After Product Issue #2

Welcome back to After Product.

In this newsletter, we’re shining a big, bright torch on career paths that Product people can move into 🔦 

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Here are some key takeaways from our chat with Carson Taylor, Product Strategy @ Samsung, ex-Zynga:

• Paths into Product Strategy - a lot of folks Carson works with have come from consulting into Product Strategy. Coming from PM has some pros and cons.

• Feature-level PM at a big business vs earlier-stage PM - you get exposure to a broader set of business/product problems at smaller companies - which could be useful if you’re interested moving to pure strategy.

• ‘Isn’t Product Strategy just part of being a good PM?’ I hear you cry. Carson’s suggestion is that all PMs need to be strategic, but they don’t have the bandwidth to focus on this alone - and it’s a change of pace when you do.  

Full interview below 👇

Great. So tell us about what you do!

Yeah, so right now I work at Samsung in Product Strategy. I work on any gaming-related services at Samsung - stuff like Samsung Gaming Hub, Samsung Galaxy Store, and Game Launcher.

I recently graduated from Dartmouth, where I went to business school. During my MBA, I was a PM for a Series A start-up, before which I moved into Product Management from Project Management at Zynga.

Tell us about why you made the move into Product Management.

I was just really interested in the problems and the space that PMs operated in. I really liked the concepts that they were dealing with, and the responsibility that they seemed to have - they were really driving the show.

It seemed like my skills as a project manager (organisation, team leadership, prioritisation, data analysis) would transfer really well into Product, but that I’d be able to apply them to solve what I felt were more interesting and impactful problems for the business - in project management, I was purely execution focused.

I’d gotten to know the Product team really well and really admired who they were and their work - I could see their impact on the team and the company, and wanted to be part of that.

Did it live up to your expectations?

Yeah, very much so - it was super rewarding and very fulfilling. It was a big shift from what I’d been doing previously and I noticed that in the way I interacted with people - they were coming to me for more strategy questions that were really about the business and the potential impact.

It was instantly clear that the potential success or failure of something was on me - so it was very fulfilling to step into more of a business leadership role.

So what motivated you to go get your MBA?

I decided to apply when I was still in the project management role, for two reasons:

1. There were some aspects of business I wanted more confidence in - I was dealing with a lot of budgeting and accounting that I just felt pretty unequipped for.

2. A lot of the PMs at Zynga had MBAs, and so I thought it would help me move into Product. As it turned out, I was able to make that move into Product before the MBA, but I still thought it would help me develop those skills I needed to continue my career in product or explore other spaces.

Whilst at Dartmouth, you PM’d for a Series A startup - how did you find that?

Yeah, it was very different. One of my mentors put it quite well - at Zynga, I was a feature PM - you’re focusing on one thing, idea testing, iterating, and releasing it. But it’s a small part of a bigger product.

I joined this startup and, lo and behold, it’s really different - I’m only the second PM in the company and suddenly my job is all about growth. Sure, we cared about growth at Zynga, but we had strong product market fit and it wasn’t so much of a concern. So, when I joined this smaller team, there were all these things that I was very unequipped for and had to learn really quickly.

But it was great, because the level of responsibility that I stepped into was huge. I was no longer a feature-level PM and had ownership over the whole strategy, marketing, operations, and features. It was a big challenge.

So Product Strategy now - how does it differ from your previous roles in Product?

I think the first big difference is the pace of work.

When I was a PM, it was very fast-paced and there’s always a million things going on. You’re constantly solving problems, fighting fires, dealing with tactical things, stand-ups, AB testing, customer service tickets, reporting etc. I was thinking about the long-term roadmap, certainly, but when I was a PM, I felt like I had to really carve out that time to do so.

In Product Strategy, the level of urgency is very different. I don’t really have emergencies anymore and I’m not fighting fires.

