they don't repeat it out. And it's this problem of you can't unknow what you know. So you come into some of these team or town halls or team meetings and the leaders are not talking or repeating what the ultimate goal and strategy is and they should. I had a coach once that, and I like to tell the story a lot, but I had a coach that once told me, hey, do you think Billy Joel

Mark Baldino (08:28.674)
Yes. Yes.

Rina Alexin (08:55.667)
likes Piano Man, the song? Probably not, right? Like how many times has Billy Joel sung Piano Man?

Mark Baldino (09:03.83)
He's read an article about this actually, and he admits that he didn't think it was going to be a big hit. It's not that he doesn't like it, but he talks about how simple of a song it is, and he was shocked that is popular, but he does it over and over again because people love it.

Rina Alexin (09:17.515)
People love it, so do it for the fans. Yeah.

Mark Baldino (09:19.478)
Yeah, yeah. So how are you like?

How do you, so you're brought in by product leaders who recognize they don't have the traction in the organization, misalignment in the organization. How do you convince leadership to spend that one hours, two hours, three hours, four hours, like in a strategy workshop, which is going to enable another group. they have to, does leadership have to recognize that there's a.

Rina Alexin (09:40.139)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (09:48.738)
problem with product? Like what's the acute pain you're focusing in on to get access to the C-suite so you can help fix a little bit of the problem there and then enable the product management organization to function.

Rina Alexin (10:00.309)
Great question. So I would say that the leadership in the C-suite tend to feel the pain of product management on the delivery side. What they feel is we're just not delivering enough. That's what I hear often, especially. I remember somebody put, I think it might've been even Lenny. Lenny had a guest that was talking about the differences in Europe. And that's very much true. I'm seeing it as well. It's very much, there's a, our house is on fire and it's because we're not delivering. But.

The truth is the gas is coming from the lack of strategy. It's not that your team doesn't know how to build or, again, there may be some situations where they're just completely inefficient at building. They're not good at communicating to an engineer, but they have all the knowledge to be able to do that. Most of the times, the reason why requirements are being missed is because the discovery practices are really poor.

there's not this clear understanding of what exactly are we working towards and what value is being created as a result. So in order to get in front of leadership, oftentimes we're working with organizations that do have a problem in delivery, but that problem isn't solved by telling people just build more things faster. It's really about organizing the work well and getting clarity on the value you're providing to the market.

I mean, what's in it?

Mark Baldino (11:26.818)
kind of go, you're going back through the chain. Are you familiar with the five whys? So it's kind of like that. You're kind of asking those questions and saying, okay, but why? And then you're eventually going to work back to, in this case, an issue with kind of like misalignment on goals. I love the concept of value because if you can have people back along that chain speaking to the value that you're producing or they're producing, so leadership, what's the value we're going to, we're going to, we're

Rina Alexin (11:31.571)
Yeah, yeah, that's a Toyota model.

Mark Baldino (11:56.3)
we're bringing to market, product management, what's the value, how to design, engineering. think that value is a common language. If a group of people cross-functional can speak that language, I think it can be really, really impactful.

Rina Alexin (12:10.827)
So the other challenge, because we talked about strategy, is the whole idea of stakeholder management. It comes up all the time. I've talked about it many times. I think that will be also a forever problem for a lot of product management teams, because there just are so many stakeholders. But I also find that in those organizations that have problem with prioritizing the outcomes that they're going for, the value that they're trying to drive, also have a lack of governance.

Mark Baldino (12:15.201)
Yeah.

Rina Alexin (12:39.721)
meaning they don't have a systemic way in which a group of leaders comes together and makes those high-level prioritization decisions well informed by the product management organization. So that's something else that we're often installing is, okay, how are you making product work visible and how are you prioritizing at that?

portfolio as well as business outcome level. You understand what I'm talking about, very high level. And that results us also in bringing together the stakeholders of product management. So it's not, that's what I also like to think about. It's not us just going in and making product managers know how to do their job. It's also educating the rest of the organization on their role in product management.

Mark Baldino (13:10.825)
Yep.

