Lauren Dycus of DISCO: Product Managers Invest in Others to Develop Themselves

Invest time in helping others around you develop and it will help you grow, shared Lauren Dycus, Senior Product Manager at DISCO, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

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Austin VOP #100

What was your path to product management?

I started in software when I landed a customer support role in the gaming industry. I graduated in 2008 with a degree in Journalism when the recession hit and after moving to Seattle from Denton, I desperately needed a job. I had made a new friend who referred me to Big Fish Games and I benefited from their investment in employee development. It was at Big Fish when I met my first mentor and sponsor who was the director of the Support team — Joni Barrott — who is still one of my mentors. She prides herself on developing talented individuals to grow their careers because she knows that support is a starting point for many careers, including mine. I decided to grow beyond Support and earned a role in BFG’s business development team, which at the time meant production guidance and helping game developers build their own games on their own custom engines. When I was working with developers, I fell in love with the idea of how software works and solving user problems. While I was there, Big Fish launched their own gaming cloud network to be able to release PC/Mac games on mobile and I was pitching game developers in 2010 to host their games on our cloud. It was fun to learn so much so early in my career.

While there, I learned about product management and took a series of smaller career steps toward my goal of becoming a Product Manager. I had moved to Amazon and was managing global content operations, including international expansion and launching a unique new product (we applied for a patent). I was the subject matter expert for all of Amazon Digital and so was able to run product development for this new system I had envisioned. With that experience, I was able to move into a Product Management role managing all the Amazon APIs for mobile developers across Appstore, AWS, and Kindle. Originally, this job had been scoped as Program Management and I really fought to get the designation changed to Product to reflect the actual scope of the job. I remember having a transparent conversation with my manager about my career journey and I said “I want to be a product manager, and I believe I’m already doing the job now. How can you help me get the title?”. It was a life-changing conversation and I had a lot of collateral on hand to back-up my request. My manager at the time, Shea Simpson, ended up being a mentor and was a huge advocate for me. He campaigned internally to get my job title changed from program manager to product manager, which took a fair amount of extra work for him but he believed in me.

After Amazon, I moved to a woman-run startup, LiketoKnow.it, and enjoyed seeing the leadership of strong women. I learned a lot from my engineering peers there and was able to collaborate with them to architect a few large systems to handle global data. My partner at the time got relocated to Seattle, so I decided to “boomerang” back to Amazon but working in Amazon Web Services (AWS). I was lucky to land a role in AWS that was focused on launching a brand new product, AWS Connections. I got feedback from and collaborated with all levels of leadership there, including Andy Jassy (who had a special interest in this project). As you can imagine when a senior leader is involved, my Amazon documentation (PRFAQ, etc.) was reviewed and edited by all levels of management and I received invaluable feedback. The leadership coaching I got in my role at AWS very much helped me to develop as a leader and as a product manager. After the product was live and the team wanted to focus on scale, my time at AWS came to an end. I had relocated to Austin while at AWS so decided to look at local companies. I ended up at uShip where I was able to run the product team, launch a couple of new products in Last Mile, and be a part of the digital transformation from on-prem to cloud (AWS). My AWS experience helped me a lot at uShip and both of the roles prepared me for my newest adventure at DISCO. I recently joined DISCO for a greater technical challenge and to learn from the leadership team here. DISCO has a full roster of amazing talent in both business and product/engineering, and it shows in the products we released. We are ingesting trillions of files and applying AI and machine learning to build a suite of automation software for attorneys so that they can practice law and not deal with the overhead of mundane tasks or paperwork.

So, to the question about my path to product, it has been a long winding journey but I see it as a logical progression of rounding out my skill set as I saw new opportunities and challenges.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

Yes! While product management is a difficult job, you’ll have help and you should share that help to your peers, your network, or other aspiring product folks. It’s easy to focus only on the day to day of the job requirements when you have a lot of pressure on you to help peers who are all really smart, and who know a lot of things that you don’t know.

You can just focus on your job and become insular. But I challenge you to take the time to help other people around you develop, and you will develop in that process.

I have recurring 1:1s with every product manager on my team. We don’t necessarily use that time to collaborate on dependencies between our development teams. It’s time for us to talk about our approach to product and it’s time to get to know each other and build trust, especially during COVID since I have never met any of them in person. This is time that’s outside of just “doing the job” that is helping me grow and it’s time well spent. It’s potentially helping them see my point of view since I am the only woman on the team as well (NOTE: As of publishing this post, we now have multiple other women on the product team). There are certain things I will see a different way just because of my life experience, and the same for them. It’s good to have time to build trust and long term relationships with my peer group.

