Joanna Dunn of Betterworks: Product Managers Inspire and Empower their Teams
Empower and inspire your team so that you can build a successful product, shared Joanna Dunn, Director of Product at Betterworks, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #105
What was your path to product management?
I think a very common answer to this question is that I stumbled into it by complete accident. I started college when I was 15 and then moved to Austin at 17. I was already two years into college and majoring in Russian, Eastern European Studies and Latin American Studies. I dropped out twice but kept going back to class each semester because I felt like I was letting the professors down. I think I ultimately left college because I was impatient and wanted bigger problems to solve. I started working as a stylist for a photographer, I spent a couple of years in AmeriCorps working in Austin public schools. I was clearly completely unsure of what I actually wanted to be doing — I just knew I wanted to be working. A friend of mine who did actually graduate got a job at a startup around 2008, and they needed an intern. I put together a fifteen page portfolio of photography, terrible design work and other things that were completely irrelevant to the position. I had no idea what a tech job was and the hiring manager, who wasn’t much older than me, ended up hiring me because we had the same favorite bar. Side note: She is now a product leader at a start-up herself and one of my closest friends to this day.
I didn’t really realize for a few years that what I was doing was actually product management. I had titles like content production, content strategy, but I was spending a lot of time working with engineers and R&D teams, really figuring out how to build products and features and working cross-functionally to get everyone aligned. One day I saw a product manager doing their job and I thought: “Oh that’s kind of what I do, and these are all the things about my job that I like.” So I got a job at Indeed as an associate product manager when Indeed had just a few hundred employees. It was product bootcamp, and I learned a ton from some true leaders in the space.
I just went from there and started working officially in product management, primarily in the domain industry. A few years ago, I took a job with an HR tech startup and grew into a director of product role; following a successful acquisition I am now leading a product portfolio at Betterworks. All in all, I fell into product management unintentionally and quickly realized that it was exactly what I loved and wanted to be doing because it scratched that itch of always needing a new challenge and always needing a bigger and bigger problem to solve.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
I have been interviewing product managers, what feels like nonstop, this year and have thought a lot about this. The tenets of servant leadership are pretty critical for product managers because nobody works for you. You are asking all of these people to do very significant things, but none of them report to you.
Your product is going to fail if you are not empowering and inspiring all of those people to do their part in it. They are going to rally behind you and behind a product if they feel like they are invested in it and a part of it, and if they feel like their voices are genuinely being listened to.
Really making sure that you are involving everyone and that your focus is not just this needs to get done and I need you to do it for me, but this is why, and I want you to be a part of this journey and I want you to be a part of creating this and understand why it is important for you and how it benefits whatever role you are in.
Another thing that is really essential is knowing what you don’t know and being the first to admit if you are wrong or when you need to change course. You have to discern when other people know more than you about something and be comfortable trusting their expertise. I have designers on my team and I’m not a UX or UI expert by any means. That is why I am a product manager and not a product designer. And so I am not going to come in with authority on how they should do their job or what the best system is for them to use because they are the experts in that; it benefits us both if I listen to them, let them take the lead, and learn from their experience.
A lot of it comes down to ego: a successful product manager or product leader can’t have an ego. That is where relationships, especially relationships between product and engineering, which are the most critical relationships that you will have, really start to quickly break down and quickly blow up — when either side comes to the table with ego and comes to the table with the unwavering assumption that they are the ones who are right and other people need to get on board with them. There is always room to listen to and understand somebody else’s perspective and to take that seriously and think it over. Maybe you are right, and if you are, then you should be comfortable standing your ground. But I think being comfortable with being wrong or even partially wrong is just as important as being comfortable sticking up for something.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I am a single mom of a seven year old daughter and decided to level up the whole Covid experience by hosting a swarm of kindergartners and first graders out of my house to go to school for the whole year. So between that, parenting, and working, there hasn’t really been a whole lot of reading, watching, or listening going on (unless you count the endless stream of investigative podcasts I listen to while doing chores or the reality shows I fall asleep to). But one area that I have really grown in, which I think a lot of people have this year, is the art of survival. Being able to juggle all of these different things in this very different world of work and home and social interaction or noninteraction and finding new and innovative ways to make all of that work.
I work in HR Tech, and we have spent a lot of time this past year and a half figuring out how we make this new situation that we are all in better. The biggest inspiration and learning I have had has actually been all of the conversations that I have had with our customers who are all HR leaders in these companies trying to navigate this for their own teams, and understanding the challenges that they are facing while finding solutions in our product. It also has helped me to improve the way that I work because I am having to professionally take such a critical look at how we operate in this new normal and optimize my own workflows and my own approaches to things. Our customers have definitely been one of my biggest areas of learning this year.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
We are building the bridge as we cross the water — we are in this situation right alongside our customers, building features that help them keep people engaged, facilitate better communication and ensure alignment through this unprecedented turn of events, while we are doing the same thing internally and facing the exact same challenges we are solving for our customers. It has been peak “eating our own dog food” — or as we do at Betterworks, drinking our own champagne.