Rina Alexin (13:31.595)
What should they expect of product management? How can they all work together? Because it's a win-win for the company, right? At the end of the day, everyone is building something of value for the company and for their users. And so putting together a product roundtable, I've heard a number of different names for this, but essentially it's a committee of leaders who meet regularly and a structure around the conversations that happen.

what information is being brought to them, what data is being brought to them to make decisions about, is this a product worth building or should we sunset it? Is this a, we're out of scope. We found this new information. Is it worth investing in that more, right? Making those kinds of decisions. We try to make that happen. And it's

I think it unlocks a lot of value because it eases the problem both of the prioritizing what are the ultimate business objectives and it gets all the stakeholders bought in.

Mark Baldino (14:39.042)
Right on. So first steps, maybe ideal engagement here is kind of looking on the periphery and the folks that product are working with leadership and then a broader group of stakeholders and trying to improve those. you look Insular, when you look at an actual product management group, I what are you seeing again, given kind of recent experience and it sounds like a few kind of recent sort of strategy engagements.

What do you feel like is the state of those teams themselves?

Rina Alexin (15:12.105)
Overwhelm, I would say. A lot of overwhelm, a lot of feeling like they have too many things on their plate that they can't prioritize. In fact, we ask every participant of a training class, what are your frustrations with product management? And communication is the most frequent. I think it comes up about 30 % of the time. It's the overwhelm around needing to communicate out to.

other groups in the company and then feeling like they just don't have time. So that's the current state from the perspective of a product manager. And I don't want to let go of, know, it is not just the leadership. It's not just the stakeholders. There are also a lot of product managers that, I mean, many product managers got into the industry from an operations background, engineering background, sales background, right? They didn't have formal training. They got it on the job.

Mark Baldino (16:04.332)
Yep. Yep.

Rina Alexin (16:10.619)
And there's a lot of assumptions that also happen from a product manager perspective, where if you don't have a strong process and you don't have, I don't want to call it training, but it is training. You don't have a agreed upon way of working. I'll just put it that way. And the ability to say, okay, I know what great looks like. Then the confidence level of product managers goes down. And when somebody's confidence level goes down,

they probably aren't doing their best work. They just don't know what they don't know and they don't feel like they got it. So it is also the case in a lot of these companies where we come in, we also have to address the skill gaps that are there. So I'm not saying they're not there. I'm just saying that you can address the skill gaps, but if you don't look at the organization holistically, you don't end up with a great result.

Mark Baldino (17:00.258)
think it's, mean, in running a UX consultancy, it's similar. mean, there's maybe there was this sort of proliferation of design boot camps and everyone kind of going through them and learning this short-circuited way of running the process. And so we do run into something similar when we're looking at UX orgs and their kind of maturity level and where there might be some skills gap. But I think what resonates a hundred percent is this component of communication.

Right. And we also stakeholder management for sure. But, you know, is my primary job to create spreadsheets, to fill out, you know, to build, to design a wireframe or to write a requirement. Is that my primary responsibility or is it my primary responsibility to communicate this out to multiple stakeholders? And I think it's probably both. I think people do struggle and they've arrived in these spaces of either leadership or just kind of individual contributor level in really

in honest ways, but they get to a spot where maybe the team beneath them, they're working with, doesn't have, as you said, process, which sometimes people don't like too much, but sort of a consistent, as you said, measure of success. What are you doing? It's selection bias. I tell people, when somebody hires Fuzzy Math, they kind of know they have a problem with design or they have a need, right? So it's selection bias and who talks to me.

Rina Alexin (18:25.673)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (18:28.64)
But we also do run into resistance with other stakeholders, internal sometimes maybe with design teams if we're paired up with them. Like when you're bumping into some skills gaps or you're seeing like, there's not a clearly defined process. People are pulling in different directions. Like how are you pushing through some of those areas of resistance with maybe within a product management or?

Rina Alexin (18:49.951)
within the product management org, as in they are resistant to the idea. So I mean, that's pretty rare what you're describing. Usually when we come into an organization, product managers are happy to see us and they actually get inspired by some of the ways in which we're showing them how to understand their job. So we're giving them clarity around their role and we're giving them the tools to actually do it well.

Mark Baldino (19:00.864)
ready.

