Julia Beizer on Building Product at Bloomberg Media

Jacob: Let’s start off right from the beginning with two core questions. How did you find your way to working in product? Because your early roles at The Washington Post were on the edit side, and then what exactly does the Chief Product Officer and Global Head of Digital at Bloomberg News actually do?

Julia Beizer: Great questions both. I will start with the first one because it’s chronological order. I found my way into journalism somewhat haphazardly. I was a lifestyle journalist at The Washington Post. I wrote about fun events and things to do in Washington DC, but I worked in The Washington Post digital newsroom that was housed over in Arlington, Virginia at the time. I would say that experience really lit me up to the power of journalism. I could hear my colleagues on the phone with Congress people, and I just thought, “Man, this is such an important field,” and it felt great to be a part of it.

I joined The Washington Post on the day Katrina hit landfall, and if you’re in the middle of a news story like that, you can’t help but fall in love with journalism watching the way journalists cover big events like that. I was doing my lifestyle reporting, and being a part of this bigger news-gathering enterprise. As I continued on in my career, two things happened. Number one, I found my way to work on a number of tech products. The lifestyle section of the website was very well-monetized, had a lot of advertiser dollars flowing in, so we had access to developers and I worked really closely with a lot of developers on some big projects that were really fun.

Things like interactive maps where all the bars with patios are and things like that. I got my feet wet on how to do tech projects. Then the second thing that happened was I started to realize that while I loved being a part of content creation, and I loved reporting especially and talking to people, I had become even more in love with the idea of journalism being a sustainable business. If you believe that’s true, the problem to solve isn’t that the world needs another food blogger. Though I was happy to do that work in my 20s. The problem to solve is user experience. It is modernization, it’s subscription, it’s growing engagement.

It was through that realization and this kind of increasing work I had been doing with the tech side that I found my way into a job I had never heard of, called product management. I’ve been doing that ever since at a variety [chuckles] of different news organizations and brought that to my current role at Bloomberg. To your second question, what does the Chief Product Officer and Head of Digital do? I find myself in the middle of our two major revenue streams that is subscription and advertising, trying to make sure we’re maximizing our digital platform to, number one, first and foremost serve our customers. Then number two, make sure that serving of a customer translates into a sustainable business.

I have a really, really great team of people I work with to do that every day, and it’s a trip.

Jacob: Before we get into talking about Bloomberg’s products and things like that, I want to start with some basics. In most tech organizations, product is likely the bread and butter of the business. However, in media content is actually the product, which would mean that editorial is the bread and butter. How does product in the traditional sense work in a media company? Then how do you work with your stakeholders, which are by and large likely not very traditionally product-focused?

Julia: Sure, and I say this to my staff a lot. Being product in a media organization is not for the faint at heart. Oftentimes you go into a room and not everyone there understands what you’re bringing to the table, whether you’re representing tech, design, editorial or commercial interests. Someone in that room is thinking, why is this person here again? It’s a challenge in a way, it is at a big tech company. That’s exactly why you should do product at a media company. We are in the midst of this massive digital transformation. I think outside of big tech companies if you were to look around and say what is the future for each individual business going to be like, digital’s going to be a huge part of that.

They are going to led– These companies are going to be led over that bridge through a period of disruption and innovation, and product has a big role to play in that. It’s lonely being in traditional industries as a product manager, but you have the opportunity to have a front-row seat in the middle of disruption and help these industries find their way to a new digital future. If that’s not motivating and exciting for you, you’re in the wrong business. I think that’s the spirit with which you can bring a product mindset to a media company. That said, I think there’s been a ton of work.

When I started doing product in a media company, and that was probably 2010 at the time, couldn’t explain the job to my mom, still can’t, by the way, couldn’t explain the job to my mom. Certainly couldn’t explain it to my bosses and or various stakeholders I’ve had. Over the last 10 years that’s changed dramatically. You see a lot of people in journalism school, embracing product thinking. You see a lot of newsrooms embracing product thinking. I think there’s a lot product can offer in that product is essentially a mediating force between commercial, technical, and user-focused interest and trying to figure out what the goal of the organization can be, and chart a course on the way there.

That’s a really exciting opportunity.

Jacob: When we last spoke, you spent some time talking about the two major roles at a product department, and I might be simplifying this, but product managers and program managers. Can you explain what these two roles are, and how organizations should be thinking about activating both functions?

