Techtopia Ep. 1 | From Music to Engineering, to Design, to Product Management (Angela Potter, Senior PM at Salesforce)
Angela is Techtopia podcast’s first special guest. She graduated from Northwestern University with a major in music performance. While she was at college, she started with UX design from side projects, through several different positions, now she is a senior product manager at Salesforce, the top 1 CRM software vendor around the world, being responsible for mobile app service of more than 1.7 million monthly active users. The anchor Yingtutu talked with Angela about these breakthroughs and her daily work at Salesforce.
1. Creating Credentials Where There Is None
Yingtutu: As I reviewed your linkedin profile, I saw you were a music performance graduate in college. Then you became a UX design intern after graduation. To me, there seems to be a huge gap between the two different professions. How did you do that?
Angela: I did major in flute performance in college, which was completely outside of tech. As I decided to step into user experience design, I figured out I needed some real practice to get my foot in the tech door. So I learned a little bit of front-end development like coding, and by using the skills I learnt, I did several side projects. One of them was a Facebook app that could tell people how much a hipster they were based on whether they liked music. The project somehow showed that I knew how to execute something. This allowed me to get my internship and eventually more real jobs within UX design. To me, knowing how to code is a much more a tangible skill, while it is harder just to start from designing.
2. Wearing Different Hats
Yingtutu: Then you went to Olset?
Angela: Yes. That was where I got my first kind of like legitimate job at a startup doing both design and developments, sort of the value proposition I was able to bring to the table for these tiny companies. It was a travel company trying to raise a seed funding and they did 500 startups such as an accelerator in the Bay Area, which I think that was a really cool experience.
3. Learning from Working
Yingtutu: And then you joined GoldBelly?
Angela: Well, yeah. GoldBelly is a very fun company. They are a consumer company that you can order from famous restaurants across the US, like if I am in San Francisco, I can order a deep dish pizza from Chicago that FedEx to me overnight.
So I was doing development and design back then. I got points and I was actually really enjoying doing both. And I guess I was being a little indecisive to do a lot of things I want. At GoldBelly I actually had some mentorship from some people who were coding and designing. I learned at the time about development, about best practices for coding, about writing tests and also about design. I also learned how to look at other examples of people who were trying to solve similar problems and get inspiration from them and then really just try out a lot of different things until I have something that makes sense.
4. Let Go and Being Dedicated
Yingtutu: I notice that after GoldBelly, you seemed to be away from being a developer and becoming a full product designer at DoubleDutch. Why did you do that?
Angela: DoubleDutch is another bigger startup I’ve ever worked for. They offer mobile app for events. If you go to a conference and you download a mobile app for that conference, the people who host that conference probably purchase something like an event app or software in order to configure and publish it out. For a huge conference, maybe the hosts custom build the app themselves, but most hosts do not want to publish a mobile app for a single event, so DoubleDutch has a software where the conference hosts can use to configure their app and put their sessions, speakers, details and branding in there, and then DoubleDutch will handle that app and publish to the App Store with the event name on it.
Back then I really enjoyed being able to do both development and design. It was nice to feel like self-sufficient, like you could design and create something and did not depend on anybody else.
But I realized that if I want to get to the next level in terms of my design skills, I need to focus a little bit more. So I decided that I wanted to focus on design because I was finding myself doing a lot of coding and coding my own designs, which for me, I would find that when I was thinking about designing something, it was very hard to put aside the developer part of my brain. I was like “oh I have to code this,” which turned out that I should just design something that was easier to build.
It is important for designers to be able to think about what is achievable from a perspective, but I also think it is important to be able to start with more of an open mind and think through what is the ideal user experience, and from there, figuring out how we get there and what the first step is.
Yingtutu: That kind of technical restraint could confine your design at the very beginning.
Angela: Exactly yeah. So I felt it was limiting me from thinking big, in terms of user experience, and so when I transited to DoubleDutch, I decided that I wanted to only do design and focus on that and become a better designer.
5. Observing for Decision-Making
Yingtutu: The next position you took was at Kelvin and you were a product designer and also a product manager. What drove you to do that?