My whole team has a pretty diverse background of how they have practiced product management and I love hearing about that. You can learn from all of their past experiences as product managers: how they did things, how they got through a certain type of ordeal, or what they wouldn’t do again if they face the same challenge(s) in the future. These are all insights into how you can solve problems you have yet to face. I am a big believer in history as an insightful tool to help you make future decisions. Product history is mostly word of mouth — especially because much of our product history is proprietary to private companies. When you read a blog, it’s always veiled in some way to protect the intellectual property. Personal relationships are the way you can really hear the histories to learn and grow from.

Even outside of product teams, building personal relationships with stakeholders is so important. When I was at AWS, my direct manager, Erik Pavelka, use to spend the first ten minutes of every meeting talking about how things were going with others — just building that personal relationship. He was incredibly senior, we had a lot of work to do, and I had a hard time understanding why he didn’t just want to get to work — let’s go! He later explained his methodology of how he was building the infrastructure of trust that he could call on later when there was a challenging situation.

That’s my challenge to all of you! Take the time to look up from your work, and build relationships to invest in helping other people while also helping yourself develop.

What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?

I’m really interested in how things work so I tend to get curious and then look up random systems or tools. I’m also pretty active on Twitter — I follow a lot of different voices, especially diverse voices, even if I don’t fully understand what is happening so that I can stay informed on different perspectives. Especially during COVID, I’m insulated from a lot of diverse in-person interactions so I seek it out on Twitter, even if it’s sometimes a minefield. I also love reading about history and the technology they used in the past. I read about this Roman city on the coast of Italy, Baia, and archaeologists had to develop underwater WiFi to get to these ruins. Really interesting to read about and I ended up looking up the underwater WiFi technology to learn more about how it was invented and the problems they faced with that product.

I like what MIT Technology Review puts out on their blogs, the Harvard Business Review, Wired and the Economist. They tend to cover a variety of topics and often have thoughtful takes.

And along with all that technology content, I enjoy reading romantic stories from another time — like Jane Austen, as cliched as that sounds. I’m also a huge fan of Malcom Gladwell — especially his writing on how hard work and luck intersect. I know people say he is just a social scientist, but I enjoy seeing how patterns overlay and his ability to see patterns across different groups or events. I always think it’s interesting to think about the typical product manager conundrum of “causation or correlation.”

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

I love the product I work on and the group of smart people I get to build it with. DISCO builds products to support legal teams and I own the workflow systems and related features for large litigation cases with millions or trillions of documents to process (and trimmed down with the help of DISCO AI). Our primary customer for my product line is Litigation Support for Ediscovery. When these attorneys have a case, they have a team of experts focused on gathering all the relevant documents to the case, which is called discovery. Our product helps these attorneys, paralegals, or other litigation experts make decisions for what is relevant to the case and use our tools to create an operational workflow or implement rules to ensure consistent document review across all those millions or trillions of docs. DISCO’s workflow suite of products are meant for large cases where there are teams of attorneys working on the case. Our platform and DISCO AI technology helps our customers to focus their review only on documents that matter, thereby cutting down the need for human review and speeding up their review process.

I love the complexity of our product and the fact that we are innovating to change what was a very paper-driven industry. I have legal peers that spent more of their careers working with bankers boxes than software. It’s exciting to be here now because what we are building is innovative and disruptive to the legal space. Often a lot of startups make this claim, and I love that it’s true at DISCO. I get to work with incredibly smart people on solving complex problems so we are all constantly learning. I’m looking forward to our DISCO adventures in the next few years and seeing what we will accomplish.

How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?

Well, I’m trying to help by getting folks that are experienced product managers to take time out of work to attend these events that folks like you and Dan organize. But I get that it’s hard to attend events after work — you really have to put your mind to it to show up to an industry event after a full day at work. I think that the more people that we get involved, the stronger the local product community will be, especially as all these companies are moving to Austin. I would love for them to see — ”Hey, this is what it means to be in product in Austin — join us!” I wouldn’t like anyone new to Austin to be feeling that they have to start over because they are not aware that this community exists. The more people participate, the more people show up, and the more people become aware! Once that happens, then we can have more of an impact to help the folks that are trying to get into product.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

The one product that has significantly changed my life in the last year is my Apple watch. I really like the move and stand goals because it actually motivates me. Every day, I want to close my rings — I love the feeling you get when you see the rings close and the firework effect that comes with it. I also love getting badges — I love that it uses gamification to motivate me. It’s such a wonderful example of “gamifying” your product to promote the end result you’re shooting for users to pursue. I didn’t buy my watch to workout, but Apple is definitely succeeding in helping me to be healthier. The other amazing feature the watch has is the breathing reminders. It will catch me when I’m tense and remind me to breathe so I will do a minute of breathing. It coaches you through these moments. I have poked around with some of the other apps on it: I get my Okta VPN alerts on it. So if my phone is in the other room, I can use it to log into my work computer. It’s expensive but a thoughtful product, like many other Apple products.

Thank you, Lauren!

Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.

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