Mandana Varahrami of RapidDeploy: Product Managers Need Humility

Humility is an invaluable source of growth shared Mandana Varahrami, VP of Product Management at RapidDeploy, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

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Austin VOP #86

What was your path to product management?

My path was really non-traditional, but then again, I am not sure there is a traditional path to product management.

In the late nineties, I started out as a social worker interning with AIDS Services Austin — it was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. It was the beginning of my career in public health. I worked in public health program management for non-profits in Austin and Seattle for several years and then decided to get a Masters in Public Health and MBA. I was thinking that I would end up doing international health work, dealing with global health outbreaks and prevention. But my career took a little bit of a twist. After finishing grad school, I stepped in to help with the family business, filling an administrative and operational role in support of our home health care business. And it was there that I got a taste of the entrepreneurial bug. I got to work those muscles in tandem with my passion for public health and health care. I spent about a year and a half there and got the business to a certain point to be able to pass the torch.

I then decided to take a job with The Advisory Board Company, which would be my professional home for over 10 years. I really grew my career there. It was a healthcare company known nationally for its health care research, consulting and healthcare tech. I started working on the consulting side for their infection control product. I then navigated to another product after a couple of years, implementing and driving engagements with hospitals and health systems. I was in a team leadership position trying to create efficiencies around tools that my team was using for healthcare analytics. I partnered with an engineer on the team to build something to support them, and the next thing you know, it evolved into organically building a product. It took the incredible support of and faith of my manager and my company to allow me to grow in this work. I ultimately ended up doing product management after that full time and have been in it since then.

I have worked on over 10 different products, largely within healthcare — both B2B and B2C. I recently chose to pivot to public safety at RapidDeploy. I was at a point in my life where I wanted to continue to build out my career in product management beyond healthcare, but it had to be with a product with meaningful impact. And that is certainly the case with the current product that I am working on.

So, if you were to tell me 20 years ago that this is where I would have landed, I would have given you a perplexed look. But looking back, my path to product management was purpose-driven, paved with a lot of lessons through failure and successes and accompanied by many people who I admire and value as smart, creative, forward thinking human beings.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

The advice I have is what I often share with the new teams that I join, and those new to my teams.

The first thing I talk about is to embrace the limitless possibilities associated with technology but also honor building technologies responsibly, in consideration of future implications and with the highest degree of integrity.

So whether it is health care, public safety or social media, we have to be considering, as part of the innovation, its future implications and building product with the highest degree of integrity.

The second thing is, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I know that is a trite phrase. But oftentimes I think in product, especially in the ideation phase, we want that first step of what we build to be perfect. My advice is that sometimes you have to take that first step with the design or function having done proper due diligence, research and user testing that you may be only 90% sure about, and that is okay. You have to expect that degree of uncertainty that you will learn more about through iterative development.

You have to know that you are committing to making it better or perfect ultimately. But don’t let that perfection keep you from taking that first step.

The third thing is the most important: humility. Humility is actually an invaluable source of growth in a product management role. The outcome of our day to day work is a product, something that is showcased to all our colleagues, then for all our users to use. We get feedback on our work from all of the above, often public feedback. From there, we will usually want to either exceed positive expectations and/or improve mediocre or underwhelming feedback. Sometimes the feedback in early testing phases can be crushing, especially when you’ve taken incredible pride in what you have built with your teams.

This is where humility comes in: the ability to take the feedback, understand it, and then work on it. If we’ve made mistakes, acknowledge it, learn from it and make the change. The goal is learning, not shaming.

So that is a great quality for product managers. Why do you think it is important?

I think sometimes product managers, as with other professionals, feel like they always have to have the answer. In cases where that may not be true, the best thing I’ve learned is to feel comfortable saying that.

The one thing that I often share with my team is that there is nothing wrong with not knowing the answer as long as they’re committed to finding the answer. And just exercising that ability to say, “I don’t know” is an important step towards developing humility.

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

What is inspiring me today is not really technology specific. To be honest, the back to the basics degree of creativity and pursuit of hobbies that have been driven by the quarantine has inspired me. With people being forced to stay at home, cooking has made a comeback for people who love it or were curious about it, but did not have the time. People are sewing (who sews anymore?!) their own face masks. People have room to dial back things a little. I have been inspired to collect more plants and care for them without killing them. I’ve been mildly successful at that.

I have also been listening to a podcast that interviews product leaders and founders. I have been inspired by the humility some of these successful leaders have. It reinforces the advice I gave above — people who have been incredibly successful have had humbling moments that contributed to their drive and ability to succeed.

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

As I mentioned earlier, I pivoted from healthcare to public safety — specifically emergency services and response. It is a highly complex, high impact product that literally saves lives. RapidDeploy has pioneered a cloud-native dispatch platform for 911 call centers. It is the product that a 911 call taker uses when a 911 call comes in and that dispatches a call to first responders. What is exciting about it is that our team is working to bring public safety into the 21st century.

RapidDeploy is a game changer for the industry, as it is not weighed down by the on-premise limitations associated with legacy computer aided dispatch systems. Because it is cloud based, the call takers have the ability in real-time to enable almost any map you can imagine to understand the environments associated with a location of an incident (landscape, weather COVID cases, etc.) within a single interface. The platform can ping the caller’s cell and have their location populate on their map, conduct 2-way SMS chat in over 60 languages, and video chat if need be. The platform can pull up a camera at an intersection or on the side of the highway to view the traffic or an incident that may have taken place. The path for what RapidDeploy can do for public safety and the lives of those who need it the most is endless and that is what I am most excited about.

And the other great thing is the company is made up of some incredible people and that also makes it exciting. Many of my colleagues have been first responders, 911 call takers for years and are now helping implement our product and conducting training on how to use our product. Others are wholeheartedly committed to the impact and bring their best to work every day. I could not ask for a better group of talent and human beings to be working with.

What is your biggest product challenge currently?

I think for me it is really about how I can get everything I want done in the product today, instead of tomorrow, which is the fun challenge for most product leaders. I think the innovation around bringing more situational awareness to emergency response is endless. It is also in high demand. And we have to continue to look ahead three to five years and work backward. So, it’s all about figuring out what is most important and which investments will save more lives.

There is also a degree of change management associated with using new technology. It is a product where every second counts for the time to task. So it is an exciting challenge to think through the type of progress we can help our clients/users make through our platform through an optimal (and perhaps new) experience.

How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?

I think that for any community to grow, it requires a place and a purpose. For Austin, there are many reasons for us to gather as product managers. It could be around sharing challenges in our industry, specific to product, or it could be around tech for good. Tech for good is something that I do on the side and I think it is a great opportunity to bring product managers together. It can also be around niches in the market. For a product like mine, it would be interesting to talk to others who are facing similar challenges. There is obviously a level of camaraderie in product in terms of what we are working on and problems we are solving. But there is also the personal and professional growth from talking to other product managers.

How do you bring that learning and growth back to your team?

For me, I love the idea of bringing people from the outside, other product leaders in to share their learnings with my team. My view is not the only thing I want them to hear. I want them to hear different points of view about different ways of building a product and bringing a product to market. I would love to bring in other perspectives as part of a Lunch and Learn. Going back to place and purpose and right now, we are all remote, which makes the place rather straightforward today. But I also hope in the near future, we can meet back in our office/community common spaces and learn from one another in person in Austin at some point.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

It is my Apple TV. It is my source of everything: my shows, movies, music, podcasts, workouts on Peloton. We all love Apple products. It is clean, easy to use, intuitive. Even though you might not think it is at the beginning, you eventually understand why they built it the way they did.

Thank you, Mandana!

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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