The theme of this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is transformation, and Melissa’s guest is Brian Bhuta, Chief Product Officer at Signify Health. Brian is an experienced product leader and is passionate about establishing and scaling product management organizations in an agile environment. He’s also an expert at getting tricky or resistant stakeholders on his side.
Show Notes
The theme of this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is transformation, and Melissa Perri’s guest this week is Brian Bhuta, Chief Product Officer at Signify Health. Brian is an experienced product leader and is passionate about establishing and scaling product management organizations in an agile environment. He joins Melissa to discuss transformations and product management from an inside perspective.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Brian talk about in this episode:
How Brian and Melissa both got into product transformation.
The raw material of transformation is people who are passionate about wanting to do better on a regular basis.
Employees and customers want a bold vision, and not a boring one.
Consider and acknowledge that there are people who have invested more into the company than you have. A leader who has the goal of product transformation, but who has a mindset that they’re going to “save” or “fix” the company, is doomed to alienate the people who have helped build the company to where it is.
We have to build a relationship with our team and the people we are now in charge of. “You’re never gonna be able to work with someone if you don’t understand them,” Brain tells Melissa.
An executive who sees themself as part of the team will make great steps towards transformation and help the company move towards a great workplace culture.
When selling a product we need to consider if the product and the market are right. We also need to make sure that we are not promising too many things to our customers.
Melissa and Brian talk about building relationships as both sales and product leaders, and building trust internally.
Once you build a foundation of trust you can deal with any subsequent backlash or friction that may arise as systems begin to change.
Resources Brian Bhuta | LinkedIn, Twitter
Episode Transcript
Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. This week is all about transformations. Transformations are something near and dear to my heart. I've been at lots of companies trying to establish a product management organization, figure out what should product managers do. That's what I've kind of dedicated my life to for the last five to six years.
Today, I get to talk about that with my friend, Brian Buda, who's the CPO of Signify Health. Brian and I met when we were working at Athena Health together. I had come in there to help lead a product management transformations, try to take 350 people who hadn't done product before, teach them how to do product.
Brian came in the same week as I did to be the VP of product over one of their product lines. I'm so excited for him to share what he learned doing these different transformations with you and how he comes in and approaches it from an inside perspective, whereas my perspective is the outside consultant. Because I think there's a lot to learn, and I really love his approach and how he gets everybody on his side to get the product organization to where it needs to be.
So listen closely to what Brian's got to say. Hey, Brian. Thanks for being on the podcast today.
Brian Bhuta: Thanks, Melissa. I'm happy to be here.
Melissa Perri: So we've known each other for quite a few years. We met when I first came into Athena Health to help lead the product management transformation there. It was like your first week too, right?
Brian Bhuta: My first week, I think, was your first week.
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, we both walked in and looked around and were like, oh man, there's a lot of work to do here. So it was nice to have somebody else looking left and right here that was helping to try to change things.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I thought that was great. So you came in and you led the collector product, so VP of product there, took over that team, had a couple of directors of product reporting into you, had a bunch of other product managers. And I'm excited to talk to you today because we're going to talk about transformations and what it's like to transform a product management team. So can you give everybody a little bit of background? How'd you end up at Athena Health before that? What do you do now?
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, absolutely. So my core background is really in computer science and technical background and really started my career in the healthcare space and quite frankly realized that I wasn't a very good engineer and I needed to do something else that can make a living at. And so one of the early things I did and I didn't really have a name for it was I found that as I was developing software, I loved talking to users.
Like, why am I building this? I just kept asking myself, what am I supposed to be building? Why am I building it? And I found that I loved talking to our users and figuring that out. And through a series of events, I ended up realizing that that's a big thing of what people call product management and kind of putting a name to it in the industry.
I spent about 10 years in healthcare startups, got a little burnt out on healthcare itself. And so I actually went the other way from a healthcare startup to a non-healthcare behemoth organization and went to EMC and spent about five years there working closely on kind of new product development. And did that, found that I was missing healthcare and found my way to Athena where we ran into each other and started working together.
I spent a number of years there running the collector product, the revenue cycle product. And then most recently, about two years ago, transitioned to a company I'm at today, Signify Health, and really just kind of fell in love with the mission of the company, where we were going, and the bold vision of changing the way that healthcare is both delivered and paid for and really trying to drive towards that. And found myself, I think we're going to talk about this a little bit, but found myself in a situation kind of coming to this company where it wasn't too dissimilar from what we kind of experienced, which is the core question of everyone kind of looking around and going, what is product management?
Why do we need it? What do we do with it? What does that even mean? And helping to try to come in and think a little bit about the kind of core transformation and not transformation for transformation sake, but transformation to really drive the business forward and to achieve the goals that we want to achieve for the company.
So a little bit about me and at Signify now, loving it. And we just, Fiction just IPO'd a couple of weeks ago. That was a fun experience and it's all uphill from here in terms of effort and hopefully in terms of the company as it grows. So, yeah.
Melissa Perri: Awesome. Yeah, the IPO is very exciting. When you told me, you were like, oh, go look online right now. We just IPO'd. I was like, yes, this is so cool, especially because I had worked with you guys a little bit. So it's nice to see companies that I've worked with be very successful and go on to do great things.
So lots of fun stuff happening at Signify too. I think what you guys are doing is great, but we're here to start talking about what is to actually transform the product team, right? So both in Athena and in Signify, this is the second company you walked into, was head of product, took over your whole team and really turned it around.
And I have to say for the people who are listening, Brian is awesome at this. I've watched him come in at Athena Health. His team was amazing. They were just running like a well-oiled machine. He just took charge and helped grow. A lot of people as well who've never been product managers before into awesome product people.