Rina Alexin (19:17.065)
So I don't really have so much in terms of resistance from a product manager perspective. I will tell you though, because you did ask me about current state. What's think top of mind for a lot of product managers right now, and this isn't for everyone, of course, but it's obviously, and everyone's talking about it, it's how is AI going to change my job? That's something that we're hearing. And maybe there could be some resistance there. But I would say that

If in that case, I think the resistance is potentially fear-based of just not really understanding the technology or understanding how to use it well. And I understand that I completely empathize with product managers in that seat. I've seen like experiments done of AI or generative AI produce a pretty high quality results and we use it at our company as well. I think in the end there, would say, listen to that fear, lean into it and learn

how to make that a positive for yourself. Because if you just run away from it, that's not going to serve you. That fear is not serving you. So instead, learn about it and see how you can use it. Because I do think that product managers who are getting very good at using this technology and using it regularly, they're going to do their work a lot faster, and they're going to be more efficient.

Again, I don't know, five, six, I mean, this is moving very quickly, so I don't have a crystal ball and anybody that does, I mean, unless they're really, really in the deep AI state, yeah, I don't quite know exactly how it's going to shape the role, but I do know right now it is providing a lot more benefit for those who are using it well in terms of.

analysis, like data analysis, getting all this voice of customer research, helping code it. So product managers who are using this work well, even for our, so product side has a playbook, right? That's what we teach when we go into an organization, we could put that into chat GPT or any of the other generative AI tools and help guide. That's an important part.

Rina Alexin (21:27.465)
Don't have it do the work, the thinking for you. Help it guide your own thinking. That's how you're going to make sure that it is a valuable use of the technology. I've seen so many people just spit out answers like the prompt, they prompt it and they spit the answer out as though that is an accurate answer. That's not valuable. yeah.

Mark Baldino (21:48.79)
No, not at all. I mean, people forget that it's generative, it's recursive, right? Like we talk about, designers talk about the design process and they're always like, we can't just do this once. This is an iterative process. We're gonna learn from it we're gonna move forward. And I don't think people treat Gen.AI the same way because actually the answers in my experience with JetGPT do get richer and better and more refined the more I interact with it. And I heard an example, I'm having the next episode on record on the podcast is gonna cover some of this.

that people who have really good editing skills, like could be good editors, will be successful maybe in the next few years because that's kind of how you can... That lens of editing and getting something back and being able to tweak it, pull out the most important components and then send it back and kind of go back and forth, those people will be potentially more successful using GenI because they kind of have that gear or that muscle and my... Sorry, go on.

Rina Alexin (22:44.779)
Well, yeah, well, I agree and yet I disagree with you. I I think what you're saying is those people who have the muscle of being curious and are good learners, which I think maybe editors have some of that, being, I'm trying to think, because if I were to think about it, if I were to communicate it, I would think that the people who are really good at learning or understand how they learn.

are going to be very successful here. What I mean here is it's not just about generative AI, it's about AI and different technology, new solutions are going to be out there. It's about being smart in the room when you're talking to engineering and you're having a conversation. And those who, I don't think everybody in product is going to be so, I don't know, literate in this topic, but get as AI literate as you possibly can.

maybe from your perspective, editors have that natural learner mentality, but I would think other people also can.

Mark Baldino (23:51.916)
Yeah, think it is a mentality more than anything else. As you said, taking your playbook and passing it through and getting feedback or improving it. I think there's actually an opportunity for AI to help people with their human-to-human communication. When I'm writing, tend to be pretty wordy and it's not effective. I know that if I can say something in

three words I should, but it's just not my nature. And actually like GenAI has helped me a lot in like, want to make this more succinct, get this down to the core component or for this audience, I kind of want to have a lens of how to approach this with this audience. I do think people can use it to improve some of their comms and take a little bit of the, you know, the burden off of some of their work product that they might struggle with just because it's not in their skillset. And actually I think they can use it to, as you said, be lifelong learners.

and figure that out. think if you're not, consultants, you're not utilizing it yourself in your own work, I think you're missing out. If you're not using it to improve my consultancy's process, and if I'm actually not helping my clients utilize it better, I am back to that concept of value. I'm missing a value I can provide. I have a very strong sense that my team is not going to be manually

Rina Alexin (24:51.774)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (25:15.468)
pushing pixels around in two years, right? It's gonna be giving prompts and getting those back and then making adjustments. And I just think the nature of the work is gonna kind of, is gonna change even if we can't have sort of a crystal ball to figure out where it's gonna be. It's different now for those that are embracing it. And I do think you're right. Like get exposure to it. You might decide you don't wanna use it, but keeping it at bay is kind of a detriment to I think people's personal careers and the kind of services they're providing.