Julia: Sure. I think a mistake that media companies specifically make when they think about product managers is they think, “Oh man, I need to hire a product manager. What are you looking for? I need someone who can get stuff done.” Well, anyone can get stuff done. There are really great functions that are really more like either project management or program management, that’s really focused on the delivery of certain features or new sections or commercial initiatives. Just making sure those things get out the door. That’s a really important job, and really shouldn’t be undercounted, especially in this moment for our industry where really every decision you make matters.

Making sure you follow through and execute is key. Product management I think is a slightly different problem. Perhaps more expansive. Not all media companies have the stomach for it. Product managers, as I see them sit at the intersection of all of these different competing, sometimes competing business interests. What’s the best for the user? What’s the best for the story of our journalism? What is the best for our commercial interests? How can we best present it? The ever-present issue we all face with not enough resources, not enough time.

Product managers creatively synthesize all those ideas. Put the user at the center and figure out the best thing to do to deliver on the goals of the business, while meeting the user needs. I often say that product managers are the bridge between the technology you build and the business you want to be in. I think media companies often just aren’t getting the most value out of their product managers if they’re not thinking about product managers playing this kind of larger strategic role in helping you really understand your customers and figure out the best way to grow your engagement and grow your revenue from there.

Jacob: I had in my notes this concept that one group of people look at things through a microscope while the other group of people look at things through a telescope. Can you elaborate on that point?

Julia: Oh, yes. We were talking about that. That was a quote I had just read and was particularly enamored with from Paris Hilton, I believe, talking about her business endeavors. Her boyfriend who was working on these business endeavors, and she said that he talks about needing to look at your business through a microscope and also look at your business through a telescope. I think product managers can play both roles, media companies shortchange themselves when they only ask product managers to focus on micro problems. Those are the problems of delivery, as opposed to taking that telescope look and say, “Hey, look, what are we going to do in the next quarter, half year that’ll drive our business forward in a major macro way.” I think in media specifically, we have a lot of ways, we’ve innovated over the last couple of years. People have done affiliate marketing, businesses, people have branched out into events. We’re really at a point where people have gone hard at subscriptions. I think we’re really at a point where we need to come up with like, “What’s the next big innovation in the business?” I think product can help point a way there because when done right, product managers are really, really close to who your customers are.

Jacob: Let’s pivot now and spend some time talking about Bloomberg because that is where you are today. A big part of your focus at Bloomberg has been on building out the subscription product. We saw news the other day that this is growing wonderfully to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. What went into launching the subscription product at Bloomberg, because it’s not really just flipping a switch as those outside of product like to say. What went into launching that from talking to your customers, to working internally with stakeholders and then ultimately getting it built?

Julia: Sure. Great question. Working on the subscription business has been one of the joys of my time here. I started about four months before we launched that business, so the decision had been made to do it. We were at work on some tech work to do it. I would say we were in very early stages for how we were going to stand up that business. Yes, it started a lot with talking with our customers. How could we enhance our product so that people would think, “Hey, that’s worth paying for.” How much were they willing to pay? What were they looking for from a coverage perspective? I would say we took a really like 360-degree view of what product we needed to have and be worthy of subscription dollars. Furthermore, I think what got really interesting in the part that I’m most proud of after we made sure we were clear on the product, we started thinking more holistically about what it means to launch a paywall. As I said when I got there, we’re not launching a paywall. We’re launching a subscription business. A paywall is the toll booth, please pay us some money. Great. Can you transact? Amazing. Transaction done. A subscription business means can you actively continue to recruit and attract new members every month, acquire them. Can you retain the ones you have?

Do you have the right email programs set up and push notification programs set up to make sure subscribers are getting value out of their subscription? We have spent a lot of time and effort in building out what I would call a 360-degree marketing apparatus in support of these efforts. How can we use data and propensity modeling and other machine learning tools to help us find on the 50 million people on our site every month find likely subscribers and make sure we market to them with the right offer, with the right language, with the right price? We’ve done a ton of testing in that space, and I think that’s where we’ve seen the biggest rewards.

As we go into next year, I think we’re really focused on mid-funnel. How do we get those lightly engaged users? How do we get them off the sidelines and into our subscription product? I think the most fun thing about that product is really not only talking to our customers and understanding how to make a great product but also doing the work across marketing, across product, across editorial to say, okay, great. Our goal is revenue. The way we will measure whether we’re on track to hit our revenue number, is by measuring active subscribers, and then for active subscribers, that means we have to acquire a bunch of subscribers and we got to retain a bunch of subscribers.

