BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Stevie Huval

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

Hi Stevie, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

Prior to BigCommerce, I always had jobs in some form of customer service/ sales. They ran the gamut, in terms of industry, but the common thread was customer service and sales. Throughout my career, I used a good many different technologies and was always particularly struck by how clunky and ineffectual most business software is. Every industry I worked in, every company, bad software seemed to be the thing they all had in common. Over time, I couldn’t help but find myself ideating on improvements and genuinely believing better solutions could exist. This all led me to ask myself: how would one even go about deeply understanding a software user’s problems and then getting a solution to the market?

To get to that answer, I thought it made sense to shift industries and get a job in tech. I figured the way I’d have to “break in” to tech would be as a salesperson first. I joined the BigCommerce sales team and then eventually transitioned into a Sales Engineering role. At this point is when I started to work more with our Product team and learn more about what they did. My coworkers and I spent a ton of time trying to get feedback to the Product team and the Product team was even nice enough to involve us in ideating on solutions based on that feedback.

Here is when I had that lightbulb moment and realized I finally had an answer to my question about how to bring technology solutions to market. I learned that the way companies understand users’ problems, ideate, and test solutions, and then get those solutions to market is a team effort that is largely driven by the craft of Product Management. I realized that Product Management is what I came to learn and do — I just didn’t know the name for it until then.

So I started to focus more and more of my Sales Engineering time on interfacing with the Product team and learning. I tried to be a “front lines” resource to them in a market that was still relatively new to us as a company. Finally, when a Product Management role opened up, I jumped at the chance to apply. I got some supportive coaching from colleagues and friends and ultimately landed the role a little over 2 years ago!

What do you work on? Tell me about a day in the life of a Product Manager.

Product Management is genuinely a giant mash-up of research, technology, sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Which area I’m focused on changes drastically day-to-day but in general I am most often:

• Talking with users to understand more about their day-to-day and looking for opportunities where technology can make their day even better.
• Doing industry research to better understand the market in general, validate user feedback or a hypothesis, and quantify the impact or value of solving a given problem.
• Working with the broader business (Marketing, Support, Executives, etc) to determine and maintain a “stack-ranked” list of problems I want to solve. I’m often presenting slide decks that give quantitative and qualitative information about a given problem so I can with the rest of the business on the urgency of solving that problem.
• Working with designers and UX researchers to more deeply understand our user’s needs and ideate on possible solutions.
• Meeting with engineers to flesh out technical paths to solving a user’s problems and level of effort to do so.
• Writing detailed requirements so our designers and engineers are able to execute on one project while I begin research on the next.

What is an important problem that BigCommerce is solving?

We’ve drastically lowered the time, difficulty, and cost of entry to launch and maintain a sophisticated eCommerce store and eCommerce tech stack.

It was not long ago at all that an eCommerce site meant a minimum six-figure cost and one year time investment from a business. Whether you are a scrappy startup or a large, established business, that is an incredibly high monetary and human capital barrier to being able to just see if there is a market for an idea you’re testing.

Creating or sourcing a product people want to buy is tough. As is finding product-market fit, getting the word out to that market, and nurturing that market long enough to turn leads into sales. All the while, you need to be paying your staff and your suppliers while that cycle plays out.

Reducing the cost and upkeep barriers associated with eCommerce technology enables merchants to pour more into research, development, and marketing so they can create awesome things and sell them to the right people. Helping businesses allocate more time and money to growth is such a rewarding challenge.

What projects are you most passionate about building at BigCommerce?

My primary area of focus is Identity and Access Management. Because we build business software, we think a lot about who our users are within the context of their organization and what they need in order to get their job done with as little friction as possible. As we’ve had success moving upmarket, we’ve had the privilege to serve much more complex and sophisticated organizations. We know those companies need to manage their users — and those users’ permissions — in a way that reflects their own organizational structure. We also know they need their administrative complexity to stay flat even while their organizational sophistication grows. Growing the product so we can exceed these expectations, and maybe even delight our users in the process, is a really exciting technical and UX challenge. We have some really exciting plans in this space.

In addition to that, I also work on a few projects related to our agency, technology, and strategic partners’ needs. I’m really interested in the ways ecosystems form around platforms and how we can do even better at enabling that. It used to be you basically hired a big, blue-chip company (at a pretty penny) and they had to drive every, single, aspect of configuration and integration for a merchant’s end-to-end tech stack. We believe we can solve for 80% of the eCommerce features the big legacy companies solve for at 20% of the price. For the rest of our users’ needs: how can we continue to enable best-in-class technologies, developers, and agencies to thrive in our orbit and close any gaps? If we can continue to grow and empower our ecosystem, there is no limit to the amount of value our users can expect from BigCommerce. That’s so exciting.

Are there any tools that you use as a Product Manager that have changed the way you work for the better or made you more productive?

I’ll stay away from naming software tools as I think organizational needs change and no productivity tool is a silver bullet. That said, there are a few thought exercises I think are hugely impactful to delivering good product:

1. OKRs — Google’s Objective & Key Results framework is super critical to helping me breakdown a problem and gaining support for a solution within the broader organization. I really appreciate how simple and impactful it is.
2. Global Stack Rank — Maintaining an organization-wide stack rank of development projects is incredibly helpful in forcing us to be really sure we’re building the right thing for the right users at the right time. It is such a simple way to force those really tough priority decisions and gaining organizational support and alignment behind the most important ones.

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

You don’t have to action all input you get but you do need to make it easy for people to continue giving input.

Receiving requests, suggestions, and feedback is not a zero-sum game. You don’t need to respond to that input by explaining why “your way” is better. You need input to improve so you should make it as easy as possible for people to have those conversations without just hitting a wall. That said, not all suggestions are useful. At the end of the day, you should feel empowered to trust your gut about what advice to incorporate and what advice to let go of.

What advice would you give to other women in tech?

Somewhat expanding on the above: In a large, cross-functional organization, learning to say ‘no’ to a request while still maintaining a fruitful and collaborative relationship is maybe the most useful skill of all time. I’m not flawless at it but I’ve learned that doing so is mostly about being:

• Empathetic and truly taking the time to understand the request
• Direct about the other things you are working on and why that request would compete in strategy or priority.

Exercise that muscle and your relationships with your colleagues will continue to positively develop, despite you not being able to say yes to all (or even most) requests.

We’d like to thank Stevie for sharing her time with us and giving us a look into her day-to-day at BigCommerce. Follow Stevie on Twitter @steviehuval and on Medium at Stevie Huval.