Scaling Product Teams: Sean Smith
Product Leaders: So how did you get your start as a product manager?
Sean: I went to college to become a systems admin, I did a networking and information systems degree at Wentworth, and was going to get my CCNA certification and was going to be a network admin. Then I changed a bit and wanted to be a software developer and then realized I was bad at both. That’s when I got pointed towards consulting and joined PwC in their management consulting group in InfoSec before InfoSec was cool. I spent a lot of time at banks and financial services companies - definitely a lot of time on the cost side of the house, so doing a lot more risk management, process improvement, cost reduction projects.
Those projects started to get a bit repetitive and I wanted to see the other side of the house, so I joined Oliver Wyman, where I spent more time on strategy and revenue. So instead of working for the CIO, we were working for the head of strategy or head of the retail bank. That was able to give me this well-rounded experience of how companies were run, specifically with how they use tech. Towards the end of my time at Oliver Wyman I joined a practice called OW Labs - they are a full stack product team inside of a consulting firm and would take on pieces of a strategy and build POC. I joined that group and got to be a PM without the title, and realized I’ve done a lot of this stuff, just with different names and in other jobs. Eventually I left consulting as I knew I didn’t want to live the consultant life forever. A friend of a friend introduced me to a small 15 person company that was a construction logistics marketplace for dump trucks. They didn’t have a product team, hadn’t really heard of product management, but were nudged by an advisor that they should add someone as a PM. Coming from consulting, they probably looked at me and said “well he’s not from Facebook, but he’s a grinder and will work hard.” I think they were really looking for a high-velocity hire given their small size and I was able to ramp quickly coming from a consulting background. We went from $8M in annual payment volume to over $250M in a few years.
Product Leaders: I encounter a lot of product managers and product teams that don’t have a healthy relationship with Sales or sometimes are disconnected from the realities of selling the thing they’ve built. How did your time in Sales Engineering affect your perspective as a PM?
Sean: Early in my career I had an aversion to speaking to sales people or dealing with sales teams. I really had a change of heart working in the sales engineering environment and then made it part of my brand. When I joined Axle, during the interview process I highlighted that one of my strengths is that I’m a BD (business development)-centric product guy. I spend a lot of my time today in the market, and I work closely with sales people because I think closing deals is fun, it’s exciting, it funds the business, and all the good things that come with that.
Product Leaders: When you came to Axle, you were hired in as the Head of Product, basically the beachhead for the team? How big is the team now?
Sean: Yep, that’s correct. I joined Axle 11 months back when we were roughly 20 people and we’re up to 70 now. The business itself is growing pretty fast and we are as well. The product team is currently at 5 and we’ll be at 9 in maybe a couple of months.
Product Leaders: Usually good ICs get promoted to leadership and then find that there are many new skills they need to master. As you started to lead a team of other PMs, where did you suddenly sense you had gaps?
Sean: I found that my unique ability to quickly put out fires (some may even call me a firefighter) and push stalled projects along, was extremely valuable in my leadership role. The skills enabled me to easily build trust with my direct reports. They could see, ‘hey this guy doesn’t just talk the talk’, but instead that I was willing to jump in and actually move things along when needed.
Additionally, simply being a good listener and ensuring the team is being heard are paramount. Axle has a culture of change, and a culture of very open feedback. Monthly (and sometimes more) we are revisiting all of our delivery processes and tweaking them to make fixes. People respect that quick action on feedback, and they respect calling a spade a spade, ie: ‘Hey, our design reviews are not going very well, we’re not getting approvals, what are we going to do about it?’
An area of opportunity that I’m working on is onboarding new team members as quickly as the engineering team. Our engineering team has an Objective and Key Result (OKR) on time to first commit for new developers. Their goal is measured in days, while for me I’ve found it takes a few months to get product managers up to speed. Our timelines are just very different. So I’m working on ways to quickly onboard PMs faster, what is the ideal speed, and what I can do to accelerate and delegate the onboarding tasks a bit so it’s not all on me.
Product Leaders: How would you define a successful product leader? What’s the model you are aspiring to?
Sean: I’ve found my style to be more servant leadership. I aim to create ownership and autonomy for our teams to build, discover, and ship products that our customers love. I’ve found from working with two strong founders, delegation is critical and empowering team members to own projects is more effective than just doing the work for them. I’m constantly trying to distribute tasks, so all of the important tasks get done. I make sure the teams have the context and are empowered to take ownership or as we say at Axle, “be a barrel”. The idea is you can only have as much ammunition as you have barrels, so we want to hire leaders and managers that take ownership or as we say, “Be a barrel to get work done.”
