Interview Gordon Chang: Silicon Valley PM

Gordon Chang

Learn From the Best: Everything PM from a guy who has worked in Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and several successful Silicon Valley startups.

After an interview with Gordon, I still don’t know how someone can smile for an hour straight and still convey so much authority. He is confident yet humble, he is the type of person who you’d want to dissect his brain and see how he did everything right. Here is a piece of his brain:

1. Given your experience at big corporations where you had access to vast resources, how do you adapt and thrive in a startup environment with limited resources?

Let’s start with the differences between corporate and startup environments:

• Corporate: You are a small part of a big machinery, and since the machinery is constantly in motion, you are pressured to do your part to keep that motion going.
• Startup: You are fighting an uphill battle, juggling many tasks at once and by yourself.

Here are 3 solutions to fight that uphill battle:

Apply the Corporate Mindset to Startups

• Usually, people’s first reaction to a lack of resources is to panic and start to tackle the long list of tasks they have to do immediately, and when a similar task arises, the person does the same: getting it done now.
• What is something that corporates have that startups don’t have?
• An efficient process in place that is profit-generating, self-sustainable, and less chaotic and ambiguous. But, corporations are also slower to change and each person has a narrow scope of ownership. Bingo! Take advantage of that in a startup.
• Since you have more ownership and authority over a project or goal in a startup, build a system that will require fewer resources in the future, such as automating the process. Don’t think about what is the fastest way to do this task. Instead, take an extra minute and plan how you can scale this effort with some processes and templates, so that in the future you can spend less time to achieve the same results. Focus on the next similar tasks, and keep your eyes out for the long run.

The Famous Harvard Way: Timeboxing

• Focus on one big goal at a time, and give a “timebox” on when the result should be “good enough”. This method allows you to stay focus and be less panic. You can go deep on one specific and use that momentum to solve problems efficiently, while giving you space to react to other small routine tasks.

Think Outside the Box

• One key question to ask when solving user problems as a Product Manager, is: How can I tell one story very well?
• The solution doesn’t have to be the product itself, it can be through telling the story through a video, or content.
• Gordon used to work in Microsoft Teams for Education. When COVID hit, schools shifted to online classes, and a different set of features were demanded: raise hands, hard mute, etc. Features Microsoft neither had nor had the engineering resources required to build it in a short amount of time. Therefore, he worked with product marketing and content teams to create articles, videos, and talks, about the 17 steps to set up a good online class. Ideally, it should’ve been one or 2 steps, but the features just weren’t ready yet. So as new features were released, the storylines were updated as well.

2. Tell us about a time when you had to defend a design or product decision that was controversial. How did you handle pushback, and what was the outcome?

Problem:

• Gordon worked at the Growth Team in Facebook and the goal was to increase daily active users, specifically through enhancing the friending experience to encourage people to connect with more friends.
• When they were looking at the data, they found that there was a divergence in the data when users were segmented by maturity (measured by the age of users and how long they have been using Facebook). In India, where users were less mature, they used Facebook more often than those from the United States or Europe, where the users were more mature. For example, it doesn’t make sense to ask a person in their 40s with two kids to use Facebook every day.
• They did more research and found that,

1. The older you become, the more you care about close friends.
2. As Facebook was so good at optimizing friend numbers, people often had too many irrelevant friends.
3. Over the years Facebook friend list has expanded to everyone you kind of know, and relatives you don’t want to share intimate life experience with.

• As a result, the team pitched an initiative to uplift “close friends experience”, to recreate more exclusive friendships. In Gordon’s description, “to create a Facebook within Facebook (for close friends)”.
• However, this was in direct conflict with their short-term goal. He was essentially asking people to make fewer friends, and not asking users to log in every day (DAU) to keep up with friends, the proposed features would also require engineering resources.

Solution:

• The team painted a story where this new feature can improve user retention in the long run. With this feature in place, more mature users would feel more connected with friends that they actually care about and keep using Facebook in the long run. Which ultimately aligns with Meta’s mission on “bring the world closer together”.

