Buck Avey of SkySlope: Product Managers Know Their Customers

Reza Shirazi
Austin Voice of Product
5 min readNov 7, 2017

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Understanding your customers’ pain will help you solve it with your product, shared Buck Avey, vp of product at SkySlope, for my interview series, Austin VOP. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

Austin VOP: Issue #18

What was your path to product management?

I started in a customer-facing technical support role. I really enjoyed helping customers and solving their issues; however, I wanted to evolve my career to the business side. With that end in mind, I got my MBA and found that the marketing domain was the most interesting: understanding the customer and developing the value proposition of the product. I moved into program management and got exposure to engineering, product, finance, marketing and other teams. This is when I decided to move into a product management role.

It really helped to have the background in technical support and knowing how to empathize with the customer. Once you talk to a customer, you really understand the challenges they face. Without empathy, it is much harder to create a good solution. It is gratifying to be able to build products that resolve issues that would have to be dealt with after the fact when a customer calls technical support. This is what gets me out of bed every morning — I have felt the pain and frustration customers are dealing with and I want to help them avoid it.

How do you learn and grow in this field?

I always continue to learn as I tread the path of product management. Whether it is Agile, Lean Startup or Design Thinking, these are all different tools that you can bring to bear. You have to pick the tools that fit, depending on your product, company, the culture.

Lately, I have been reading a lot about Design Thinking. I also enjoyed Ash Maurya’s books on Lean. And Pragmatic Marketing has good articles on best practices.

I also attend meetups where I can learn from others in the product management community. We are all innovating in our own ways and we can help each other learn and adopt new tools and best practices.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

One of the things I have seen happen in some organizations is that product managers become project managers. The key thing is to focus on the market and the customer — know it better than anyone else. This will give you a strong voice when you need to prioritize.

Nevertheless, product managers need solid project management skills. If you don’t have the ability to keep the team on task and execute, you will struggle to succeed. You have to have a somewhat directive approach when needed.

As a product manager, you might be able to develop a roadmap and write user stories.

But if you cannot provide data to defend your plan to executives, then the person with the highest title will win the argument.

You have to be able to say that you talked to fifty customers and twenty-five of them had this feature as their highest priority. Having quantifiable data will dramatically help you defend your initiatives and drive your product forward.

What is exciting about the product you are working on now?

SkySlope is a product that provides transaction management for real estate brokerages. It drastically reduces the time and paperwork that needs to be filled after selling home. It helps to automate the repetitive activities that real estate agents and transaction coordinators have to perform. They can use this software instead of using paper and it speeds up the process drastically. This gets them focused on what they do best which is to put people in homes they want to buy.

SkySlope is especially useful for firms that have a lot of agents. Doing all the paperwork manually is compounded the more agents you have. These firms can scale their business a lot more easily by using SkySlope.

What is your biggest product challenge currently?

Our challenge is to stay ahead of the expectations of the customer and consumer. We have so many well-designed apps that we use as consumers that are easy to use and elegant. This consumerization of software trickles down into business to business products like ours. Even though we are a smaller company, we are challenged to keep up with the bleeding edge of functionality, usability and design from the likes of Google and Amazon even though we have a much smaller team.

How might we build a stronger product and tech community in Austin?

We are lucky in Austin to have events like Product Camp and other product meetups. Austin needs to continue to foster this community involvement. My advice is that if you have an idea, get involved. Don’t just show up. Do something that gives back to the community.

I recently moved to Sacramento from Austin and I do not see anything resembling the product meetups we had in Austin. I need to carry the torch here and get involved in organizing and not just attending. I would like to cross-pollinate best practices between these two state capitals.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

My favorite is Sling TV. It gives us the flexibility with our entertainment options. I did not want to pay the high cost of cable and did not want 200 channels most of which I did not watch. Sling TV has a great DVR that allows me to watch the shows I want anywhere — like when I am at the gym — right through the app. Sling was at the vanguard with this approach and now the cable channels are offering it too.

Thank you, Buck!

Austin VOP is an interview series with product leaders to build a stronger product and tech community in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

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I am passionate about building products and building community. PM by day and community builder at Austin Voice of Product: https://austinvop.com.