What initiatives are we going to do to get there and I think out of that, we’ve come up with some really innovative and frankly just really fun and collaborative ways to figure out how across marketing, product and editorial we can attract and retain new subscribers.

Jacob: Can you dig in a little bit more on that metric active subscribers because when you and I were talking, I think what we both agreed on is that too many media companies spend too much time thinking about just net new subscribers, but you take the different approach where you’re thinking about this concept of the active subscriber. Can you dig into that?

Julia: Yes, you bet and this is all credit due to my partner in crime on this business a woman named Lindsey Murphy Horrigan, who is the GM of our subscription business and runs consumer marketing for us. The idea of active subscribers, what I love about active subscribers is that says, people on any given day who are subscribed to your publication. That’s new users you acquire day one and users who have not yet churned, any user who is not yet churned. Why do I love that metric because it’s inclusive of both acquisition and retention. You can add a bunch of users, but if they all churn out after a one-month free trial or low-paying trial, you are not actually growing your long-term revenue.

You are not actually building a sustainable business, so what active subscribers allows us to do is to look at those two metrics, those two levers we can pull in terms of acquisition and retention, and try to figure out where we should on a month to month or quarter to quarter basis where we should put the most of our efforts to make sure we’re driving the most sustainable business. I think oftentimes you’ll read in the trades, big acquisition numbers and that’s great and certainly, a good indicator that you have a strong product that people want to pay for.

The thing about what makes subs businesses so great and such a trip to work on is it’s about human beings every day deciding they want to stay subscribed to your publication, you’ve got to earn it every day, you got to leave it on the field and that active subscriber metric, I think really helps focus us and our teams on making sure we’re really building relationships with subscribers that are going to stay for the long haul.

Jacob: Then to expand on this as the product team, how do you look at managing day-to-day, the actual subscription business? What optimizations and tests do you run and how much time goes into supporting the marketing team who is focused probably much more on the granular growth of the overall subscription business?

Julia: Great question. I’m going to get real nerdy for you on a second. Is that okay with you or you down to go down this nerdy path with me?

Jacob: That’s why we have the show.

Julia: All right. Amazing. Okay, so we have two product teams that work on the subscription business today. One is a pod all around acquisition. The other is a pod all-around retention. I would say that those teams, and so that’s a product manager and a couple of engineers each. Those teams are focused on two things. Number one, a program management level, a set of AB tests that they come up with together with their counterparts in marketing to see if they can do anything to beat our existing controls. For example, changing the copy on a marketing tout to get a user onsite to subscribe.

Can we run an AB test or multi-variate test trying to find the right optimization of that language to drive more people to subscribe? We run anywhere from 10 to 20 tests every month on those granular details. I would say that’s about a quarter of each of those teams time is spent on running and operating and managing the results of these quick turn-optimizing tests. Those are done in conjunction with marketing. The other three quarters of their time they spend focused on those longer-term investments, those things we have to do for the long haul to make sure that we’re building a sustainable business.

For example, building out a more robust onboarding program has been one of the priorities of the retention team and making sure subscribers as they subscribe, get more familiar with what the product is and all the benefits, and that we roll that out in a smart way. I would say it’s about one quarter, three quarters, and obviously, that’s very rough between the kind of quick-turn experiments and the longer-term investments that will set us up for a better business going forward.

Jacob: I want to move now and talk about the advertising business because, from a product perspective, you’ve also been put in charge of this reimagined ad business, I saw one source refer to it as. Can you talk about how you’re looking to tackle the advertising business at Bloomberg and how it’s going to change over the coming months and years?

Julia: Sure. Advertising has been a real treat for me about a year ago. The ad ops and ad product and programmatic platform team moved over into my group. I have as in my capacity of product, I’ve always worked closely with people in ad ops. I’ve always worked closely with people on the advertising side but never with this degree of detail and depth. I’ve really enjoyed the chance to go deep there. I would say we have a couple of different ways we’re looking at it. Number one, first and foremost Bloomberg is a client-led advertising business. We want to be easy to do business with. We want to provide really, really great client service and make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients across all of our campaigns that will continue.

