Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Christina Richards of Virtana On The 5 Steps Needed To Create Great Tech Products
An Interview With Hannah Clark, Editor of The Product Manager
Ensure Value in the Customer’s eyes — a former colleague of mine who had a rather snarky way of looking at the world used to say, “just because you think your baby (product) is beautiful doesn’t mean other people (customers) will want to kiss it (buy it).” He wasn’t talking about babies of course; he was pointing out that engineers (and product managers) have to guard against the tendency we have to get so passionate about our ideas that we assume everyone else will think they are as amazing and valuable as we do.
Currently, only about 1 in 4 employees in the tech industry is a woman. So what does it take to create a successful career as a woman in Tech? In this interview series called Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech, we are talking to successful women leaders in the tech industry to share stories and insights about what they did to lead successful careers. We also discuss the steps needed to create a great tech product. As part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Christina Richards.
As the Chief Marketing Officer for Virtana, Christina Richards has over 25 years of marketing, engineering, and revenue-acceleration experience that she has leveraged in building both small and large businesses. Prior to joining Virtana, Christina served in Marketing and Business Development leadership roles at Silicon Valley startups like Aeris and AOptix, as well as large global firm Nortel Networks. Christina earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, and her MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
There are several factors that ended up solidifying my decision, but it’s fair to say that the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet played a key role in sparking my original interest in engineering. I grew up in a military family, and as a kid I got the opportunity to tour a major aircraft carrier and saw the jets take off and land in fascinating precision. My first thought was, “I want to fly that!” but both my eyesight and gender were working against me. My second thought was, “If I can’t fly it, I will build it!,” and that started me down the road of learning about the field of engineering and technology.
After I had been an engineer for about a decade, I earned my MBA, and a parallel set of experiences gave me insight into the fascinating world of business mechanics — and that led me to combine my engineering and business experiences and leverage them in b2b marketing leadership roles that are heavily focused on technology.
It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Not humorous per se, but one thing that I had to learn early on as an engineering manager was how different people processed information and communicated. I am a “think-out-loud” type of person, but I had many engineers working for me that were more introverted — drop-shipping a load of new information on these folks and expecting immediate feedback and decisions wasn’t reasonable. I learned over time that different personality types process and engage in different ways — it was important to let the information absorb, process, and then engage for next steps.
What do you feel has been your ‘career-defining’ moment? We’d love to hear the lead-up, what happened, and the impact it had on your life.
It was probably my choice to move from Dallas to Silicon Valley 17 years into my career when I was recruited to the area by AOptix. By the time this happened, I had already been an engineer, business operations leader, marketing leader, and entrepreneur. It was a calculated risk moving away from my network I had spent almost 2 decades building, but I could see that being in Silicon Valley was an important step to get to the next level of my career in technology.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
Being a young female engineer was still a bit odd, even in the mid 90’s when I entered the market — women had been penetrating the industry for over a decade by the time I showed up, but we were still unusual and often underestimated.
I don’t recall ever considering “giving up” as an option — my mother was raised on a cattle ranch and my father was military, so the mindset in my family of origin was “keep going no matter what.” More important than that though — my mother had an extraordinary ability to problem-solve in extremely unique and insightful ways. A bit of that rubbed off on me, and I have leveraged that “outside-the-box” thinking in a variety of ways to overcome hard times along my career journey.
Ok, super. Thank you for all that. Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address? How does your company help people?
In simple terms, Virtana helps customers get more value from their infrastructure. Hybrid (on-premise and cloud) IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, and IT leaders are contending with rising costs and the management complexity that results from multiple cloud service providers (CSPs).
Our independent research has confirmed that 82% of organizations are leveraging a multi-cloud strategy, and 72% of IT leaders had to repatriate applications for performance and cost reasons as a result of insufficient planning.
Virtana has a flagship platform with four main components for helping hybrid/multi-cloud companies tackle these problems, including Infrastructure Performance, Capacity Planning, Cost Management, and Workload Placement.
In addition, Virtana is constantly innovating — currently, we are expanding our generative AI infrastructure solutions to provide our customers with further capabilities to ensure availability, improve internal efficiencies, and reduce risk.
If someone wants to lead a great company and create great products, what is the most important quality (for example, “determination” or “eye for detail”) that person should have, and what habits or behaviors would you suggest for honing that particular quality?
I think listening skills can go a long way when building a company or developing a successful product. Listen to your team, your customers, and your partners — then be nimble and humble enough to address concerns, iterate, and try again.
Be careful not to fall in love with your initial design or approach…if the market gives you feedback that the path you are on doesn’t solve the critical need or it’s not unique and valuable, you have to be ready to give up any assumptions that are blocking your progress.
Next, let’s talk about teams. What’s a team management strategy or framework that you’ve found to be exceptionally useful for the product development process?
My current company has a great set of “Behaviors we value” that you can read about here that are very on point for collecting and maintaining high-quality teams — it summarizes into these five things: servant-leadership, customer obsession, diversity & inclusion, measure what matters, and help each other.
I also have a hiring acronym that I like to use when I am vetting new hires: “CCM” — competency, culture, and motivation. “Competency” is the candidate’s actual capacity to do the job at an exceptional level. “Culture” is in reference to vetting whether this person will be additive or detrimental to your existing team’s culture. I define the last item, “Motivation,” a little differently…it’s not just a question of “are they motivated to do a good job?” the question is “what motivates them?” If you understand that about a potential hire, you can make a much better assessment of whether they will work well in your environment.
When you think of the strongest team you’ve ever worked with, why do you think the team worked so well together, and can you recall an anecdote that illustrates the dynamic?
I have had the good fortune to work with several high-functioning teams, so it would be hard to pick just one — my current team is top-notch and has great depth of expertise as well as high EQ, which makes them a fun team to work with.