Angela: So I think while in DoubleDutch I really enjoyed making B2B products, things that people are actually using in their workplace that help them be better at their jobs. I found that very motivating and so I wanted to work on another B2B product.
Kelvin does industrial automation. It has tools for configuring control systems for oil and gas wells. It has a very complex product with a lot of configuration in it so there are many things for it to do to help their customers customize this product to work for them in order to build their control systems for giant machines. I had to install trust in customers, in terms of making sure they know what was happening with their machinery, making sure they could see that the systems were making them successful and optimizing their production. There were a lot of fun challenges there on that.
Actually DoubleDutch was the first company I ever worked for where there were any product managers. Prior to that, I was at smaller companies and I didn’t even know what a product manager was. When I participated meetings with other designer and engineers in the same room, I felt we were all product managers. So I started thinking about whether I wanted to be a part of the managers. It took me a little while to decide that I wanted transition to that because I really like designing. And also, I wanted to be doing strategic like roadmap work, like I love thinking about all these different pieces, and how they fit together, as how our user’s needs could match with their business’ needs, with their customer’s needs and how we could make sure we actually deliver these things with engineering. I love working at these problems. But I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let go of being a designer and I think there was hesitancy in me.
I think that designers have freedom to determine the user experience so I felt like I was not quite ready to give up control of design. But at Kelvin, I felt I was ready to start to relinquish control over all the details of design and focus more on strategy and scoping.
Salesforce.com, inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It sells a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. The company was co-founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff as a software as a service (SaaS) company.
In 2020, Fortune magazine ranked Salesforce at number six on their Fortune List of the Top 100 Companies to Work For in 2020 based on an employee survey of satisfaction. (Adapted from Wiki)
Yingtutu: Your next stop is Salesforce, where you are right now. Please tell us about your job at Salesforce.
Angela: Our core businesses is CRM, Customer Relationship Management. We have a wide variety of products we offer and I think the one we are most known for is our sales product. We have customers of big and small companies. Most of them have their sales reps use Salesforce in order to track their work. Essentially when they go to customer meetings, when they make deals or move deals along to next stage, they will put all the information inside of Salesforce for their company to track their performance. Usually their compensation structure is based on the information they enter into Salesforce and how they are progressing their deals.
Some companies use Salesforce for their entire employee base. Like we have a customer who uses Salesforce to have their employees clock in and out of their shifts. Everything in Salesforce is configurable.
6. Embracing Challenges in the New Journey
Yingtutu: I heard that being configurative is one of the greatest features of Salesforce’s products. Can you elaborate more on that?
Angela: Configuration is definitely quite a challenge at Salesforce. Many of our customers are in huge companies that have entire teams dedicated to configuring Salesforce. They build custom code on top of Salesforce. So for biggest customers I think configuration is the most important piece and they are willing to invest for resources they need to configure, while we also have smaller companies who use Salesforce and might not have dedicated Salesforce admins. (Admins are what we call the people who are within our customer companies but to configure Salesforce for end users.) For those who do not have admins, to be simple and be able to work out of a box is more important. Configuration is definitely a top goal to strike and I think that’s something we are constantly trying to figure out like how many resources we need to be supporting for a really configurable side and then also like how we can make it easier so people don’t have to do so much configuration for their end users.
7. Listening to Multiple Perspectives
Yingtutu: You mentioned several different roles who involve in configuring Salesforce like the customers, admin users, and end users. Would there be tensions between these different groups of people? For example, the end users as employees who are asked for using Salesforce might not have much motivation to use it but their employers, who are your customers, would love Salesforce, for it can help them track performances.
Angela: You definitely point out the challenge we face, and I think this is the case to some extent for any B2B product, any enterprise software, where the person who is buying your product is different from the person who is using it. I think our customers really love us and the admins as well. They love being able to have this freedom to create interfaces within their company on Salesforce. End users, though, they are required to use Salesforce for their job.