Product Leaders: How do you assess strength in a PM candidate? What are the must-haves you are looking for?
Sean: Axle is different from other places I’ve worked in that the culture is not just stickers on the wall, it is authentic and lived by every employee, every day. Some of the values that are especially important for the product team are tenacity (remember, be the barrel), curiosity, transparency, and empathy. From someone’s background and where they’ve worked, you can get at their level of tenacity. How they answer questions usually gives you good insight into transparency and empathy.
Product Leaders: How have you managed to grow the team so successfully in such a competitive hiring market?
Sean: Something that’s been true from the start and even in this competitive market, I’ve been very purposeful about holding a very high bar and not compromising on every candidate. The only compromise I have made is time. That probably made things harder for me and my team longer than it should have because I have not been able to hire as fast as I should have to keep up with engineering and the rest of the business. I have been ruthless about making excellent hires first, even if that slows other things down, because ultimately it will be better for the business.
Product Leaders: This is my opinion, but I think we collectively need to make more PMs by bringing people in from other fields. There’s too many open roles out there and not enough people with prior experience. Is this something you’ve tried or considered?
Sean: I truly believe that. I’ve hired a couple of former bankers as PMs, and I’ve found that to work quite well, because they provide a capital T in tenacity. One person in particular, their first project when they joined Axle was an underwriting automation and risk weighting engine for our portfolios. We didn’t exactly ease him in, but he took the challenge on and did great. It has since made an enormous impact on the business.
Product Leaders: For people that are considering product roles, and especially product leadership roles at rapidly growing small companies, what have you learned already from your time at Axle?
Sean: Always work towards building a high trust environment. If you don’t have trust among senior leadership, engineering counterparts, and lines of business you support, then everything just falls apart and projects take longer than necessary. Building and maintaining a high-trust environment allows people to move faster.
Another lesson is that I should have hired earlier and quicker. In rapidly growing companies, it is essential to quickly identify hiring needs and then work closely with recruiting on the strategy to fill those holes. Sometimes a recruitment strategy that works for sales will not work for product, so pivot quickly and don’t be afraid to speak up. We’ve managed to grow fast and have made solid hires, but maybe it could have happened quicker.
Product Leaders: I always ask people I interview to comment on the “profile of an excellent product manager” and give me feedback. From our conversation so far I know you would probably call out that tenacity and curiosity are not explicitly mentioned, though I’ll tell you I whole-heartedly agree that both are important. What else stands out as things you agree with or that might be missing?
Sean: You’ve got empathy and ownership - that’s where some of the tenacity comes from. Being empathic to the problem you need to solve and exhibiting extreme ownership to get it over the finish line is key. One thing that feels like it might be missing is teamwork. I think that a tendency of more junior PMs is to look at engineering as a service, not as a partner. If you have a great relationship with your engineering team, you can get a lot more done. There’s a partnership, team building element that would be good to add.
Overall, this tracks. This may not be intentional, but I like the priority of the way they are listed, especially on the hard skills. The ability to look at objectively data and be analytical. Product manager domain, not to dog on our own people, but I think that’s the easiest to pick up.
Product Leaders: It’s intentionally that way. I put it last on purpose and when I explain this to people, I always say “you know all of those things we read and obsess over about agile, and user stories, and rituals, and prioritization frameworks, it’s that one line item, that’s how important it is overall.
Sean: Right, right. I totally agree. The thing under what you need to be effective - frameworks I may change it to be “structure” but could be frameworks, or something else.
Product Leaders: This bottom part is my assertion that product management is all about making decisions, but there’s not a lot of training out there on how to do it well. Until we get replaced by AI, humans are imperfect decision machines that are subject to bias. I didn’t eat enough this morning, I’m angry at my friend, I’m worried about my job, whatever. If I just leave this alone till tomorrow will come back and my decision would be different? What do you think about the role of judgment in product management?
Sean: I learned in this role especially, and maybe because I’m older and wiser and a dad, now and more introspective or whatever, I’ve definitely found myself having a couple meetings in row that are not going the way I want. I’ll say I need a 15min walk because I’m not in the right spot to do my best and that level of self-awareness is definitely new for me [laughs].
Want to work with Sean? Check out Axle’s open product roles.