So you even work with one of them right now who's now a director of product, and she was kind of an associate product manager before, but she's killing it. And I love that. I love how you can come into organizations and kind of look around and start from scratch and just really, really build them up.
So to set the scene for those of you listening, where we met at Athena when I came in, they had just gone through this big agile transformation. It was 5,000 people across the organization. We had something like 360 product teams, 360 product managers, most of who never did that before. And I was brought in to help establish what is product management?
What should these people do? And Brian was brought in to oversee collector and helped get that team up and running. So when you walked into Athena, Brian, what was your impression of it? What would you say was the state of the team?
Brian Bhuta: Yeah. You know, it's an interesting question. The thing about kind of walking into Athena and still know a number of people there, and it is a great company. It's a really great company with a great mission. One of the things that attracted me, and this is something I think everybody should be looking at, is the people.
I think the first thing I recognized was that there were a lot of really smart, really passionate people. And I think of that as really the core foundation, especially thinking about in general, any job you should be taking, you should be looking at that. But if you're looking at a company in a position where you're going to be talking about transformation, the raw materials of transformation really have to be passionate, smart people who want to do better, who are willing to learn.
And that kind of culture of teaching, learning, and being willing to say, how do we do better on a regular basis? So that was kind of the first thing I noticed when I walked in was a lot of really smart, really talented, really passionate people, a great organization with a great mission. And then I think the next thing at a macro level that I noticed was just everyone was working really hard.
And I don't say that in a bad way, right? But everybody was working very hard, but everybody wasn't really sure they were working on the right thing. And often when I ask people my favorite question, which is why are you doing that, they don't have great answers, which is fine, pretty typical. But I think that's the first thing I noticed was like, there's a lot of great people, awesome company, great talent, everybody working very hard.
Nobody really knows why they're working on what they're working on. And that was kind of the first thing to me that was like, oh, okay, cool. This is something we need to start to figure out. Does that make sense?
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's something that I noticed right away too. I actually think it stemmed from this conversation I was having with one of the other VPs of Product. And I think also Kyle, the Chief Product Officer, he was like, why are we not kind of releasing things fast enough? And when we dug into it, it actually turned out that we kept changing goals and everybody was not sure what they should be working on.
So we changed the different things that they were working on and we changed the projects around or we changed the teams around and we kept changing things or they kept changing things so much that nobody could actually produce anything. And that's like something that I do in the organizations too, when I first come in is just be like, why are you working on this? And there was no consistent story, but I think that was one of the things that you pulled together for the team and that we did as an organization there too was start to tell that story.
How do you think about what should Collector be or how to set that strategy? You just walked into this organization trying to get up to speed with it. What did you do to look around and figure out how do we pull this strategy together or what's needed here?
Brian Bhuta: I think the first thing on that for people to know is that especially when you walk into an organization, probably not the first thing to do is to set strategy. It sounds a little bit weird, but it takes a little bit. I mean, you're going to have first impressions. There's going to be some low-hanging fruit.
We'll talk about that a little bit about kind of low-hanging fruit of where do you start, how do you get wins, things like that. But it takes a little bit to actually develop that strategy and that rallying point. A lot of the first foundational things really are, they're smaller, if that makes sense.
They're not these big things that we're going to move in a momentous way. That's too much for an organization and for people to grok. It's like, whoa, you just changed my world. And so I think we'll talk about a little bit more of the tactical stuff. But ultimately, I think from a vision standpoint and the goal of where you want to get to is, what I always say is be bold.
What people buy your employees and people buy... When I say people, I mean your employees and your customers want is they want a bold vision. They don't want a boring vision. Nobody wants to work for a company that says, oh, yeah, we're just going to make things a little bit better. Cool. Yeah. Let me get out of bed for that in the morning.
Nobody wants that as their core, why I do what I do. And so as you're learning and as you're walking an organization, one of the things you want to do is start to figure out, what is that bold vision? What do we want to be doing? What is the piece that's going to get the teams excited and start to move us toward that?
I think there's plenty of examples out there. I think the person that is fairly obvious that everybody kind of thinks about here is, I mean, Elon Musk is like a genius at this. I mean, if you look at every single company that he is involved in, how many does he run? These really bold visions that the people of the company are bought into.
SpaceX's job and what they're trying to do is not just, oh, let's get the next rocket into space. It's like, we're going to colonize Mars. It's like, whoa, really? That's amazing, right? That gets me out of bed in the morning. And so I think the big thing that you want to try to think about is, how do you build enough knowledge as you're learning about the organization, as you're learning about the industry, or learning about your customers that you can build that bold vision that gets everybody excited.
And it takes time, right? I mean, sometimes you may even have that, but it's too jarring to the organization to hear. That's not like your first day kind of talk to your team, right? That's something that builds up over time and you need to pre-sell. And by the way, on this point, one other interesting thing is, these things don't get developed in a vacuum, right?
There's no development of strategy and bold vision in a vacuum. It's not a product, quote unquote product thing, right? It's not like the product person goes out into the wilderness and goes on a fast for four days and comes back with a product vision, right? That's not how it works. It's working with all the other parts of the organization.
It's iterating on ideas between people individually. It's pre-selling people. Hey, what about this? Let's go talk over lunch. I just have these crazy ideas. Let's talk about them. Creating that space for people in the product org and the rest of the organization to give feedback and to think about these things is kind of how these grow.
They're rarely the sweat lodge vision moment where you just kind of come out and figure it all out and inspire everybody. Yeah, it definitely takes time.