I think historically Salesforce had prioritized customer admin’s over the end user’s experience. And I think that’s the case again in a lot of enterprise software where it’s more about the customer rather than the end user. But I think at Salesforce, that mentality is starting to shift a little bit. I know at least in my team, we are really trying to spend more time focusing on the end user’s experience and making sure that they actually want to use the product and are getting value out of it, not just a way for them to record everything they are doing so their boss can see it. I mean, our customers can require our end users, but there’s only so much you can require, right? I hope our end users are motivated to put data rather than doing their job the bare minimum. So I think that is one of the challenges that we are focusing on right now, which is how we incentivize end users to actually want to use the products and get value from the product outside of just their company who wants them to use it.
Yingtutu: So following up “incentive,” how do you make sure your design or product is solving the right problem for the end user? How do you do product research and how do you use it to better help your product management?
Angela: It is something of combination of methods. At Salesforce, the product managers, as it is in my team, we do go on customer calls quite a bit. I often talk to our customers about their mobile strategy. And I can know what they care about like how they can do to create good experiences on mobile and what we recommend them to do, and conversations about the problems they are experiencing and what their goals are.
For end users, we gather their feedback inside the mobile app that feeds into our user research. We have a dedicated user researcher for mobile who can run usability studies and send out surveys to end users. We also have data scientists who help us get the right data we need to understand how people are using our app. That allows us to dig into how people in a particular organization use the app. By applying many different methods, we try to look for patterns and figure out what the biggest pain points and the biggest opportunities are.
8. Achieving Functional Group Alignment
Yingtutu: I heard that there is a key skill for product managers called “priority management.” What does that mean to you?
Angela: Prioritization is hard, especially in an organization like Salesforce where you have so many different teams, and each team has its own roadmap or features. If you want to do a big feature, at anytime you can’t do it alone. Like for the mobile team, if we want new configuration for the admin, there is a team that owns admin configuration, so we need to partner with them. And that can be really challenging when they have other teams sort of asking them for help with their features. There is definitely a lot of negotiating going on in order to figure out how to get things done. But I want to mention one characteristic part of Salesforce that helps to guide our priorities.
So Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, will publish his priorities every year. It is a form called V2MOM: vision, value, method, obstacle and measure. It is basically what the company is trying to accomplish for the year. And that can cast specifically from the top down, so that everyone will be writing our goals and at the same time, making sure we are aligned with the vision of the company. Perhaps it sounds hierarchical for somebody who comes from a startup background, but I do think it can be very helpful in the situation where a team is being asked for help from like 20 other different teams to execute on their features, and they have to make a choice on what to prioritize. One can always choose the projects that align most with the highest priority company goals and do those first.
9. Building Interpersonal Relationships for Successful Teamwork
Yingtutu: How do you represent your team to go out and negotiate with other teams in order to achieve your team goals? Do you do help exchange?
Angela: I have seen many people doing this explicitly, like I’ll do this for you, if you do this for me. I believe that there is definitely an aspect that personal relationships are an important factor, but I think that’s especially the case when you’re trying to convince other teams to help you with your feature, instead of helping another team with their feature, potentially. The formal process for dependencies is to file a team dependency on that team, which is basically like a JIRA ticket. Salesforce has been doing these major releases for years so we kind of organize that way. But in reality, you don’t just go filing dependencies on other teams without talking to them. It’s always better if you know somebody on that team and have a personal relationship with them, and you can go and explain what you are trying to do and get a feel for whether that’s something that might be realistic. It’s like you do in the same way in life if you are trying to get in touch with someone.
It’s always good to go through your network and see if there is anyone you can connect to. I think everyone is human, and everyone wants to be treated like people, and want to have these real conversations when they are being asked for help. So that’s definitely something that I’d love to navigate. Something I will be happy to do as much, and it’s also something interesting as an aspect of the job. It can be absolutely rewarding when you are able to build these partnerships and be on the same page about what the priorities are. Thus, you can create fairly big features that are impactful if you can get buying partnership from other teams.
10. Practice Overcomes Nervousness
Yingtutu: I heard that a product manager at Salesforce needs to present in large conferences. How do you manage yourself to do that? Would you be nervous?
Angela: I’m definitely nervous when I present. I did the Dreamforce for the first time last year which was one of our big yearly conference, with over a thousand people of attendance in San Francisco. I presented about the mobile app program and did a couple of other smaller sessions. For admins, I explained to them how to configure on a more practical level. There were hundreds of them. I also did a webinar for one of our releases that had over a thousand people attending. These were completely new to me. I have never done things before I joined Salesforce, so I practice a lot. I am not somebody who is naturally a public speaker all the time. And I am a little bit introverted myself. So that’s definite a skill that I practice.