To Overcome this Pushback:

1. Understand the core problem.
2. Find out what exactly the user wants.

They did research for 2 quarters. Then, they looked at those results and worked with the data team to look at historical data from past projects, to make sure that this feature aligns with the Meta’s mission and the team’s new mission Gordon defined, it’s doable, and there’s estimated “DAU opportunity” in the long run.

3. What’s your take on the next big disruptor in martech? Are there any emerging technologies or trends you believe could change the game in the near future?

Generative AI, because it can

1. Optimize Flow
2. Personalize

Customers want to achieve the best return on investment (ROI), and one way to do that is through marketing. How does generative AI help?

• Make their workflow seamless by providing an all-in-one platform.
• Give them a more personalized experience(ad campaigns) by using past data to create personalized text-based and image messages.

For example, Crescendo Lab’s CAAC uses AI to automate message writing. And by making the sales agent the final decision maker, AI is not taking them out of the equation completely, but reducing their time to react.

In a bigger landscape, many B2B SaaS companies that touches “productivity” in the user flow, would be best fit to integrate Generative AI as seamless as possible into the tool.

4. Tech companies often face accusations of being ‘copycats.’ Can you discuss your approach to avoid competitors from copying your product?

Gordon cites “7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy”, a book by Hamilton W. Helmer. In sum, the more “powers” you apply to your business, the harder it is for people to copy you.

-1- Scale economics

-2- Switching costs

• By helping customers achieve their goals easier, such as through engagement, ROI, conversion, etc. When they choose to switch away from Crescendo Lab, switching costs would incur. The more we create optimized metadata and efficient automation in our product, the harder it is for customers to switch.

-3- Cornered resource

-4- Counter positioning

• Uber: Drivers don’t need to pay high registration fees anymore. Making it hard for traditional taxi committees to defend due to its business model.

-5- Branding: Building trust so customers

• Apple, Netflix

-6- Network effects

• Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat
• Salesforce, an example specifically for B2B.
  Salesforce has created a marketplace where if you need enterprise software, it already has a huge number of vendors that sell through them.

-7- Process

-8- Switching powers

5. Why do you devote your time to Crescendo Lab, how does Crescendo Lab attract you?

People & Culture:

• Employees here embody a transparent, supportive, and growth mindset. Everyone is constantly looking for ways to improve faster, whether that is an improvement for their own skill set or the project.
• For example, last week, the product and engineering team documented over 400 actionable Items over a year from the retrospective they did every month. He noticed that there was a new employee who joined this retrospective meeting, and this was his first time in a retro. This person openly praised another person for their work and also gave constructive feedback for the work of another person. This newbie shared his opinions objectively, and the person being criticized accepted his comments instead of trying to defend them. This is when Gordon knows that this culture is not just evident in individuals but embedded in the whole environment.

Niche Market & Growth Opportunity:

While other international martech products incorporate chat apps such as WhatsApp, Crescendo Lab’s products mainly focus on Line’s Official Account. This is extremely appealing to countries like Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand, where Lone CRM is their biggest pain point of consumers. By penetrating the martech market through a niche market, Gordon sees a huge opportunity for Crescendo Lab in the future.

Perfect Match with Past Experience:

• Microsoft Teams → Line Chat App
• Microsoft Dynamics → Crescendo Lab CRM Data
• Bing Ads → Create Marketing Campaigns
• Meta Friends → Line Friends

Something New to the Table:

• Gordon’s past experiences were mostly from the United States and Canada, so he thought this could be a good segue for him to experience more of Asia, a mutual exchange of cultural perspective.
• Gordon had experience managing product managers, product designers, and engineers. And Crescendo Lab allows transparency and opportunity to expand to other departments such as marketing and business development roles.

Key Takeaways:

• Apply a corporate mindset to startups by planning for the long run and preparing for growth.
• Utilize timeboxing to get things done faster with fewer resources.
• Consider solving the problem through storytelling instead of altering the product itself.
• Establishing an ecosystem to enhance the product experience can be a powerful tool.
• Read “7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy” by Hamilton W. Helmer.