Rina Alexin (25:44.039)
And I think to your point, since majority of the responses that we got in terms of what are you frustrated about your job today are communication oriented. I mean, that's a great use case for something like this is, I'm sure that if you can create a, I don't know, bullet points of what you learned that week, you can create a newsletter through chat GPT that helps you communicate to all your stakeholders. So there are ways that I think.

alternative AIs go to help the product community help with some of that overwhelm in the administrative tasks so that they can clear out their desk and focus on that valuable discovery work and the strategy work that will then help them execute much better. And I think in the end, create those, rather than having a burning house, bring value to the market. And then leaders, I think, will then trust product managers.

to be able to do that strategic work.

Mark Baldino (26:44.418)
Yeah, 100%. Can we return to one topic which is near and dear to my heart, which is data? And I feel like I'm always kind of amazed at organizations that I step into that are successful, that don't quite have a handle on the data. That could be at multiple levels of the organization, at the high level, KPIs and metrics, down to base level, like tracking usage through a tool.

Rina Alexin (26:50.687)
True.

Mark Baldino (27:11.22)
What do you see as the role of data in product management? How have you seen, and if any specific examples of like how it's literally improved either the ability to people get work done, to get alignment within a group. I know you're a proponent of it, but I'm just kind of curious, like what's your take on the role of data and product management decision-making?

Rina Alexin (27:31.779)
agree with you, there are still a lot of organizations that you go in and then you ask them, how are you measuring success? And they don't have an ability to actually measure the success of their product. It is very, very common, even with digital products sometimes, right? So they're not putting in the right code to enable like what actions are done or to measure those actions. When we go into the

Companies that have a no data problem, that means they just don't collect it. We need them to start thinking about how, like, what is that first step that I can take where we can actually start measuring that data. The other problem, I will say, I know Dean Peters, one of our consultants will also say that there is now more that companies can do with simulated data if they have a no data problem. But I'll leave him to talk about that. That is a whole other topic.

Mark Baldino (28:25.194)
Awesome. All right. If you have a podcast or there's an article, I'm happy to link it as part of this so people can or we'll just link to his profile. make.

Rina Alexin (28:29.579)
I wonder if we do. I'll ask him. But yeah, that is a common problem of like the no data. We just don't have any data. The other most common problem is we have data, but we don't trust it. And I even face that sometimes in our own company. And it's hard because data doesn't always come in clean. I mean, I'm just thinking most recently in our marketing data, we have some issues with...

I don't even know how they get through the captures, but they do like bots and they mess up our data, right? And that we have all these random bots in our system and we want to cleanse them out. So data cleansing is the other aspect around it. But I will say that if you don't have a way to measure the success of your product or the health of your product, or you have data that you do not trust, those are two huge problems.

because it's just really hard for you to know what's working, what's not, and make better quality decisions. And at the end of the day, that's really what product is supposed to be doing is gathering data, qualitative and quantitative, about their market, about their company, and about their users, and making a better decision about what's the problem to be solved, what's a valuable solution people will pay us for, and so on and so forth. And how are you going to have AI in your product if you don't have data? It runs on data, so you can't.

Mark Baldino (29:51.35)
Right. Yeah, just think, I do think that's an area of maybe it's, don't know, resistance isn't the right word, but an area where we don't have the data, but we're gonna still try to operate in that environment. That's a, I think a real challenge for human being. I don't know. The thing with designers is like, sometimes they don't wanna, I mean, fine with research, right? But sometimes they don't wanna necessarily have to have the ability

Rina Alexin (30:06.845)
Ow.

Mark Baldino (30:19.894)
to translate that level of maybe lower level data to higher level, like business metrics and KPIs. I think some design organizations don't think it's their job to connect the data that they would be tracking, let's just say like something within the tool. You're using a tool like Full Story, it's capturing a bunch of analytics, right? That they can use that to make small level decisions, right? Micro level decisions about

Rina Alexin (30:26.091)
What do mean?