Melissa Perri: I think it took us maybe even six months after I was at Athena. That's when we first started to talk about changing the strategy because I think you're right. There's other things that we need to do before we can just jump in. Could you imagine walking in there on day one and telling all these people who had worked there for 20 years, whatever you're doing is wrong. We're changing our strategy. We're going in this other direction.
Brian Bhuta: That's right. And there's a very human aspect of it, too, which you're kind of calling out, which is bold vision is very exciting. And yet it took us a while to get there. You have to be very careful how you talk about it, especially in a larger organization, because it can be interpreted as exactly what you just said, which is, hey, I'm the new person at the company.
Everything you've been doing is wrong. Exactly. And it's a really delicate balance of creating mid company. Everyone talks about vision at the beginning of the company, and that's a blank slate. It's not easy, right? But you have to kind of deal with the historical baggage. But walking into a company, you have to recognize that there's people who have invested a lot more blood, sweat, tears, time, et cetera, into getting the company to where it is.
And you are privileged enough to step in at that point. The fatal flaw that I think intellectually people have when they walk into these is I'm here to, quote, save or, quote, fix, right? Like those words, you kind of have to get them out of your vocabulary a little bit and recognize that there's a lot of people working really hard to get to this company being successful, right?
And that's the case in every company that I've walked into. And they know what they're talking about. And you really have to be careful not to come across as invalidating that in any form or fashion. And it's tricky, right? It's a really, really hard balance to strike between those things. But it's extremely critical because you don't want to lose and alienate the people who have built what it is and will most likely build what it will be, right?
Exactly.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, and you're getting into this one component that I think you're fantastic at, right? We came into Athena Health, and I watched everybody kind of turn and be like, why are you here, Brian? It was not like you walked into Celebrity and everybody was super happy you were there. Same for Signify Health.
Same for me. Every time I come into these organizations, it's always leaders, right? They're like, oh, man, you were brought in to fix us, right? Like you were saying. Not even if I use those terms, but that's the perceived thing. Oh, we couldn't do it ourselves, so now you're here. What do you know about this?
I've invested all my time. And I watched you both at Athena and Signify. It's like a 180. I try to describe it to the people listening, but I watched you come into Athena Health. People were really mad, right? Didn't want to work with you super well. It was really a lot of friction. Same thing with Signify.
And then all of a sudden, like two months later, you're best friends with everyone. Like everybody wants to work with you. People are like, Brian's amazing. How do you do it? What's the magic?
Brian Bhuta: First of all, I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I don't know if people actually want to work with me, but I'll take it. Hey. Trust me. Yeah. Look, I think, and this is something that I really, and by the way, again, appreciate all of that. I've made more mistakes in coming into an organization than people probably do in their entire career.
So I could sit here and tell stories. And we'll get into a couple of where I messed up and had to kind of fix things. So I've certainly messed up plenty and big, big league. But I think when I come into the org, I think what you're talking about is kind of people and or organization that either doesn't understand or threatened and how do you kind of get people there, right?
And I think there's a couple of things that I always think about. One is, you know, look, when you take the job, there has to be some level of support for product in general, right? And there has to be some sort of alignment there. And, you know, I think your boss, whether that's a CEO or, you know, CPO or CTO, whoever you're going to end up reporting to, are they on the same page, right?
And it doesn't need to be 100%. We all disagree on nuances of product. But in general, are they supportive, right? You can't walk in and be on an island. There's a couple of pieces that I try to undertake when I go in. I mean, the first is kind of proving through results and actions, not words, right?
There's an aspect which, and by the way, I think this helps. I kind of harken back to my 10 years in startups, right? I tell people, like, if you want to learn how to do everything in a company, go to a startup, right? I mean, I got out of college, opened an office, re-architected a product, racked a server, cleaned a bathroom, had to figure out how to get a BJ's membership on my corporate card to go get Diet Cokes, right?
Startups are so like that. And you just kind of learn how to do everything. And I think that builds some muscle memory of doing versus talking, right? I think that's not for everybody, but for me, that kind of built that muscle memory and that DNA of doing. And I think the worst thing to do is come in and talk and not do, first of all.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's where I see a lot of leaders go wrong as well. And those are the things where they get kicked out of their positions, right? They come in, they talk a lot about what they're going to do, but they never actually do it. They don't put plans into action. They don't put plans into motion. So I agree.
I think you've got to have this balance, right, of talking about what you're going to do, educating people about it, but then also putting it into practice. How do you kind of straddle that line around, when's the right time to start doing, especially if you come into an organization with a transformation, right? You've told me before about, you know, how you want to get the lay of the land and you want to understand people.
Like, when do you figure out it's the right moment to take action or to put something into place?
Brian Bhuta: It's about picking battles. And I think the good news is, is you apply the same principles you take in any sort of iterative development, right? Which is, you start small. Find a couple things where you can prove what you're talking about that are not threatening. Don't go for the big thing that everyone's talking about.
Find a couple things that you can point to, right, that you can prove out and say, look, there's this thing over here. You know, when I came into Athena, I think one of the biggest things that I learned as I talked to people was that people kept using the word reactive. I heard that over and over as I talked to them, reactive, reactive, reactive.
And so I went through my organization and I found that the biggest team, the biggest chunk of investment that we had was on a team that was literally called the response team, right? I wonder why they're reactive. I wonder why it was reactive, right? And by the way, so found a point of alignment, right?
Even if people didn't macro level believe or be completely bought in, I found a common thread for a number of people. I found something relatively small and I changed it. And in that case, the change there was we're not going to have a response team anymore. And here's how that's going to work, right?
And kind of calm people's fears, that does not mean that we're not going to be responsive, right, and that we're not going to do this work. It does not mean that we're not going to answer the call, you know, answer the phone when you call us. It's not like we're stopped doing work. So again, say that in words and then action on it, right, to make sure we don't lose that, tell the teams that we can't do that.