I do rehearse but not want to become robotic; I want to sound like a person who is having conversational talk on the stage. I try also to put myself in the mindset of speaking directly to people even if there is an audience of 500 people.
Q&A
1. What advice would you give to those who are now product designers and want to be product managers one day in the future?
Angela: I do think that product management is the one of those roles that is different at each company. At Salesforce, there’s surely a lot of presenting, public speaking and talking to customers. A big thing to think about in making the transition from design into product management is if you enjoy the complexity of conflicting priorities.
Also like dealing conflicting opinions between different users and customers. You may find that perhaps the end users want something to be easy. They don’t want to have to put much effort to get into this tool so their boss can see it. And then you may have your customer who wants to put more features into the tool. Maybe you already feel it’s too complex for the end user, and then you have stakeholders internally you have dependencies that you’re managing, and you have to decide whether to build a feature you can do on your own vs something that depends on another team.
So I think if you are someone who embraces the chaos and complexity of that, then product management could be something that you might find it interesting. And if you are a designer and you are thinking about product management, I would say that for my opinion, think through like if I have this product, what should the roadmap be and what your team should do. Or if you work with product managers, ask your PM like how/what kind of factors go into the priority of these items? And what makes this more important to the next? Just try to start engaging in these conversations and thinking about not just end user experience but also all of these other factors that go into the priorities of features.
And starting engaging with engineers. Getting engaging with JIRA or whatever tracker you use to manage engineering work, and start writing tickets for developers and get close with them. Engineers are your friends. They are powerful allies.
2. How does this pandemic crisis affect Salesforce? Is Salesforce still hiring?
Of course the pandemic has impacted everyone. But I think Salesforce has been fortunate at least so far that we are still hiring. One of the things that Salesforce has really been thinking about is how we help our customers figure out how to navigate the pandemic. So we are standing up new initiative to try to help our customers. We also have work.com to try to relief the charge of how people can reopen safely and gradually, and work on how we can help our customers think about that.
3. What’s the biggest challenge to transfer to PM from designer ?
I think the hardest part is, perhaps it is a lot of presenting and a lot of trying to build relationships and negotiate for dependencies. Also when I was designer, I could have a few hours working through problems and now I feel like I don’t have hours of time during the day. Most of my job is being in meetings and consulting with other people, making sure things are on track making and people have what they need in order to continue to do their jobs and switching directions when something is not working. And a lot of making slide decks which I didn’t expect, so you have to love making slides but tolerating making a lot of slides.
4. What’s the biggest achievement so far since you work at Salesforce?
I think I’m motivated by being able to actually take a feature and put it into the hands of the end users so they can use it and it makes their lives easier. I was really proud of being able to shape my first feature. In February, I shared a link to a page inside the Salesforce mobile app. Probably one and a half million users got the feature. I was able to drive that happen, which was great. We got some feedback from users that was basically like “Oh God I can finally do this.” It’s rewarding to be able to make someone’s job less painful and focus on what they actually want to be doing.
5. What is the more difficult part of a PM’s work than a product designer’s?
I think one of the very different and challenging part of being a PM is that I need to be the one to move things forward or make things happen. (But what if you have difficult team members?) I think I’m really fortunate to work with people who are genuinely motivated to get things done and to do the right things for users, for the company, and for the rest of the team. I do have responsibilities for the products and moving that forward but at least at a company like Salesforce I don’t actually directly manage any of the people on my team. My team members report to like, their engineering manager or their design manager. I think that is nice to have partnerships from function based leaders like design managers and engineering managers. And if people are not doing what they are supposed to, there usually are some reasons why and sometimes it takes a little bit of time to uncover that or figure out what’s going on to get back to the right track.
Angela’s linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelacbpotter (feel free to connect Angela on Linkedin)
Angela’s interview on Youtube: https://youtu.be/Naz5k8pgxAo
Yingtutu Product Design Facebook Page: https://reurl.cc/8GAODj
