Amy Ross: “Innovation is driven by necessity”
Women in Product Austin has started an interview series that focuses on how local technology leaders are adapting to COVID-19. This February we spoke to Amy Ross, Director of Product Management at Electronic Arts (EA).
At EA, Amy leads a team of product managers in the Worldwide Customer Experience division, which is responsible for providing service and support for all EA products. Prior to EA, Amy worked at AT&T for 18 years. While she started in program management, over the years she also took on product marketing and content development roles. As the organization recognized a need to pull those disparate responsibilities into a role of full oversight, Amy transitioned into product management at AT&T.
I spoke with Amy about the history of product management, the impact of COVID on the gaming space, and transforming from a project-based organization into a product-based one.
What was program management like when you started?
That was a long time ago and it’s evolved quite a bit since the early 90s. Back then, someone else would decide the strategy and what needed to be done, and hand it over to me to drive those outcomes. Success as a program manager meant delivering the ask of the business, on time, on budget, and on scope.
Can you speak to the evolution of product management as a discipline?
Product management arose from the need to drive change faster. Innovating quickly requires the people whose job is to focus on evolving a specific product to go out and meet market demand.
Back in 1995, we were not releasing a new iPhone every year. Companies weren’t building new industries overnight. But as certain industries started experiencing change, other organizations looked to those disruptors that were innovating quickly and said, “How are you guys doing that?”
Retail is a great example. There was a time in my life where I didn’t think I would shop for groceries online. And here comes Amazon to disrupt retail and build a whole new ecommerce industry. Amazon’s ability to turn up different business pillars within their market and leverage their consumer base to develop new revenue streams is remarkable to me.
What does Product Management look like in practice at EA?
There are lots of versions of product management, even within EA. You have product managers who work with studios and define what features need to be in the game. And then in our world, product management is more on the business side.
The product management discipline in our organization is six months old. We’re still working through a lot of the operating models and roles and responsibilities to make it work. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, no two product management organizations look the same.
Can you talk about the nature of the industry that primes you to do things in a certain way?
EA has multiple studios that we work with and delivering a unique experience to our players is of utmost importance. Releasing a game happens on a long cycle, much like creating a movie.
By the time you launch it two years later, the industry has changed. A whole new set of tools may be available, there may be a different set of player demands, and a competitor may have come out. Because of the complexity of what we do in gaming, trying to anticipate what the service strategy and customer experience strategy should be is hard.
You mentioned how in the last six months you’ve started a new product organization. How have you seen product management change in that time?
We’re an organization that has had a culture of build, build, build. The ideal thinking and investment, from a product management perspective, has not traditionally happened. Prior to this, we would decide what we wanted to get done in the next fiscal year or funding period and finish as much as we could with that amount of budget, time, and scope.
Once we were done with it, we might make some small enhancements, but we were on to the next thing. That means we didn’t spend a whole lot of time figuring out if it was going to have the business impact we hoped. It’s been, “I have this great visionary idea. Let’s just go build it and see how it does.” When you hit the ball out of the park, it’s amazing. But how many times do you have to bunt before you get there?
That is not the approach we’re taking going forward. It’s not to say that it isn’t a business model, particularly if you’re a smaller organization that doesn’t need a robust product team. But as your organization matures, you want to be more strategic and innovate. It means delivering less impact in the short term, but making sure that the impact is more predictable in the long term.
What are some strategies for shifting that build mindset? How do you redefine success?
This is an amazing time for innovation just being driven out of necessity. Companies have to get to a point where their business is at competitive risk, and they say, “Hey, we can’t afford to wait a year to know whether this is going to move the needle. How do we get faster?”
A lot of organizations don’t embrace product management until they realized they were sending things into the market that didn’t have the impact they wanted. Out of that, you’ve seen the development of product management, which is there to help everyone fail fast and pivot before you’ve made a massive capital investment.
I think the biggest pivot is celebrating success around delivering value instead of around getting something done. Success needs to look like customer enthusiasm and engagement.
How has COVID impacted EA and the entertainment industry?
We’ve had some of the best results we’ve ever had as a company. From an industry perspective, people are engaging with home entertainment at a much higher level. With commutes no longer taking up people’s time and shelter in place intact for a good part of the last 12 months, the effect is people are finding entertainment in new ways. They’re not going to movie theaters or malls, so they’re spending more of their time engaged with home entertainment.
How has the last year affected your roadmap or strategic direction? Are you putting more investment into certain things?
More people playing games means more people contacting support. Organizationally, we had to figure out how to resolve player issues faster and keep a service level up while navigating the challenges COVID provided us. We have to think about the interactions we have with players, as it may be the only time a player interacts with the EA brand. I am anxious to see how the world looks several years from now. COVID is driving a ton of innovation that we did not remotely imagine.
What does market research look like for you?
In the Worldwide Customer Experience group, we’re fortunate to have our own team of market researchers and data people. Because we’re the first line of defense with our players, we consume a ton of data in order to understand what drove players to our contact center. It drives where we need to focus and what potential services or tools we need to be thinking about delivering for our players.
What do you look for in strong product managers? What does a product management leader look like?
Number one is curiosity. The way you drive innovation is through understanding the process that allowed us to arrive here, and then figuring out how to make that thing better.
Number two is the idea that product managers are humble servants to the business. Being able to stakeholder really well, and create an environment of trust: “I’m going to bring her idea to life, and I’m going to make sure that she knows what’s happening, and that it fulfills the need, want, or desire that she wants it to deliver.”
Last of all, is there wisdom that you’d like to share?
It’s important to learn to speak the language of engineers and business teams and talk to the right audience in the right voice. I find that is what product managers are the most challenged with. Those who can navigate both sides of the coin make the most remarkable product managers, in my opinion.
Not all product management is created equal. If you are interviewing for product management jobs, understand what the specific role is. Some roles require internal communication and are more political in nature, while some skew more technical.
As you’re going through the process, ask, “What does this product management job demand specifically? Who would I be interacting with? What teams would I primarily be interacting with?” Above all, seek out products that play into your strengths.
Thanks to Kristina Kernaghan for editing.