But even just something as simple as saying, hey, I've heard we're reactive, I'm going to get rid of the reactive team. And everyone's like, oh, huh, that makes sense. Maybe like, this isn't so crazy. Yeah. And so I think it's really, there's a tendency, like you said, and I think we talked about it before, this kind of bold vision, big moves, we want to make big moves.
But you also, you have to look at it like product development. What's something small I can do right now? And then let's build off of that to get to the bigger things and to tackle the bigger things. And, you know, I think, and I've made bad mistakes plenty of times in my career where I've gone after something too big that had too much friction against it.
And it's just not helpful, right? And it doesn't work. And, you know, you kind of have, you end up in this kind of death spiral of people pointing to it and saying it doesn't work. And it's the opposite if you can find something that's small. And so I typically try to find two or three things to glom onto that I can fix relatively easy that are not contentious, but that can prove what I'm saying and I can prove that product, you know, done correctly does deliver value.
And that's typically what I do. And then, you know, if you've done a good job coming in, listening, learning, and, you know, we should talk a little bit about kind of building relationships, right? But if you've done that, then you can go back and you can reiterate it, right? You can say, hey, remember we talked about this thing?
Like, isn't this better? Like, yeah, it's not fixed, but like better, right? And everyone's like, yeah, I know it's actually better than it was. And you're like, cool, we're making progress. Let's keep going, right? Keep doing this. So I think it's taking that iterative mindset, finding something small, finding something that's not contentious, and just going and doing it, and then building off of that as building blocks to get bigger, you know, meatier things and tackle those kind of more contentious things as you go along.
Melissa Perri: Let's dive into the building relationships part of this, right? As I mentioned, you're very good at this. I imagine there's two different ways to do this. One, you've got to build your relationship with your team and the people that you just took over, but then also your executives. And I know for a fact that some of the executives were tense in some of these places that you worked at because they'd been there for 20 years and all of a sudden you roll in and it's like, we're going to change everything.
What do you do to make sure that you can build a good relationship with your executive peers? How do you figure out like who to target and what to do and how to get them on your side? Yeah.
Brian Bhuta: Like in my mind, this is the million dollar question, right? Because every process, tactics, approach, frameworks, like, behind all of those are people, right? And people with their own perspectives, you know, their own emotions. Everybody's got it. And so if you miss that point, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good, quote, unquote, good you are.
You're not going to get very far, right? You might get a certain amount. I think there's a couple of things that I like to think about. One is, when we talk about building relationships, it's time, right? And to a certain extent, it's more tiring, physically and mentally, to build relationships than it is to just go do, right?
And it takes time, and you do it. I think it's being purposeful about your time, being purposeful about what you do, how you do it. And, you know, as a matter of fact, you know, you mentioned Kyle before. For those listening, Kyle is also the CEO of Signify Health. And so I've worked with him at Athena and here.
He used to be the Chief Product Officer of Athena too, so everybody can keep track of that too. That's right. Also just had a baby girl. So congratulations to Kyle. He was the one that really drove me towards this concept of relationship, right? There were a couple of contentious people when I was working on Kyle's team at Athena, and I remember talking to him and I was expecting three steps.
I was expecting an action plan. I was expecting, you know, from my perspective, what I thought was gonna be extremely sage wisdom from Kyle, right? From my Chief Product Officer. And I'll never forget, I was literally sitting there and I was expecting this like very businessy answer. And he looked at me and he said, have you had lunch with this person yet?
And I was like, what are you talking about lunch with this person, right? Like, come on. And we had a really good conversation about that, and now, looking back on it and kind of going through this, I realized that his point was, you're never gonna be able to work with someone if you don't understand them.
You don't need to be their best friend. You don't need to be forever soul mates or whatever is the next thing after friends. But you need to understand each other, right? Because it's gonna be really hard to understand why they're opposed to this if you don't understand the person themselves. And so it's about taking time, things like that.
And then I think there's two other concepts. One is, you know, keep saying, listen, right? Listen and take feedback, right? You have to listen and listen, not just what they're saying, but what the person's not saying. Ask about, I also like to talk about, you know, origin stories of things at companies, right?
Everything started somewhere. And I love to find the people who know where these things started and just ask them, like, tell me that. Were you here when that happened? Like, how did this even come about? And you find out so much, so much history, so much of the person's perspective on that thing that they either are protective of, whether it's a process or a product or a technology, whatever it is, you find out so much about why they're passionate about it, defensive about it, you know, things like that, that you can go, oh, okay, your comments or your objections or whatever are actually making sense to me now.
I get it. It's because this is your baby, right? Like, when I come in and I say, hey, we really need to look at, you know, this new web framework, I totally miss the fact that you invested five years of your life building our existing web framework, and this is literally your bait, and I just told you your baby's ugly.
Like, okay.
Melissa Perri: That's why I make friends.
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, that's why I make friends, right? So I think that's the first one. And then I think the second one, and it's interesting because this actually happened at Athena physically. I'll talk about this more metaphorically, but it actually happened at Athena physically because, as you know, in the offices, there was a lot of soft seating around, there were a lot of couches and things like that.
But I literally call this sitting on the couch with the person. And it's literally like imagine yourself, instead of being across from them with a issue in between, like literally get up and go sit on the couch with them, right? Like why are they thinking this way? Like what's going on? It was interesting, the person that you and I worked with at Athena that I think.