One of the big things I want to, in my role working with these ad operations and other groups, is make sure, hey, look, do we have the right dashboards for insights that can provide us better material for pre and post-sale, insights for our clients do we have the right information to arm our sales teams with so that they can provide really cool and insightful stories for our clients as we’re trying build and grow our business. Number one back to basics. We have a strong direct sales organization. I want to make sure that we are using the gifts of technology to share some of those insights with our clients. That’s first and foremost.

Secondly, I think the growth of the subscriptions business now that I’m at Bloomberg, we’re about two and a half years in, has provided this wealth of examples of times where we have used AB testing to drive to greater results. I think that there’s a huge opportunity for us to do that, not just for the advertising business, but more significantly for both businesses. You imagine that, especially as most media companies or many media companies are doing these dual revenue streams, can we figure out a better way to monitor those two revenue streams in real time?

Can we look at our website like a revenue optimization engine, and start to figure out how we turn the dials to, “Hey, likely subscribers, they get one kind of experience. Never, subscribers, they get another type of experience.” I believe there’s a lot there that for reasons you and I discussed, don’t usually come to light because these organizations are relatively siloed. We have the opportunity in my group, to share some tools, to share some knowledge, to get our databases together, so that we can use everything we’re learning on the sense of business, not just about our customers from our first-party data standpoint, but also from their behavior on-site to drive the advertising business as well.

I’m very optimistic about the prospects there. The early tests we’ve done have shown, we got a lot of opportunity to just be smarter. I used to have a friend who said, “Media companies really need to keep their hand on the radar.” I think that’s apt. For many years in media businesses, we didn’t. I’m thinking about 2015 when many of us jumped over to social media and distributed platforms, we didn’t have a real sense of how we were making money on all these platforms. I think we’re all smarter now, and I think there’s a lot of work too.

Jacob: Being put in charge of the advertising business, I agree with you that media companies have given up control of their advertising businesses, or at least that’s my opinion, what has gone on. What are you thinking about the coming death or de-prioritization of the third-party cookie? Where are you investing to maximize your first-party data acquisition, which I imagine is going to become increasingly important for your advertising business?

Julia: First question, first, I think the death of the third-party cookie, if you just take a macro view, this is obviously the right decision. Consumers are increasingly wary of being tracked in this way. There’s all these reports that 51% of publisher revenue disappears somewhere in ad tech. We’re at a point where we lost control of the car here. I think that the death of the third-party cookie is a good way for us to reset and say, “What are we trying to do here? What’s the best transparent and user-friendly way, we can try to monetize our websites?” I think it’s a good reset moment. I am spending a lot of time reading up about all the options and other solutions out there.

I think Bloomberg is trying to take a client-led approach here, what do our clients want? What do our clients need, and what do we think is the best way to serve their needs by also being very, very cognizant of what customers are? What our readers are comfortable with? I think it’s a good reset moment for the industry, it’s kind of overdue, and we have an opportunity to reset here. I’m optimistic about that. The first-party data moment is really great for us. Bloomberg, aside from being a media company, we are housed within a larger financial data company. We’re a data company. We have the right DNA for this, we have the right infrastructure for this.

We’ve been very, very encouraged with, first of all, our customer’s willingness to share information about themselves when we provide the right value exchange, we give them a reason to do so, and our ability to really draw some real insights out of that, that can help drive business for our clients. We have a really unique audience here at Bloomberg, an elite audience. One that our clients really want to speak to, and our efforts in first-party data, just collecting more and more both demographic data about our users, but also survey data to try to figure out that psychographic as they call it profile of what our users care about. I think that’s provided us with a couple of key benefits.

Number one, what do these users care about, and how can we create better editorial and better products and services for them? Number two, for our advertisers who are looking to reach this audience, we have insight about what makes them tick. We know what platforms to reach them on. We know the best kind of creative to reach those audiences. When we think about first-party data, we see it as this whole ecosystem between behavioral and contextual data on the site, matched with self-reported data from our users, either in the form of surveys or demo, connected with platform-level insights.

The combination of those three, the insights we’re able to draw out of those, I think is really beneficial to our advertising clients, which is the ultimate goal.

Jacob: We’ve talked about the subscription business, and we’ve talked about advertising. At media companies, there’s often some pull between the two departments. Between, do we gain more content to get more subscribers, or do we open up more content so we can get more advertising dollars? Both of these departments reporting to you which I have a thesis around why that’s the right approach, but I’m curious, can you lean into this concept of the revenue optimization system, and how you tackle and prioritize the two revenue streams?