Our customers need more from us than they ever have before. These key areas of engagement, communication, alignment, they have gone from being nice to haves to absolutely critical over the past 18 months. There has been a growing trend in these areas over the past several years, evinced by the explosion of growth in the HR tech industry, but the pandemic really kicked it all into high gear. It is just a really fascinating position to be in as a product manager. While I wish I could change the events that got us here, I am glad that these areas have become a greater focus for so many companies.
To be more specific though, there are two product areas I am particularly excited to be working on right now:
The first is our core OKR platform. We are doing a front-end rewrite of our entire platform, which is an opportunity to reassess and reimagine how we think about OKRs and how our users engage with them. Going beyond a fresh coat of paint into creating a truly new and innovative user experience is just where it’s at as a product manager. I’ve spent a ton of time not only talking to our customers and internal stakeholders to learn what we can do better, but also engaging my network and speaking with leaders at companies who are not our customers to understand how they leverage OKRs and what their pain points are. That’s the fun part of product management for me- — but we still have a long journey ahead to make it all happen; ensuring product, design and engineering are in lockstep and mutually supporting each other to get to the finish line. That’s where the hard work comes in, but also the excitement and the payoff, knowing what we will ultimately bring to our customers and the market.
The second is our investment in data science. We are sitting on a goldmine of data, knowing (in a non-creepy way) what employees, managers and leaders are doing that might either put them at risk or point them towards success. We have a data science team focused on how to best leverage all of these potential insights we have to help empower every person who uses our platform, from individual contributors to CEOs.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
I moved back to Austin shortly before the pandemic, and I certainly hope to be able to do more networking and community building as things continue to hopefully calm down with Covid. I will be coming into it from a different place than when I was in Austin earlier in my career. I now have something to offer in terms of mentorship and guidance, which is something I have made a point to do a lot of over the past few years, advising friends on product management in their startups, mentoring PMs earlier in their careers.
If I look back on my career and growth in product management, I was really fortunate to have an amazing mentor throughout the early years of my career, without whom I would not be anywhere near where I am. That is why mentoring is something that has always been really important to me to pay that forward. I want to use the experience that I have to help other people in the same way that I was helped.
It would be great to have something where it is easy for newer product managers to find and connect with product leaders or more experienced product managers who want to share their knowledge and support. Early in my career, I would not have had the courage to go up to somebody who was in a leadership role and ask them to be my mentor. It can be intimidating to ask someone for their time (it is still intimidating for me to ask up) and finding a way to close that gap and make it easier for people to connect in that way would be really great.
I would also like to see more opportunities to provide coaching, mentorship and advising in our younger and under-resourced communities. It is no secret that the tech world has a problem with diversity, and while it doesn’t solve the whole problem by any means, I know first hand from my AmeriCorps experience as a college and career counselor in an underserved high school (yes, while I was a college dropout myself) that showing up and saying “hey, this is an option for you, here is a path to get there, and here is some support to get you there” goes a lot further than not.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
Between working pretty intense hours and parenting and occasionally trying to have a social life, anything that makes my life easier and does things for me that I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing becomes a quick favorite.
I moved recently and I was putting together a bed frame and it was just the most enjoyable experience, which is not something anyone ever says about assembling furniture. The whole process took maybe five minutes and there were all of these tiny things about it that made it so much easier and so pleasant. They had so clearly thought through the user experience of putting together this bed frame and incorporated all of these aspects that not only made it easier but I thought: wow that’s really cool and it made me kind of excited about it. The level of thought put into my experience as the person assembling this piece of furniture, I thought it was just really, really awesome.
My experience with that physical product translates so well to the products we are building at Betterworks. No one wants to build a bed. Similarly, no one wants to use HR software or have another system they log into. There can be a steep hill to climb for adoption in the first place, so it’s important to focus on developing features that help people get things done in an efficient and non taxing manner while also incorporating these elements of delight, these aha! moments. I want them to use Betterworks and think: oh, that’s really cool, that’s neat — something I had to do anyways was just made a little better, a little easier, and now I don’t mind coming back. We spend so much of our days doing things that we’d rather not be doing, but a great user experience can really have a significant impact on that.
I think when it comes down to it, the opportunity to make that impact on people’s daily lives through the products they interact with is what I love most about product management.
Thank you, Joanna!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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