Talking to Leah Elzinga of ATB

Jerin Stewart introduced me to Leah Elzinga when I interviewed him earlier this year. She is a Product Owner at ATB Financial and Community Organizer. What a great introduction that turned out to be, as Leah is just a font of product management tips and information that I hadn’t heard before!

Leah got into tech by doing a Ladies Learning Code workshop. She signed up to go back to school the day after taking a workshop. We talked a lot about how going through huge and hard life experiences and being a parent makes you able to empathize with customers and team members better. Some gems from Leah “How can I use that to help my teams deal with things or what your customers are going through? Being a parent makes you realize what you need to learn and when. You just learn things when you need to learn something!”

Ruthless prioritization goes to not only your backlog but your time and energy too! 

Here is my interview with Leah:

Do you consider your product a SaaS product?

Yes! It’s pretty close to the definition. Customers are able to acquire a product through software and we work on payments within business banking.

If you’ve product managed for other products, how does SaaS product management differ from other products?

Balancing between building and maintaining. Been a Business Analyst, a Digital Project Manager, a Functional Designer, it’s all the same skills. A lot of the differences depend on scale, more than Saas versus not. For example, in construction your stakeholders are much smaller but they have more of a say in the day-to-day changes to your product. Changed the tools but not the direction, but now have more people to work with and rely on, including design, research and data teams. Coordinating those requests, prioritizing them, managing teams of people. Are the requests worth it? These all depend on scale.

How do you define product management?

What are the most important things to build for a person to actually make their life easier … and knowing when those things have nothing to do with tech.

What is your particular approach to product management?

Wants every single person that touches the project to know what the customers need and how we’re going to get there. Making it very clear why a customer does what they do. Making it crystal clear to cross-functional partners so that the conversation can continue when you’re not in the room. Literally had a brain injury and had to take time off. The work could continue on without me because it was clear in the previous conversations and documentation why we were doing what we were doing.

What’s your strong suit as a product manager?

Not just empathy but being able to act on it when I know I can’t empathize with someone and knowing what to do about. Enough of a tech background to understand how engineers and business people think. Understand how they come to a conclusion and process a problem and get ahead of them. When those mindsets diverge knowing how to bridge the gap between them. You can’t just be nice, you have to take the time to learn about design principles, system thinking, business, engineering …

How do you know that you’re doing a good job as a product manager?

When customers can do what they actually need to do and it doesn’t even occur to them — when they don’t even notice the system that they’re interacting with.

What’s your favourite part of being a product manager?

Being able to work with really smart people, building cool shit with cool people and never having that tied to a schedule, timesheet or a budget. Focus on products and ideas, and the natural outcome is hitting targets. Falling into the project management trap you focus too much on the symptoms — you’re falling behind etc.

How do you generally make decisions?

What will make you the most money? What costs you the most money? Remembering that time equals money. Do you know if that is costing your business the most money? Realizing that other gap is costing more which you’re ignoring because this other thing makes you feel worse. Always focused on businesses.

What are your favourite product management resources and tools?

• People! [She] learns better from people, Meet-ups, engaging, and always go off topic. Go to Meet-ups that are tangential to your natural scope, PMs should go to content, developer Meet-ups. PMing is lonely because it’s you and a team of people that don’t think like you.
• Learn about systems thinking and design thinking
• Learn how to learn and how decisions are made. Understand computer science: how to think, how to problem solve, how to break down systems
• Design books are more consumable than business books because designers look at it from [a human] perspective rather than with a slightly different lens.
• What are the important things my business needs to do? How do they do them? Read Google and Apple’s UX guidelines
• Should have an arsenal of diagramming tools, use pictures to make your case (for English as a second language reasons and for visual learners), get your thoughts out in the open so that people can understand them
• Need a basic amount of digital literacy, being able to write pseudo code or knowing how to write it in conditional statements

How do you spend your time?

Right now because we’re in active dev at the end of a project, putting everything that we know and we’ve learned into a consumable format — not a lot of discovery to do right now. The product owner role is evolving so establishing an intelligent development plan, establishing the sequence of development, filling gaps in the process and practice, moving knowledge out of people’s heads so that it is more sustainable so that everybody needs to see it, this allows you to build cool new shit because you know where the gaps are. Did you document everything that happened on a shelved project? Do you have decision logs on how things were made?

How do you approach problem solving?

You can’t be good at everything, learn how to learn.

Thank you so much for your time Leah! This post is part of handful interviewing product managers at other companies in my quest to learn more about my profession.