Coffee with Kathy Porto Chang

This week, we’re grabbing coffee with Kathy Porto Chang. Kathy is a Senior PM on the Discovery team at Twitter. She focuses on recommendations — the algorithms that help you discover new people to follow and content to explore on Twitter :). Kathy recently wrote about building for relevance here.

How did you get into product management?

I would say that my path to being a PM was unusual — but I’ve found that PMs come from all backgrounds.

Looking back, it seems the path started early with a love for technology. I remember being 4 and my engineer dad teaching me to ‘code’ my name in colors. We used to spend our weekends wandering the technology street market in Taipei (where I grew up) and build tower computers together — the days that I got to swap in bigger RAM memory were exciting.

After college, I spent 5 years in finance working in distressed investing and financing. That was super fun and I often draw on the core skill set that I developed there — primary qualitative and quantitative research to try to make sense of ambiguous situations, defining a clear hypothesis and how to test it, as well as pre-identifying what data would make me change my mind. That process is very helpful for a PM. A lot of building product is “How quickly can I get to what the right answer is, and how do I know if it’s right?”.

I then went to Stanford for my MBA and especially to spend time in the d.school. I loved learning about human-centered design — how to uncover user needs through interviewing and observing with empathy, as well as rapid ideating, prototyping, and testing.

After Stanford,— having been bitten by the entrepreneurship and tech bug — I started thinking about different roles in tech, and spoke to a lot of different people in the industry. I thought that product management could blend my interests in user-centered thinking, technology, and strategy, and took my first PM role at General Assembly in New York.

“Who are the ~2 best people in SF that you think I should meet and can introduce me to?”

How did your role at Twitter come about?

I got to Twitter through several women in product, starting with Ellen Chisa. Ellen & I started interacting on Twitter, and then Ellen invited me to a regular breakfast of NYC PMs. Jenn Vargas started a Slack group whose core members initially drew from that breakfast.

When I moved to San Francisco, I reconnected with that Slack group to ask them “Who are the ~2 best people in SF that you think I should meet and can introduce me to?”. Sheridan Kates introduced me to Joy Ding, a PM at Twitter who referred me into my current role (and used the strong Twitter Women in Product group as a major selling point!). The recommendations team is a great fit for me, since one of my core passions is the intersection of machine learning algorithms and compelling user experiences.

The easier that you make it for someone to help you, the more likely they will.

Your “Who are the ~2 best people in SF that you think I should meet and can introduce me to?” question is powerful. Where did that come from?

It made it easy for people to help me and quickly led to high quality intros. Most everyone can think of a couple of people that they think highly of.

I also often use a variant of the question now at Twitter. Whenever my manager or mentors give me development feedback, I immediately ask them who the best person at Twitter is at that skillset and then set up coffee with them — it works for everything from storytelling to JIRA.

The easier that you make it for someone to help you, the more likely they will. I have a lot of coffees with people who ask, “I want to get into technology, where should I start?” — that’s starting so broad that I have to do a lot of work to understand where I can help. Instead, I tell them to pick one thing and go for it. I don’t care if you really have three things and you tell me one of those things, like “I want to be a PM in EdTech” that immediately narrows the field so I can think of who you should speak to.

When I joined, I made sure to spend a lot of time listening to them and not adding unnecessary processes.

What advice would you give yourself if you were starting out today?

To understand where I can add value and where I can just let the team run. Right now, I PM 4 subteams with their own roadmaps, comprised of excellent engineers and designers. When I joined, I made sure to spend a lot of time listening to them and not adding unnecessary processes. I try to empower my team to make decisions and focus on accelerating their impact. If I didn’t do that, I think PM’ing a team of such scope would be near impossible.

To get better at weighing short-term impact with long-term strategy. Over indexing on either of those is detrimental. It’s important to have an ultimate view of where we’re going and then milestones along the way to get us there.

I used to believe “Oh, if I do good work, people will notice” — unfortunately that’s often not true.

What advice have you received that’s been formative for you?

To be bold. Be bold in terms of product vision — think about what will make a step change for your company and how you can start investing in that now. As an individual contributor stretched in scope, it’s easy to become reactive. I’m always reminding myself to look for the bigger opportunities, with impact-creating milestones to get there.

Also, something that I historically have been shy about is to be bold personally — this is where my mentors have really helped me. Be bold in asking for a promotion, and in putting yourself forward for things. I used to believe “Oh, if I do good work, people will notice” — unfortunately that’s often not true.

It’s more important to develop your strengths because you can hire for your weaknesses. As you progress in your career, it’s more important to develop your strengths because you can hire for your weaknesses. A mentor advised me to pick one or two natural strengths to be absolutely amazing at, rather than only focusing on improving weaknesses. Rather than being a mediocre all-around person, it’s more effective to build a strong complementary team.

What books do you recommend to PMs?

• Algorithms to Live By — this book covers how to apply classic computer science algorithm problems to decision making.
• Essentialism — the idea in this book is that one should focus on a couple of things and ruthlessly prioritize being good at those things, and that’s better for one’s career and development.
• Thoughtless Acts — this is a picture book from IDEO about how people use objects in ways that they’re not “supposed to”. It’s really helpful as a PM to step back and consider how people are using our products in ways that they might not be designed for. This book is great for developing empathy and divergent thinking.
• The Creative Habit — I love this book and re-read it often. Twyla Tharp (the author) is a choreographer, and in this book she talks about how creativity is a constant practice and how to build a method for being creative. The most powerful part of the book, for me, is when she talks about how she used to dance all of her choreography before giving it to her dancers. Then one day realized that she was limiting her dancers because she was 50 years old — they were 20 — and she was limiting their potential by only giving them moves that she could do. As a PM — working with high-powered designers and engineers — that feels super relevant.

What do you consider the traits of a great PM?

1. Empathy. The ability to see something and imagine how the user would explain it. That reminds me of another key question I ask before launching a product: “What is the thing that users will complain about most?”
2. Deeply understanding your product’s core differentiation and being able to defend it against all the noise. In tech, we always look to see what others are doing — I think that’s when products can fail. Really understand your core differentiation, who your audience is and what their needs are.
3. Having an inspiring vision, formed thoughtfully through listening. So much of being a PM is the ability to get the team and stakeholders bought into a direction. That’s the only way to get things done because we can’t do things by ourselves.
4. Hypothesis-driven and experimental. Having clear hypotheses and knowing how to test them is crucial.

I left coffee with Kathy excited to put her questions and advice into action. My favorite questions were: “Who are the ~2 best people in SF that you think I should meet and can introduce me to?” and “What is the thing that users will complain about most?”. Thanks for grabbing coffee, Kathy!

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