There is one team that I led in my engineering days that also stands out in my mind because it was the perfect example of the value of diversity of thought. This team was particularly unique because it was eight people, and every single member was from a different country. Especially in our design and validation environment, having people from eight different mindsets applying their own unique approach to solving design and product problems enabled a rich variety of input and approaches. Talk about a great place to innovate!
If you had only one software tool in your arsenal, what would it be, why, and what other tools (software or tangible items) do you consider to be mission-critical?
As a marketing leader, I suppose I would have to say my main marketing automation platform — however, I am a huge fan of collaboration and project management tooling as well.
In general, I am a gadget/software tools/apps fanatic — both at work and in my personal life (probably due to my early history as an engineer), so like many others right now, I am enamored with all the shiny new AI tools…I have had long conversations with ChatGPT and am geeking out over all the new opportunities ChatGPT creates in the marketing world.
Let’s talk about downtime. What’s your go-to practice or ritual for preventing burnout?
Hiking in the Coastal Redwood forests here in California. There is something distinctly regenerative about spending time in nature in general, and we are blessed to have both amazing redwood forests and epic cliff-side beaches so close here in Silicon Valley.
Thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are your “5 Steps Needed to Create Great Tech Products”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
People tend to think we live in a 3-dimensional world, but that is not the case. We live in a 4-dimensional world, where time is the 4th dimension. A great example of this truth comes if you visit the town you lived in when you were seven. The town you visit will occupy the same three-dimensional space but in a different time, and as such, will hold a completely different set of people, possibilities, and challenges.
This truth applies to product creation as well. At different points in time, the exact same product can range from being innovative and ground-breaking, to being an “also-ran” and completely un-differentiated. So, the first thing to remember is not to fall in love with an idea no longer inhabiting its optimal time dimension.
That concept runs through all of these five steps but is particularly important in the first 3.
1. Ensure Value in the Customer’s eyes — a former colleague of mine who had a rather snarky way of looking at the world used to say, “just because you think your baby (product) is beautiful doesn’t mean other people (customers) will want to kiss it (buy it).” He wasn’t talking about babies of course; he was pointing out that engineers (and product managers) have to guard against the tendency we have to get so passionate about our ideas that we assume everyone else will think they are as amazing and valuable as we do.
A product only matters if the Customer loves it as much as you do and is willing to trade their dollars for the value your product provides. Do vigorous market testing and customer/prospect interviews to make certain you are building the right product for the right time-space in your market. Almost as important is to continue to do these touchpoints throughout the life of your product to ensure your ongoing development matches the customers’ actual needs.
2. Truly Differentiated: And it’s not enough to just ensure value — you need to also focus on bringing something to the market that is uniquely different from your competitors. I call the art of trying to sell an undifferentiated product “selling via hand-to-hand combat.” It’s the most costly and difficult way to go-to-market, and it can only be sustained for a short time.
Like individuals, every product has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Play to your strengths. If your weaknesses are table-stakes features, fix those too — but where you will really differentiate is by expanding and capitalizing on the things that make your product truly unique.
3. Match the Market: This is where that time dimension becomes even more critical. If you are going to enter an already crowded market, be sure to do enough market testing to ensure your differentiation is significant enough to carve out a new niche within that crowded space. I can think of several examples where a niche player carved out a unique foothold and then expanded from there to become a major market player — Arista comes to mind.
Conversely, If you are trying to create a market that doesn’t yet exist or spin-off a new thread of an existing space, make sure that you are matching the pace of the market need (again through customer research).
4. Continuous Innovation: Once launched, remember that design is a cyclical process, not linear. Even if you have strong success out of the gate, the technology market is a constantly changing environment — what got you to where you are will not get you to the next phase of your business. Continually stay in contact with your customer and prospect base, understanding the changing needs and demands they are under, and keep your product design relevant. After all the hard work it takes to get to initial success, it can be tempting to enjoy that success and relax for a minute…but your competitors won’t, so always be moving forward.
5. Build up your People: The first four steps are impossible without a motivated, committed workforce. When times get tough, some companies/leaders will get consumed by the pressures and challenges of the product/business and forget about the people that are doing the creating and selling. Today’s top C-suite leaders always keep in mind that in the 21st century, the employee-employer relationship is a partnership. If either partner feels they are not achieving their goals, either partner can leave. The hardest-working teams I have ever seen are the ones where the employees feel valued and appreciated.
Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?
When it comes to making change for any under-represented group — such as women in tech — I think it is really important to start by acknowledging how far we’ve come and the progress made instead of only talking about what is still in a state of lack. The expansion in diversity of the tech employee population both in gender and ethnicity since the start of my career 25 years ago has been exponential, and groups to support women in tech and diversity in tech are now ubiquitous, as opposed to being an anomaly when I first started.
What needs more work is getting that same diversity going at the executive level. Getting a solid representation of women into key strategic roles both in the C suite and on boards is what I would really like to see improve over the next decade. I have seen some sparks of progress on this as well, both in groups I am involved in like Hipower Women Executives of Silicon Valley (hipower.org), as well as others that encourage women in executive and board pursuits.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield, or Lisa Nichols. I have read many of their books, and every time I always collect a new spark of an idea to improve my business or motivational skills. I would love to have a detailed chat on the nuances of these ideas over lunch someday….and it would be even better if that lunch was right after an event where I had just given a motivational speech (one of my future goals!).
Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!
About the Interviewer: Hannah Clark is the Editor of The Product Manager. With a background in the tech and marketing spaces, Hannah has spent the past eight years coordinating, producing, and curating meaningful content for diverse audiences. Great products are at the heart of her life and career, and it’s her mission to support current and future product leaders in an ever-evolving industry. Read our latest insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews at theproductmanager.com.