I don't think I got off onto a great foot with this person. Based on some of the things I said, again, I make a lot of mistakes, you know, and this person talked to me, and we were, I'll never forget, we were in one of the hallways, and there was literally a couch there, and we sat down on the couch, like physically facing the same way, and it was like this really nice kind of physical manifestation of like what I was trying to do. Which is like, yeah, let me sit here with you, because, by the way, we actually have the exact same goals, and we're trying to do the same thing, we both see the same problem, and so show me it from your way, show me what you're thinking about, show it, like it doesn't mean we need to agree, but like literally, it was just really nice that we actually sat on a couch together and kind of talked about it that way.
So I think that's the other thing is you have to understand people, and you've got to understand both where they are professionally as, at some level, where they are personally, and that'll help to inform a lot of what words you use, how hard you push, and getting people on quote-unquote your side, which typically is really just the same side of you anyway. Looking at the same issue and trying to resolve it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, and that really builds trust with everybody over time, right? We always talk about building trust in product management, how do we get people to be influenced by the things that we want, and I think it really starts from what you're talking about, which is building the relationship with the person, understanding who they are. When I go in for transformations as well, I always like to figure out how everybody's being judged for success.
So I always ask everybody, what's your goal? I did find out at Athena Health prior to me starting and you coming in, there were a lot of people who had goals that were just ship this thing by December, and that's all they needed to do. They actually told me, they were like, we'll ship everything in December to hit our goals and get our bonuses, and then January we'll fix it.
I was like, that sounds efficient. And yeah, it was like, wow, okay. I guess that explains a lot. But once we figured that out, we could fix it. And because we went and figured out where everybody was coming from, we could be like, well, this is what's causing the issues, right? These are the goals that people are being measured by.
But it's not until you have those conversations and actually talk through it and understand that person and why they're reacting that you understand how to like, to bring them onto your side or to influence them or get your things into place, which I think is important.
Brian Bhuta: You're reminding me of one other thing here, which is make other people successful. It sounds relatively simple, and people typically think about this as, you know, my job is to make my boss successful, right? People always say, it's like, I want to make my boss look good, right? Like, they've got goals, and my goals tier up, and so cool, I'm going to achieve my goals so that his or her goal can be achieved.
I mean, that's not a terrible concept, but when you talk to people, it's their goals, and also, what do you mean? What is success for you, right? Like, I love that you said that because it is, man, if you can help somebody or make them successful, and by the way, they get credit for it, I don't know what builds trust more than that.
And then next time you say, hey, let's try this or something like that, it's like, you helped me last time, you know, and why would you not help me this time? And I think that gets lost a little bit, right? I think, especially in the executive ranks, I think it's pervasive throughout organizations, but certainly at the executive ranks, I think there'd be a tendency for it to be a competition, right?
Yeah. You know, typically, relatively competitive people end up as executives, as a gross overgeneralization. Not always the case, but so you now have this group of highly committed people, and you know, the myth there is that there's a pie that needs to be divided, right? You've got to get your piece versus how do we all make the pie bigger, right?
The reality is not that there's a piece of pie and you got to get your biggest piece. The reality is that there's probably a pie for everybody. And seeing the people you talk to, even the people who may, there may be some friction there, as somebody you want to make successful. I mean, it does so much and it builds so much trust with those people.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. And what you're talking about too, right, with that pie, that's one of the, one huge issue I see with companies that try to take on a transformation. A lot of times it doesn't stick because they put individual goals across the entire executive team. They're like, this is sales' goal, this is product's goal, this is this person's goal.
And they don't actually have a common goal that's here's what we're all working towards. And I think that's so important to be able to get everybody on the same page and working together. Instead of pitting people against each other, I've seen CEOs like pit their direct reports against each other, which makes no sense, because if you're running marketing and you're running product, you have very different goals.
So why would you ever want to compete, right? Like, what are we doing if we're not doing it together?
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Melissa Perri: So what you're talking about, right? Sometimes it gets ingrained in people in these bad cultures or these places that they've worked in before, and then they go to another organization, and they might bring it with them. But I think that's so important, you know, seeing yourself as an executive that's just part of the team.
And I think it's essential for getting everybody on the same page to work together towards something, too, like a transformation, because everything has to change. And you see a lot of people get scared about their jobs. You see a lot of people get scared about, you know, what does it mean for their role.
When I lead product transformations, a lot of times we're taking people who were not product managers and saying, tada! This is your role now. It's like, well, I just spent 20 years doing something else. So, like, what does that mean, right? Did I want a career change in the middle of my career? Probably not.
So what do I do? How do I do that? So when you come into those organizations and you sit there and look at the executives, I'm sure that's a lot of what you take into account. But I'm also curious, how do you work with your team, too? Because they're also usually getting a career change. It's like, today, you were the product manager now.
So I know that was definitely the case at Athena Health and the case for a couple of people that you took on at Signify as well. So what do you do to level up your team? How do you get them to start working as product managers when they've never been product managers before?
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, and of course, no one ever asks, wait, am I a product manager or am I a product owner? You never get that question. Never. Never. So I'm afraid that the listeners of this podcast are going to be like, Brian keeps answering the question the same way. But I'm going to keep answering the question the same way.
Because it's the same general tactic, which is the first thing you need to do with your employees if you want to up-level them is understand them. What do they want to do? And I think your point about the individual who is surprised you're now a product manager and they're like, yeah, but I've been doing this for 20 years.
The thing that everybody usually glances over and goes, the step that everybody skips over is asking that person whether they actually want to be a product manager or not. To your point, everyone, and rightly so, look, I mean, you need a job. Everyone wants, there's a level of stability and security, things like that.
But the thing that people don't typically ask is, do I even want this job? Do I want to be a product manager?
Melissa Perri: Yeah. We actually had a lot of people at Athena Health after we defined that role, say, oh, I don't want this. This is not what I signed up for. Yeah, exactly.
