Lights, Camera, Home Goods: Find Out How This Theatre Production Manager Ended Up in Product Management at a Leading Tech Company

In our new content series, “How to Build Products & Influence People: 4 of Boston’s Top Product Managers and Their Stories” we spoke with some of the leading PMs in Boston to learn how they’re driving real change within their respective industries, but more importantly, within their own organization.

We spoke with Emily Levada, the Director of Product Management at Wayfair. A powerhouse in the world of home goods, Wayfair has grown immensely in recent years. With over 16 million active customers worldwide and an ever-expanding team of employees, the e-commerce company shows no signs of slowing down.

Emily began her professional career as a Production Manager for a contemporary theatre in Washington DC. Overseeing 60+ productions, Emily learned to collaborate with creative and technical teams in order to deliver the best customer experience possible. These skills would prove to be valuable as she transitioned into Product Management, where she continues to work closely with other departments in an effort to improve the customer experience.

This is part 2 of 4 in our “How to Build Products & Influence People: 4 of Boston’s Top Product Managers and Their Stories” series created in partnership with growth marketing agency Ideometry. Tune in tomorrow for another installment.

To start, could you tell us a little about Wayfair in your own words?

Emily: Wayfair is an online home goods retailer. We operate in the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany, across five retail brands. Wayfair is our mass-market brand and our most well-known brand. Our other labels include Joss & Main, AllModern, Birch Lane, and Perigold. We generated almost seven billion dollars in revenue last year and are a rapidly growing company, benefiting from the shift from brick and mortar to online in the home goods space.

How did you get your start in Product Management, and what did you know about the field before you got into it?

Emily: At first, I didn’t really know anything about Product Management. I got pointed in the direction of Product Management while I was getting my MBA at Yale. I quickly learned that there were a lot of things about the field that interested me. At the time, I was really into customer behavior and behavioral economics, and also liked building things.

I was, and still am, a technophile. I have a history of working in cross-functional organizations where creatives and technicians are constantly working together. As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do coming out of the MBA, I was naturally pointed towards product management as a function.

Did you notice that there was a growing interest in PM from your classmates?

Emily: Absolutely. It was just becoming mainstream when I was in the MBA from 2010–2012. I definitely saw that the large tech companies were already establishing MBA summer internship programs for PMs, and the field was starting to gain traction. There just wasn’t a lot of awareness or knowledge about Product Management at the time.

I was actually on campus at Yale last week for orientation for new MBAs, and was speaking on a panel about careers in technology. I’ve done that a few times over the years and the interest in Product Management is meaningfully growing, which is great to see.

How did your background in theatre production help prepare you for a career in Product Management?

Emily: I think there are so many parallels between theatre production and software development. At the most fundamental level, both fields involve working with a cross-functional team. I like to say that the conversations between a set designer, carpenter, and scenic painter, are the same conversations that happen between a UX designer, back-end engineer, and front-end engineer. In the theatre, I was a production manager, which is similar to a product manager, and entails figuring out how we are going to get things done with limited resources.

There’s a storytelling skill that becomes really important as a leader.

We would have a set schedule and needed to get from point A to point B, which involved a lot of creative problem solving along the way. Whether we had to reduce scope, change direction, or hire people to do certain functions, the role was all about translating between the people on the team and working to bring it all together.

There are a lot of other parallels as well. In both fields, you’re starting from written requirements, and doing a lot of interpreting. There’s a storytelling skill that you acquire when you study theatre that becomes really important as a leader. It teaches you how you motivate people and how to tell stories.

As I said earlier, I have a strong interest in behavior. Both of my degrees in Psychology and Theatre are studies of how individuals behave. One is artistic, one is scientific, and both serve me well when thinking about customers.

Where do PMs sit within Wayfair organizationally?

Emily: Wayfair has a few different research and development organizations that are various combinations of product, engineering, design, and analytics. I sit in a group that’s called “Storefront,” which works with the customer-facing websites and apps.