And that’s a lot to do with the second big difference, which is the timeframe we’re looking at - 90% of my role is to think about what the product looks like in the next 1-10 years. We spend a lot of time thinking about current and future opportunities, rigorous benchmarking, market analysis, financial modelling, building user engagement models. And supporting strategic decisions that we might take in a longer timeframe.

How do you like that change in pace?

I really enjoy it - I feel like I can breathe a little bit and be more intentional about how I’m spending my time.

But there’s definitely not the same satisfaction of building things on a day-to-day basis and working with engineers to get stuff done. Sometimes I work with designers on mock-ups etc, but I’m very upstream of the building and shipping.

There’s benefits to that, but I miss the tangibility of the impact you’re making - you’re able to make an impact in this role, but it’s not realised in the near-term, which makes it feel more nebulous.

So how do you interact with Product Management today in your role?

Every PM needs to be strategic, and PMs at Samsung are very strategic. I think they’re great thought-partners. The only difference really is that strategy is a part of their responsibility, but we’re dedicated to it.

They’re still focusing on the execution - because the scope of products at Samsung is quite large, it’s just helpful to have a separate group that is dedicated to purely strategy. It’s a very synergistic relationship, because we can flesh out a lot of that deeper long-term roadmap stuff, and give ourselves more thought and confidence in the decisions we’re making.

It works the same as the other functions that make up PM but are spun out - for example, data analysis. It’s a key part of a PM’s role, but there’s also a separate function that can go deeper on it 100% of the time.

Could you give a couple of examples of specific projects that you’d be focusing on?

Yes, so right now I’m working on our yearly foundation strategy - it’s kind of like a product review, but rather than focusing on the product’s performance over the past year or period, we’re focusing on where the product is in the market, how the landscape is evolving, where we want to play in the future, and how we think we can do that over the next 2-5 years or so.

That involves a lot of data and perspective gathering and evaluation through a bunch of common product strategy frameworks. We work with people across the company to do that and this becomes what executives will see about the future of this product. It also becomes the reference point for what we’re building towards long-term.

Other examples - new user engagement and acquisition modelling, build-vs-buy analysis and decisions, strategic partnership discussions and modelling - I’d say the general theme is about combining our product data with market data to identify opportunities, and then modelling that out, before making a decision about whether to include it on our roadmap.

Do you think you could have done this role without being a PM?

I think that being a PM did set me up really well for this, and I think this is true for most product strategy groups. That said, I'm the only one actually who has a PM background on my team - most people have come from Consulting.

That gives them a really good set of skills that they can bring to Product Strategy, which I don’t have. On the other hand, I have all this industry and market knowledge and an understanding of what it’s like to build a product. Which is a huge advantage for me - I’m able to speak with PMs in a way that I think is a little unique, even if I don’t inherently have that really robust set of generalisable frameworks to evaluate market or business opportunities in the same way. So that’s one of the areas that I’m working on growing in.

On the flip side, the consulting folks now need to go and become experts in a product and industry, and start to understand how products are built and shipped.

Is there anything that you miss about like PM’ing?

Oh yeah, definitely. Some we’ve mentioned already - building and shipping something - that’s so cool. But also:

• Access to users - I receive user interview reports now but I’m not actually doing them anymore. Speaking with users was one of the things I enjoyed most about PM’ing.

• Experiments - I miss running experiments in various visualisation tools and having the ability to change a user’s experience at a moment’s notice.

• Daily stand-ups and the community - and seeing progress made every single day.

Would you consider going back?

Yes, I would eventually, but I really like where I am now. It’s nice to step back from some of those other things about Product - in particular, I felt like I was always just running around. Particularly for gaming and entertainment, those are live services that we had to be very rigorously on call for. I think stepping back and focusing on the macro perspective will have made me a better PM.

What’s next for you?

It’s too early to say - I love the role right now and my main goal is to learn and become more impactful. The level of conversation we’re having is awesome (stuff like M&A, strategic investments, strategic partnerships) and I’m finding that really thrilling. It feels like a path to becoming an internal thought-leader, and I want to stay focused on that for now.

That’s all this week! Catch you next.

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