Brian Bhuta: And I actually had that. I remember having coffee with one of my, one of the team members the first couple of weeks that I was at Athena. And we were having coffee and we were first meeting. I'm the new, quote unquote, boss. This is the, these are the most awkward of awkward meetings. And, you know, I asked this individual, what do you want to do?
And they proceeded to talk about their entrepreneurial spirit and how they really wanted to start a company. And they were passionate about this subject and da, da, da, da. And, you know, I kind of looked at this person and I was like, hey, you know, I don't think I said it this way, but I'll say this more dramatically for this.
I was like, I think the best thing I can do for you is hire you. Like, I think that's right. My point was basically like, I don't know how much transparently this job and what you're going to be doing here is actually going to help you build towards what you want to do with your life. I could pretend, and we can probably find some things that match there, but like, the skill set you need if you want to go be an entrepreneur that you don't have, and I can tell this right now, is like, you're going to figure how to raise money.
Right? You got to talk to investors. You got to go write a business. Like, this is a relatively junior product, really. You're not going to do that. Right? And, you know, I think that's a piece that is kind of the first thing. It's like, just understand what people want to do. And it's not always as dramatic as, you know, you shouldn't work here and you shouldn't have this position.
But a lot of times, it is exactly what you said, which is like, define it, and say, so this is what you're going to be doing. Pause. Is that actually what you want to be doing? Right? Because you're going to be very frustrated, and you're not going to do a good job, and things like that. So I think, the first thing is understand.
Second thing is really what you said, which is just define. Right? And so, I typically like to go through and create, you know, what you want to do with, again, typically, when you walk into an org, what you find is that talent is managed and, you know, kind of look at it, and it's like, yours in seat.
Right? It's like, you are a senior product manager if you've been doing product management for 10 years. Right? And it's like, okay, that's not a competency. Right? Yeah, I hate that. And so, right, because it's just like, sweet, I'll just run out the clock and get a promotion. So I think, you know, it's expected to find it to your point, and we can talk more about that.
But then, it's to measure everybody against that and tend to find it. The other thing that I like to do in talking about kind of upleveling is bring in someone who you know is a good product manager. And this is where, you know, kind of building out your network from previous positions or just networking outside your job.
Right? I encourage everyone, go to, once COVID is over, go to meetups. You know, interact with people safely. Grow your network. And it can be done externally. Go hire a really good product manager. Someone who you're just, you know, you interview and you're like, yep, you know what you're talking about.
Right? Give that person a relatively long leash because that person coming into understanding product management will honestly just outrun everybody in the first six months. Like, they'll just outrun everybody.
Melissa Perri: That makes such a difference. I've seen that too. And, you know, even like when you came into Athena, right, like you were that product manager for a lot of people. And, you could see that the rest of your team, all your directors, all your product people were like, oh, that's how you're supposed to do it. And I mean, I'm a big proponent for training, obviously. Like, that's what I do. But I feel like you still need somebody there every day to like, learn from or mentor or grow from. Yeah.
Brian Bhuta: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, I mean, you can do this a number of different ways. I mean, I think part of, with Signify, when I came in, you know, I brought in an individual who knew and they were just passionate and they were, they just kind of embraced it and ran fast. And one of the cool things about that was not just, okay, let's set the pace, if you will, right, think about it as a race.
And it's like, cool, here's this person, they're gonna, you know, we're now gonna run six minute miles instead of seven minute miles, right? But they also, doesn't give them a good opportunity to teach, right? And this individual actually came in and even basic things like, how do you run a sprint retrospective or an effective one, right?
And this person who just kind of came in and was like, I can help you with that, you know, and kind of played the role of like, I think I know what Brian means, I can come and help you, right? And it becomes more of an organic teams figuring it out versus somebody come in and saying, this is what you do, here's the competency framework, go do this on a daily basis. It becomes more the team learning from each other and getting better than the management team telling them what to do.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it is just, you know, watching somebody do great work. When you can see somebody do it, it makes a whole difference, right? Rather than somebody saying like, go build that roadmap, do it like this. You will watch somebody go through and it's a whole other experience of learning. I want to go back to what you were talking about with the competency framework. I'm curious, what are the competencies you look for in a product manager when you're hiring them or when you're managing your team?
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, that's a good question. I'll start with where people get caught up and I'll give my opinion here. Where people get caught up is they get caught up on individual contributor versus manager, right? They get very caught up in the product world of that, and then sometimes they go as far as looking at engineering and being like, oh, there's a dual ladder, and like, let's create this dual ladder and like, congratulations, you're an extremely smart person relatively on your career, and you now need to decide whether you're a good people manager or not, even though you've never managed a person and that will stick with you for the rest of your life.
It's like, okay, that's too much. So what I try to think of is like product competencies. And then I like to think about just leadership competencies, and so one of the things that, you know, one of the things to do is create this framework. The couple that we do, I typically think about five, they're worded a little bit differently depending on how you think about it and you can kind of work these to the org, but there's like five product competencies and then three leadership competencies.
The product competencies are really around communication and influence. Like, how do you grow from just communicating all the way through to influencing, right? And at different levels, and things like that. The second one is really around delivery. So look, this gets back to the trust thing. Can you deliver what you said you were gonna deliver?
And again, that grows and scope and size, and things like that. The third one is value and metric driven. So can you quantify? Can you quantify and are you focused on metrics? Measurement of the Y, right? And someone asks you why you're doing something. Can you give a number? Hey, we're reducing the unit cost by X.
We're increasing this metric by Y. The third one is strategic thinking, which I think kind of plays into as you grow in your career, but just, can you think strategically? Can you put your product and the things you're doing in a bigger context and then eventually grow into developing that bigger context and drive it through the organization?
