Murphy Tiggelaar of AWS: Product Managers Are Customer Obsessed
Really getting to know your customers’ problems helps you build better products, shared Murphy Tiggelaar, Senior Product Manager at AWS, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #101
What was your path to product management?
I went to school in Nebraska and started my career at TD Ameritrade in Omaha. I did a rotational program there, which was really good for my first job to understand what I actually enjoy doing and what I didn’t enjoy doing. The rotation was first on the business intelligence team — a data heavy role. And then a stint doing internal consulting. We would work with the different teams to look at their processes and figure out how to optimize it. That is when I realized I really liked looking at complex problems and figuring out how technology can solve those problems.
Then we moved to Austin and I wanted to stay in finance. I went to Dimensional Fund Advisors and did sales reporting for about a year. And again, I realized I really enjoy technology and wanted to be on the technology side. I got a role as a business analyst. It is a really good role for people that are interested in product management and I learned a lot. I worked on the CRM for the sales enablement team. At the time, the company was going through an interesting shift with a new CTO that wanted to focus on products and not projects. Instead of working on projects, the new leadership really focused on how they could do end to end product management. A product team was formed and I jumped over to join it.
During that time I went to UT for the MSTC program (Masters of Science in Technology Commercialization). That program was amazing for helping me learn not only what I enjoyed in technology but also new ideas, how you can launch a product and how you can even launch a company. It made me really excited about product management and helped me determine, that I wanted to transition into a role that is technology focused and uses that business acumen. I joined AWS in December 2019 as a product manager for their marketplace — a place where AWS customers can find third party products to deploy into their environments.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
We have leadership principles at Amazon and I really like using them to talk about product management because they go hand in hand. Three that I will share: customer obsession, ownership and bias for action.
Customer obsession is my main advice for people that are interested in product management. Really getting to know your customers or who could be your customer and taking time to understand what their processes and what their pain points are. The key to product management obviously is solving problems. And so if you don’t know what problems you are solving and the true pain points such as why a customer says: oh this process takes a long time. You have to ask why does it take a long time and really dig into why that is an issue for your customer.
We are incredibly customer obsessed at Amazon and everything we build has customer data behind it. Either quantitative data or anecdotes from customers are used to build our products.
The next one is ownership. As a product manager, you are not just responsible for knowing your customer but also knowing the metrics of your product and being able to make informed decisions on behalf of your customers. Taking ownership is not only seeing the problems that you need to solve but really being the go-to person for that product. For example with my product, I really try to make sure that the sales teams that I work with have the information to speak on behalf of the product because I don’t want to be the only person that can talk about the product. But ultimately, when making feature decisions that comes down to me and the engineering teams that I work with to make sure that we are building the right thing for customers. And sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we tell the customer the wrong thing or we plan on doing something that we don’t. But taking ownership to say: we are reevaluating things or we have actually pivoted and we are doing this now. Taking ownership goes a long way as a product manager.
The last on is bias for action. I really love this leadership principle.Technology moves really fast, things change quickly, requirements can change. It is important to get something out there and test it. Do betas. You can do private or public betas Launching things is really important because you get that information and you can confirm with your customers that you are building the right thing. There is nothing wrong in my opinion with releasing something that maybe isn’t perfect because it is probably insanely expensive to create something that is perfect. And you want to test the market, you want to test that what you are building is the right thing.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
My personal life has been busy so I have not had a lot of time for personal development. My husband is an entrepreneur and the thing that we are really involved in is an entrepreneurship organization — EO. There is a really strong chapter here in Austin and I am part of a spousal forum. We are a small group of spouses of entrepreneurs. I have learned a ton about how entrepreneurs operate. And it is so applicable in an organization. Entrepreneurs like getting things out fast, like testing their ideas. It is very inspiring to see people that have these big ideas and are excited to take the leap to test them out.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
I work on the AWS Marketplace, a website where customers can go and can find third-party solutions. Vendors can go on and they can list their products and AWS customers can go and buy these products. I focus on the buying process and in particular how customers can use their existing processes. My product is called private marketplace, and it allows customers to be able to govern their purchases on the marketplace website. The customer problem is they want to ensure that the engineers within their organization are only subscribing and buying products that are approved by procurement, security, finance, et cetera. That is one of the products that I manage and it is a really fun product. I get to talk to not only engineers or cloud teams, but also procurement, sourcing, finance, and legal, teams that sometimes are behind the scenes in tech, but are so critical for the technologists to get the systems and tools that they need.
I will say that our team in Austin is growing and we are hiring some additional product managers and engineers. So if there are people reading that are interested in the AWS Marketplace in particular we have roles that are open or will be open soon.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
I was involved with ProductCamp Austin prior to Covid. I really love ProductCamp. They have been virtual this year and honestly, I have not attended any of the events because I don’t know about you, but I get major zoom fatigue at the end of the day. I cannot even think about being on the computer longer than I have to be. So I am really excited to see post-covid the community come back together and meeting in person. Networking is so powerful because I got to see and hear from other product managers in all stages of their product journey. You have pretty senior product leaders in the community and then you have people that are just getting into product. It is really cool to see the two worlds and everyone in between collide and learn from each other. I think the biggest challenge right now is just the inability to collaborate and really network together.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
For a physical product, it is my Apple Watch. It tells me when I need to go and do things, it tells me I need to breathe and when to stand and move. When I am cooking I can set the timer for ten minutes. So that is probably my favorite physical product.
A digital product that I use all the time is Trello. I keep everything on my Trello board. I have all my swim lanes and things that I need to do and then organize my notes in it and I have reminders and I use the calendar. I am someone that needs a to-do list and I need things organized — I am very type-A in that sense. To be able to just have it on my phone so that when I am out and about: oh, I forgot to send this email. I could just add it to my to-do list. Worry gone away. I use it for both work and personal life. I am planning my best friend and my sister’s weddings right now and I use my Trello board for that. We are buying a house and we have a bunch of renovation stuff that we are doing. I have a Trello board for that.
Thank you, Murphy!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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