There’s also a marketing technology team, a supply chain technology team, a product information catalog team, and others. Every group is structured a little bit differently in terms of their functions and reporting structures, but every group has product managers of some variety who tackle critical customer problems and business opportunities.

What separates a good PM from a great PM?

Emily: When I think about product managers that have been successful and ones that have struggled, I find it important for PMs to not think of themselves as a gatekeeper to the technology. You also don’t want to be a gatekeeper to the engineers or customers. Setting yourself up as a gatekeeper is a sure way to consolidate power. And sure, there are benefits of people coming to you, giving you information, and then making decisions about what’s going to happen, but it also makes you an obstacle. You become a roadblock, and, smart people in the organization will find ways to go around you.

I find it important for PMs to not think of themselves as a gatekeeper to the technology.

The more product managers think of themselves as enablers and make life easy for their partners, whether that’s in business strategy, operations, or any other functions, the easier it is for other people to make business decisions, influence the product, and influence the customer experience.

Can you offer up a piece of practical advice that someone who’s reading this article could implement today?

Emily: The best piece of advice I can give for anybody trying to be better is to get really good at giving and receiving feedback. The ability to have conversations with other people is where all personal growth starts and it’s where all of your relationships and partnerships stem from. In terms of someone trying to be a better PM, that means having a really good understanding of where your gaps are, what your blind spots are, what you can do better, and what your strengths are.

I think if somebody who’s reading this doesn’t have a good sense of that today, then the first thing they should do is go ask the people around them for feedback that will help them understand how they are perceived. It’s incredibly beneficial to know the impact you have on other people, in addition to understanding the ways in which you can grow and be better.

Any thoughts on how the PM position could develop and change in the coming years?

Emily: It’s hard to say, but personally, I would like to see more clarity regarding the different types of product management that exist. It’s hard to define what a product manager is because it changes between companies or even within one company. You have product managers working on different types of problems, different types of technology, and focusing on different levels of the business than other PMs.

Getting more clarity around what the different functions of product management are will help us understand how PM roles evolve over time.

It definitely gets a little bit confusing and cluttered in terms of the types of PMs and their roles, responsibilities, and how they intersect.

Emily: Absolutely. If you think about how the influence is growing, you’ve naturally got more people coming out of school wanting to be product managers. Matching those people’s skills with roles where they’re going to add value and be challenged in the right ways can be difficult when we’re all using the same language to communicate very different things. Product management will evolve in many different ways, and I’d love for us to clear up the different ways we see product management having value and influence.

Can you share insight into what your PM tech stack is?

I think this is going to be a boring answer which is that I don’t use a lot of specific technology. My tech stack really is Google Calendar, spreadsheets, and a notebook that I keep my to-do list in.

We use Slack a lot at Wayfair for group communication, we use G Suite for productivity, and then we have a lot of house-built tools. We have an in-house sprint management tool, so it’s hard for me to say that there’s a particular set of things that make up my toolkit that others could easily replicate. I find that I’m just using versatile tools, like documents and spreadsheets, to figure out a solution for whatever I need at the time.

Is there someone in the Boston PM community that you’d like to give a shoutout to?

Emily: The product thinkers that I follow are not Boston-based like the Mind the Product folks, Martin Eriksson, Jaana Bastow, and others.

I’m also very fond of First Round Review. It’s more entrepreneur-focused, but you can find a lot of product-focused content. They also have a search tool called “first-round search” that allows you to search for specific topics within articles and blog posts.

An all-day event tailor-made for product managers. Register now for Unbox 2019, September 20 at Marriott Copley Boston. Unbox is a day for product managers to learn from each other and hone their skills to build great products. There is little formal education for product management, and at Boston Product, we’ve learned that the best way to help people improve is to get them in a room with other high-caliber PMs.

Ideometry is a Boston-based full-service marketing agency serving a global client base. With a full suite of creative, development, and strategic services, Ideometry helps startups and Fortune 500 companies alike get the business results they’re looking for. If you’re doing something interesting, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at ideometry.com or email hello@ideometry.com.