And then the last one is really user focus. So in everything you do, are you constantly going back to and how is the user actually gonna get value out of this? Who's using my product and are you gonna get value out of it? So those are kind of the five, four product ones. And then I like to think of three leadership capabilities.
And this gets more into what you would think of as traditional quote unquote, people management type skills or more senior skills. But I like to think of just as leadership skills, so that you can demonstrate them without having someone report to you, if you will. And those are coaching and mentorship.
So I'm a firm believer that you can coach and you can mentor without somebody reporting to you. Teaching and learning. Can you explain concepts? Are you helping the organization? Are you actively learning about your industry or product management or your craft? And then the last one is stakeholder management.
So, beyond communication influence, do you know who your stakeholders are? Can you manage them? And can you help the organization kind of grow in that? That's how I think of like competency. It's probably not comprehensive, but it's at least like a good framework where you can mostly catch everything with your product team.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, I like that. We just had a Kate Leto on the podcast too. And she talks a lot about how soft skills, those leadership skills you're talking about are so important for product managers as well, because it's not just about, can you do an MVP? Can you prioritize something? It's about actually getting your agendas through and working with teams to actually do that.
One of the teams that I've found the hardest to work with during a transformation especially is the sales team in product management as well. And I think that was the case. At Athena, it was very much a sales led organization where everybody was reactive as you were describing. And we had to turn it into a product led organization where we were actually building products and then they were going out to sell them.
From your perspective too, how have you seen organizations transition or make that transition from sales led to product led? And what do you do as a VP of product in that situation? How do you help nudge them along from the inside?
Brian Bhuta: Yeah, I love this topic. So two things before I get into the answer just to put out there. Number one, product led does not mean product's the boss. And we make all the decisions. I mean, you need to make that extremely clear. Don't tell people that. Brian, you can't tell people that. You're blowing it up for us.
I hate to tell you, but the job's actually harder than that. You have to actually do this without being able to just tell everybody what to do. But it makes it even harder. So that's the first thing is that you need to make it very clear that product led does not mean product makes all the decisions and is the boss and everybody bows to the product god.
I think that's the first thing. I think that's the first thing. And then the second thing for context, and we'll talk about here, is you also need to realize that companies are different life cycles, right? And that could be a life cycle of the company or of just the product, right? It could be an emerging product with a big company or just a startup company.
You got to realize that the smaller and more emerging the product is, the more it's going to look like a sales led product. Like let's just, you know, the extreme example I like to say is like, it'd be great if you could, you know, if you're a startup with zero dollars of revenue, guess what your number one priority is? Pay the bills, right?
Like you got to go figure out how to get money. Yeah, get the users, right? And so it's going to look and feel a little more about that. Now, I think there's a couple of things here that as a product person, you can go and do. Number one is don't lose the core tenants of product management, which is serving the user, right?
I think we can get a little bit zealous about, well, that's not product, right? And you kind of have to check yourself and go, yeah, well, did the sales person just identify a need with our users that we really shouldn't be addressing? Or am I just being defensive because I didn't identify it, right?
It's somebody else. Like it's everybody's product, right? You're just here. So don't get too caught up on that. It's not about control. What it's all about is about alignment, strategy, and communication, right? How can the sales team know what to sell if the product team hasn't set out a vision, a strategy, a roadmap, and engaged with the sales team to say, here's where we're going and here's why.
And then I think the last thing is how product people sell something, right? Typically, it's always an extremely fascinating exercise to have a product person and you can manufacture this. What I typically like to do is give the product people a problem. I say, develop a product. And they're like, cool, this is in my wheelhouse.
I know how to do this. Look, I've got a beautiful backlog. This is great. And then I bring in the sales team and they're like, cool, tell the sales team how to sell this and how not to go outside of the bounds of my product. And then I go, okay, cool. They're your prospect. Sales team is going to pretend they're your prospect.
Sell your product to them. And I watch product people try to sell the sales people, which is always entertaining. And without fail, you know, and I usually prep the sales team as, but without fail, I try to ask the sales team, ask for more features. Hey, can it do this? Well, what if you do that? Hey, I've got this other system.
Can you integrate it here? And without fail, every single product goes, oh yeah, we can do that. We can do that. And they walk away. And I just go, okay, so how many people just increase the scope of their product? And when completely outside of the product, every single person raises their hand, right?
So I think those words about sales led for the product led are right. But I think what you need to think about is you still need to serve the user. You have to think about that as finding product market fit. If the sales team is going way outside of your product definition, do you really understand the market?
Is your product right? Do you really have product market fit? And if you do, have you communicated back to the sales team? And then I think just remembering product led versus product led does not mean you make all the decisions and you say yes or no. It really is about alignment, strategy, and communication.
So are you focusing there? Are you working with the sales team to get a product that actually is saleable is kind of the way I think about it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. And you bring up a good point about is your product actually right or is the market right? If you're not selling. I see that a lot. When we're promising too many things or we have a difficult product that is to deliver, often it's not aligned to the strategy or we don't have a strategy, right?
I watch some promises be made to large customers who were actually not our target customer or where we wanted to go into in the future just to try to get a proof point in there or make them happy. And then when we're struggling to actually build that product, we go, why? Why are we stopping everything to do this?
Yeah. So I think that's the key part between sales led and product led too. It's not just whatever can we sell, we'll build. It's more like, how do we start from a strategy and grow from that? Yeah.
Brian Bhuta: And again, I mean, not to continue to come back to my core tenant here and sound like a broken record. If you haven't built the relationship with the sales team and the sales leader, again, there's no trust there, right? So it's like, well, I would ask the product person they're just going to block my sale.