Julia: Well, I’ll tell you, you’re going really deep into what my Q4 has been like, so thanks for that. It’s worth noting all of the advertising side doesn’t report to me. Sales reports into someone else, I serve the advertising operations side. That tension still exists. That said, I am showing up as Pollyanna here in a very, very successful Q4 for us, saying, “We don’t have to choose. We don’t have to choose if we’re smart.” Right now, I would say we’re at very early stages of our revenue optimization engine. That is my end goal and dream here.

Right now, it’s pretty manual. Some people on my team got together with some people who are close to the service side, plus the people who are very close to the ad-selling side. We’re going through these numbers weekly to make sure we’re delivering on all of the impressions we’ve sold, while also simultaneously maximizing value for the [unintelligible 00:27:48] business. This is a meeting, we call project needle, we’re trying to thread the needle. I don’t believe we should have to open the wall fully to try and deliver on our advertising commitments, I think we can maximize the value of Q4, while also being really smart about how we manage the wall.

I don’t think these things have to be in conflict if you’re looking at the right data and if you’re looking at the right numbers. As you know when you’re dealing with ad campaigns that have audience targeting, filters on top of them, the numbers get tricky to read, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to read. Right now, I’d say we’re doing the precursor, so my revenue optimization engine manually, but I think as I go into 2021, where I want to go is that we have data and other systems maximizing this in real-time. That, to me, is really innovative and interesting. How can we instead of publisher yield management has traditionally hinged on this question of how can we maximize the RPM of each page?

That’s valuable, that has valuable, we should all look at the RPM of a page or pages, but it doesn’t look at the lifetime value of a user. As we move in a direction of subscription business, and the increasing importance of audience targeting, I actually think that’s a more valuable metric to look at. We’re trying to figure out, how do we get a shared understanding, a common language of what metrics matter. Then you can optimize the two businesses pretty easily.

Jacob: Let’s step away from revenue for a second. How does the product team support the newsroom at Bloomberg in their day-to-day operations, as well as launching new and innovative products, such as the just launched new streaming products that unfortunately, I’m blanking on the name of? How does the product team work with them?

Julia: Sure. We have a great relationship with our colleagues in the digital newsroom. I’ve really enjoyed working with these guys. I would say that we have done a couple of pretty interesting projects together. I’ll share a couple examples. One, we were looking at some of our traffic data earlier this year, and we were saying, “You know what we really want to do is, we want to try to build a product or better solution from search for us. We want to drive our search traffic, and is there a way we can through the combination of product and editorial build a really, really kick-ass search product?” What we did was come up with a product we call Story Threads, which launched earlier this year.

What Story Threads does is it answers questions. You’ve all been in the position where we’ve been like, “Fracking. What is the latest on fracking?” I just keep seeing in the headlines, I don’t really know what the story is, and then you Google that question. We’d like you to land on Bloomberg. We’ve developed essentially tour guides, essentially a combination– A cross between a weaker PDS story and an article. How can we provide you the latest on this particular news story, but also give you that deep sense of context of how we got here, which is something I think news companies do so well? It’s really a true collaboration between product and editorial, really diving in on what is the search user looking for and need.

There’s a woman who runs research for me, he’s phenomenal. She gives a lot of great insights about what those search users want and then designing an entire product and the editorial to go along with it to help us serve that need. What we found is actually been cool and quite surprising is helped drive the growth of the product. It has been wildly successful, not just on search, but on social too. We found that these products that were really meant to answer quick turn search questions have been something people wanted to share in moments of trying to get grounding on an issue. We’ve adapted the product since to try to make sure it solves the social use case as well. That’s one example.

In years past, we’ve worked on a product I still adore to this day called Workwise, that users could give us their salary, their job title, their desired job title, where they currently live, and where they want to live. We would crunch a bunch of numbers from the government to actually give them insights about where to move if they want to maximize their income if they should get a different degree and stuff like that. That’s an interesting product to me, because that is, number one, it’s a fun editorial data journalism project. Number two provides real value for users. Number three, it’s an exchange of first-party data that users were willing to give us because they saw value in the result.

Jacob: Stepping away from Bloomberg and thinking about product from a media perspective, at Bloomberg, you’ve got 100 people, I believe that are on your team. However, I work at a company that has 60 people total, that’s Morning Brew. If you were working at a smaller sub-100-person media company, how would you think about product in a different way than how you think about it at Bloomberg?