Rina Alexin (30:38.09)
Hmm.

Mark Baldino (30:49.218)
what they should do within a product or service. But they almost lean on maybe product management or no one to actually connect that data up to high level metrics and KPIs. Let's say they're getting a clear picture from management. And I just think like, it's an area that I think a lot of design leaders have suffered in terms of like growing their group or I don't know how to say job justification, but we're kind of have been in a lean set of years.

Rina Alexin (31:09.845)
Yes.

Mark Baldino (31:15.008)
where there hasn't been as much investment in maybe some of the areas we saw during the pandemic or decrease in investment. And I think people who can't speak even at an individual contributor level towards the data and the impact of the decisions we've made previously and how they've positively impacted the experience and how that connects up the value chain to what the business thinks is important. This is my moment to preach here. If you can't do that, you're not doing your job correctly. I'll say that.

Rina Alexin (31:37.692)
So.

Mark Baldino (31:43.636)
And I think that designers in particular sometimes struggle with like, is that my role? I don't know. You probably don't run into that as much in product management because I think people do see that it is kind of a core part of their job. But I shouldn't speak for product management groups.

Rina Alexin (31:58.315)
Okay, so first I want to say you are right. I think this is the challenge you're talking about is what is the business value of design if you don't have the data? And I've even seen organizations where they say one of their differentiation is their UX, but then they don't invest in design. So it's like, what? I thought that was your differentiation to then recognize the business value of design. I think product management also has a very similar, excuse me, issue in...

Sometimes the decisions that a product manager does doesn't increase or visibly cannot be tied to an increase in revenue, unless it's a brand new product or a feature that has specific revenue attached to it. I think that a lot of product leaders also fail to recognize the cost of a sprint versus the value that they're delivering to the company. So what is the cost of all your people? And are you actually producing more value in that time? Because if you're not, then it's

Are you really investing your people correctly? So I do think that there is still challenges even in product management of proving the business value of product management. Even though I will say that without a product to sell or support or market, you have no business, but it's still that specific decision. How did that increase ROI in the business? And without having

an isolated way to track that and to track the success of it and having good success metrics that you track, it's been hard to communicate the value of your decisions. And if you're not creating value or you're not making that value visible with data, then it's a moot point. You're not creating value.

Mark Baldino (33:41.886)
Well, I think it's a great place to wrap up. I honestly could talk to you about this for days and days. But I wanted to give you an opportunity. Where can people find you online? Maybe you can just talk about, you talked at the start, but maybe if there's a few different areas that you mentioned training and kind of advisory services, like if people find you through ProductSide, what can they expect from working with ProductSide?

Rina Alexin (34:05.535)
Yeah, sure, Mark. And this was so much fun. Thank you so much for having me on. Well, so I mentioned it at the start. My name is Rina Lexin. I like to post on LinkedIn, so that's an easy place for people to find me. Definitely tell me what you think of my posts. And I also love to hear from product managers and product leaders. I like to do coffee chats a lot because I love these kinds of conversations and I always learn something new.

Just as I did today, I learned something new from you about how designers also struggle with a data problem. So in terms of product side, we like to transform teams. So we work with product leaders and we do a number of things. We like to start with assessments. So we do skills assessments and assessments of product management maturity, where we go in and actually interview people, look at their documents, and provide a diagnosis around what's working, what's not, and what could be improved.

And our training is really about training people on how to do great product management. So what are the expectations of a product manager at this company? And we bring in what's working at that company and we meld it with best practices and we create often custom training programs for their teams that help them do product better. That's the core of our mission.

Mark Baldino (35:22.218)
Awesome. Well, I know a bunch of talented folks in product management. really think they could utilize your services to help you folks be kind of force multipliers for them. So I will certainly be sending some people your way. Thank you again for your time today. It's been a fantastic conversation and I know the audience will.

Rina Alexin (35:41.845)
Thank you, Mark. Thank you, everyone. Come talk to me, everyone. Otherwise.

Mark Baldino (35:45.538)
Alright, I'll send him we'll try to send him your way. Alright, thanks.