And by the way, that's how I make my money is commission, right? It's like, you have to go build that trust. You got to build that relationship. And as a sales leader, sorry, the product leader, sometimes you do make that decision to say, look, we are good. This isn't a big deal. Technically, we shouldn't do it, but it's really not the big of a deal.
Fine. Put that in the contract. We'll go do it because it's just building that trust. And again, you got to be smart about that, but it's not the worst thing in the world. A, to build trust internally. B, because look, as I tell every sales person, I know I'm a product person, but I like revenue too.
I like money. I love it when we make sales. We're on the same page here, right? Yeah.
Melissa Perri: What you just said too, I think is a hard concept, especially for junior product managers to get through their head and people who want to like get into product leadership positions. I have this conversation with people a lot. It's not about doing everything right and by the book, right? Like it's not about, here's my roadmap and I shall never deviate from that roadmap.
And it's not for a strategy or here's my perfect prioritization, but sometimes it's about making concessions to build that relationship. And sometimes when I teach product leaders about that, I'm like, you'll figure out what to build. You're working out with the salespeople, but then you may decide to make a trade-off just to win them over.
People's faces drop and they're like, oh, but we're supposed to be product led. What are you talking about? That's sales led. My backlog was so beautiful before all these people who want to make money on it came around. Yeah. And I think we get over that when we realize what we were talking about before, you're all working towards a common goal and sometimes building that relationship and making that concession, especially if it's a tiny concession now versus being in a huge argument when the rubber hits the road is going to be so much more effective.
Yeah.
Brian Bhuta: I've spent plenty of time building new and especially in emerging products, right? Like this comes up, but even in more mature products, look, the reality is big customers demand more, right? And you always bend a little bit more to big customers and that's okay, right? That doesn't mean you're failing as a product person because you said yes, right?
The key thing that you need to be careful of and the key thing that you need to be aware of is number one, when you make those concessions, are you confident you're working with your engineering leaders typically on a way to implement that, which is not creating sprawl or creating major maintenance problems in the future or if it is, make sure that. Throw that on your backlog, right? Let's go clean that up someday.
And then the second thing is keeping an inventory of that on an ongoing basis because it can get out of control. And there are points in my career where I have said, okay, no more. It's almost gotten a little bit too easy to build bespoke things. And in those scenarios, I've kind of just said, again, I'm not saying no, period.
I'm just saying, I'm literally going to be the bottleneck to every single one. And I'm going to look at every, and again, you got to do the work and it's a pain. And yep, I kind of put myself in the middle there, but I'm going to look at every single one and I'm going to say yes or no to every single one or not now, right?
And I'm going to work with the sales team. And in situations like that, the interesting dynamic that I've seen is, this is the same concept, I forget the book, the same concept of like, if you want to stop using an app on your phone, like move it a couple of screens over and just that much friction causes you to be like, I don't want to go a couple of screens over. Is that in your IELTS book on habits?
Yes, exactly. And it's the same thing, right? It's like, if the field in the sales team is too easy to request custom things, you just do it, right? And if you put a little friction there, sometimes people are like, eh, now I'll just go tell the customer no. Like Brian's more of a pain than the person I'm dealing with on this side.
So, you know, in a very nice way. Yeah, exactly. So, but it's the same concept, right? If you put a little bit of friction there, you typically find what's really important and valuable to the customer to be worth negotiating to get through the system versus, yeah, no, that's not really worth it.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's going to be a big mind shift though for a lot of, you know, a lot of people who are not used to that. Like, so you come into these organizations, right? You're in a transformation, and it's like, oh, all of a sudden, we're going to put a lot of friction here. Like, how do you handle that backlash at the beginning?
Brian Bhuta: You don't do that first. I think back to our beginning conversation.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, don't do that first.
Brian Bhuta: No, do not do that first, right? It's all built on relationship and trust. And once you've built that foundation, then you can do things like that and say, look, trust me. And I'm not saying no, but like, because then you can sit down, have a conversation and say, look, you know, we did this at Athena, right?
We talked about how the biggest team was the reactive team, right? The response team. And we did that. We literally went to a lot of field teams and things like that. And just, look, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to do any of that. Here's my problem, right? Again, I kind of invited them to sit on the couch with me and be like, this is my problem.
Like, I can't get to any of that stuff that you want me to get to because I'm doing all this stuff. And in general, most people were like, oh, yeah, that's terrible. Like, wow, yeah, that actually does kind of stink. I'm sorry. Like, oh, okay, cool. How can I help, right? How do we work together? Because I do want that thing over there.
And so again, just if you build that foundation, you can invite people into your problem just like you would step into their problem and say, I need your help. This is my answer. By the way, like, if you have a better answer, I'm all ears. Like, again, every idea does not need to come out of product.
It doesn't need to be you. You know, steal ideas, steal concepts, invite people to bring different solutions. Great, give them credit for it. But like, remember that your job in the organization is the same thing as your product's job to your customer, which is to solve problems and to deliver value, right?
And so whether that comes through your idea, somebody else's idea, your process, somebody else's process, like, keep your eye on what your actual goal is within the organization and make sure you're kind of constantly checking yourself to make sure that you're focused on that.
Melissa Perri: I think that's great advice for anybody who's trying to approach a transformation like this. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast, Brian. Where can people connect with you?
Brian Bhuta: I am obviously available on LinkedIn and at Brian Buda on Twitter, although I probably should be more active on there. But feel free to connect with me there as well.
Melissa Perri: Go pepper him with questions. Well, thanks so much for being on.
Brian Bhuta: Thank you very much.