Julia: I don’t know that I would think about it differently, though, take that with a grain of salt, I’ve always worked for big companies. Everything I think about product, I would have to be even more ruthless. Prioritization is the biggest enemy of product out there. Can you be very laser-focused on what your company can and should be excellent at? I think in media companies, we want to do everything. We think we need special super tools for our specific use cases. At a smaller company, I would focus on the question of build versus buy and be very, very persnickety about what I chose to build.

It would have to be something that would provide differentiated and very important value to the company, or else it’s something I try to outsource from the outside. I think that’s true. I think that one of the most important things to do in smaller contexts is continue that vibe of tests and learn. It can be very hard in a smaller context and with fewer resources to embrace a culture of tests and learn. You want to be able to just make a decision with your limited resources, execute that decision, and then move on to the next thing on this huge laundry list of priorities you have to tackle.

I think committing to evolution and iteration on a product is one of the most important things you can do to incrementally grow it over time. I believe that in the abstract, but it wasn’t until I got to Bloomberg and we really committed to that with the subscriptions business, but now I just preach it from the heavens, I think it’s the most important thing you can do in a media company.

Jacob: Then to expand on this, for a company that is looking to make its first product hire, what should they be looking for?

Julia: Great question. First product hire, I always say, you are looking for someone with a to-do list mindset product. People can often be these very helpful drum majors for progress at a company. I think it is important to get people who are highly motivated by getting things out in the world and getting things shipped. That said, I look for a strong command of data and being able to tell stories out of the data, see insights. I often use the phrase squint your eyes at the data, the data itself can’t tell you much, you’ve got to be able to try to understand the user behavior behind that data. I look for a strong command of data and what it’s trying to say, and a sense of experimentation and creativity around.

You have that insight off the data, what could you do with that insight? I think user empathy is another thing I look for in product hires. Do you have a strong kind of sense for what your users into you? When I was at The Washington Post, during the early days, of the Jeff Bezos acquisition, we were building out a product that ultimately was pre-installed on Kindle Fire devices across the country. As we were trying to figure out, what to do with this product, we mentioned that we were going to bring the product to user testing. Jeff Bezos said to us, “Hey, that’s great, you should obviously get that user feedback,” but you also want to think about, do we love it. Do we love this product?

You think about that, man, that goes against everything you hear in product school. You listen to your users above all else, you’re not the user, et cetera, et cetera. I think what he was actually saying, and which is the lesson I’ve taken to heart is, if you deeply, deeply understand your customer, and get into the mindset of your customer, you’re a very, very good barometer of what the right thing to do is for the business. I think product people, the best product people can really deliver on that user empathy because they have so deeply consumed themselves with what their user cares about.

Jacob: I want to end the show with the same two questions I ask every person who comes on the podcast. First, looking at your career, what is a mistake that you have made and what did you learn from it that made you better professionally?

Julia: I have many mistakes, but my favorite mistake was my first product job. I was still an editor in The Washington Post newsroom, and I was working on the Post’s iPad app. When we first launched it into the world, the number one comment we got from readers was, “Why doesn’t it have search? A search function. The answer to that, of course, is we ran out of time, but okay, we were going to build a search function. I took this feedback to heart, and I built the best search function you’ve ever seen, and I spent so much money to build this search function. Then I delivered it out into the world, and only 200 people a day use that search function. So it was essentially a failure.

What I realized from that is that I actually wasn’t hearing the feedback correctly. Users weren’t saying, “I want search,” they were saying, “I can’t find what I need.” That’s a really different problem to solve. When I say squint your eyes at the data, that’s exactly what I mean. Try to figure out the actual user motivation, and the actual business insight that will help you make the best decisions for the business going forward.

Jacob: Then my final question, for individuals that want to get into product management, specifically in media, what is some advice you would give them to both help them get in the front door and succeed once they are there?

Julia: The most important skill a product manager has is that of listening. Listen to your customers, listen to your colleagues, listen to the business goals. If you do that, with your ears open, you will start to figure out the best way to connect that technology or product you want to build with the organization. A lot of people say, “I want to get into product management because I hate my CMS and I think it should be better.” Or, “I want to get into product management because I have this great idea about how article format should be reimagined.” All that might be true, but it might not be the right move for the business you’re joining or for the industry at the moment.

The way to be successful in product is trying to figure out the key problems, your users, and of your organization, and then figure out how you can not only solve those but solve above and beyond them. That’s what success in product looks like to me.