Steve and I met in Grade 1! I actually can’t remember anything about when we first met because we were six, but we’ve more-or-less been friends ever since. Steve is the CEO and co-founder of Berbix and has been a Product Lead at Airbnb and a Product Manager at Google. He’s a wealth of PM knowledge and I consider myself lucky to get PM advice from him whenever I ask!
Do you consider your product a SaaS product?
Yes, definitely (at Berbix), usually SaaS is usage-based or license-based for billing. Berbix is usage-based.
If you’ve product managed for other products, how does SaaS product management differ from other products?
The users are different, there are additional users to consider with Berbix: Our customers and the end-user who is going through the flow. One isn’t paying for it but both parties need to be considered in the experience.
One isn’t paying for it but both parties need to be considered in the experience.
What is your particular approach to product management?
Ultimately it’s about setting vision, goals and metrics, and that model can be applied to any PM challenge or process at the right resolution. Need to do a good job of mental models or frameworks. Information architecture for how to think about a particular project. Frameworks to categorize features and issues, and to communicate what needs to get done and why. Using those for quarter-long, year-long and two-year-long strategies can be helpful.
What’s your strong suit as a product manager?
Scenario generation. Specifically the worst case scenario — thinking through the ramifications or pros and cons of taking or not taking a particular action — what will be the obstacles and benefits of going through this scenario, looking at it through a negative lens. Technical acumen: this was very true at Google to build rapport with software engineers, to understand general complexity of one versus the other, to help with time-sizing and other scoping.
How do you know that you’re doing a good job?
Not easily. It can be tough to know when you’re doing a good job. Goals and metrics to show team or product progress. That can be a trick because you have to pick the right metric and measure them accurately. Always need to reassess that and test the metrics to make sure they are giving accurate results.
Team cohesiveness, team happiness, do they know why they’re working on a particular task or projects, do they understand the whole, as they are a sum of the parts, user metrics and what they are.
What was your favourite part of being a product manager?
Being able to wear multiple hats, the breadth of the role, the responsibility that comes with that, not having to go super deep on one thing but be sufficiently shallow on broad range of things, when to put on certain hats, having agency, feeling empowered, doing the things that need to be done to get something out.
How do you generally make decisions?
From a PM perspective, some type of framework especially around prioritization, vision, goals and metrics and objective tie-ins to that day-to-day decision making or perspective, as a top-down method. Then a bottom-up method, empathize with the user, which could be our customer or our customers’ customer.
What are your favourite product management resources and tools?
Omnigraffle, Figma, relational diagrams, flow charts, visual representation of things, every step of a flow, how information travels, what is their experience, the flow of a user journey or information to map it all out, universal ways to convey information.
What question do you wish I had asked you?
Why did you become a product manager?
Because I thought I was a shitty engineer. I am actually a pretty good engineer, I just wouldn’t get the satisfaction because there was a ceiling. Now I can get satisfaction in a whole different bunch of areas. Similar to those who can’t do, teach — those who can’t engineer, product manage!
Thank you so much for your time Steve! This post is part of handful interviewing product managers at other companies in my quest to learn more about my profession.
Kate Moore Hermes 