Sarah King of Molecula: Product Leaders See Around Corners
Hone the skill of seeing around corners, shared Sarah King, VP of Product at Molecula, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #98
What was your path to product management?
I think most people answer this question with “an unconventional path,” and that applies to me too! My path even into technology has been unconventional in itself. I studied Peace and Conflict Studies with a desire to ultimately work for a non-profit. I moved to Austin on a whim after college; I didn’t want to stay in Southern California. As I was looking to get into a non-profit, a friend recommended that instead of working in retail while I find my long-term gig, that I consider something like tech sales — because I had a degree and I was outgoing. So, I cut my teeth cold calling people selling advertising and marketing technologies. Fast forward nearly a decade to where I am today. I had an opportunity at my last company: I was on the sales team, and our engineering team was overcoming significant data challenges I had lived through at previous companies, but sadly watched those companies struggle to solve them. The engineering team at Umbel had invented our core technology and decided to open-source it and spin it out as a new company. A year into the spinout, I joined to help figure out how we were going to commercialize a product around this open-source offering. I had my sales hat on and I was doing product at the same time but did not know it. A dear friend of mine recommended that I present a 90-day transition plan to move into product to our CEO. Literally the next day, he asked me: So, what do you want to do with your career? And the day after that, I was in product.
As I reflect on my path, people are shocked that I have gone from sales to product. But I have sold a lot of products that have fallen flat, many due to the data problems we are tackling today. I would try to identify new ways to position the product or new ways to go-to-market. I also had the sold products that we ultimately couldn’t deliver on our promises or fulfill the expectations that were being set. I have a lot of experience (and baggage!) from my sales history that I carry with me into my product practices. This helps me to make better business decisions on how we prioritize certain bodies of work and ask more customer focused questions when we are designing something. Why would we do it that way? And how can we consider how this is going to affect either our new sales or our existing customers? I feel strongly that the transition from sales is a good one because you are so used to being close to your customer and digging into their needs. You develop a deeper level of empathy for what they and your sales teams are going through, especially if you are trying to avoid not selling a bad product again. You think: what if we put this in front of a customer? Are they going to buy it? And if they don’t, then what you are doing in product is irrelevant.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
As I have grown into a leadership role, I have learned that I don’t have to be the perfect product manager and know every single detail. I don’t have a technical background by education, but our product is extremely technical. It can be mind blowing to me at times to think that I don’t have that background, in a pinch myself sort of way — where I’m sticking it to all the teachers who made me feel like I was a bad fit for STEM. But because of that, I have learned how to use the resources on my team appropriately so that I can play to my strengths. It’s critical that people are extremely honest about where their gaps are so that their team members who can fill those gaps know that they are being called to step in and step up. It can be empowering to others when you lean on them for their expertise to fill that gap, which I think helps with team cohesion and trust. Plus, I have been able to be a sponge and fill my own technical gaps over time.
When we are not honest with ourselves and our team (or our future teams, if you’re interviewing) about our gaps, we are hurting our chances of success — both individually and collectively.
As I build out my team, I aim to bring on people who have way more experience than me. I want them to come in as subject matter experts and as partners, so that I can unlock my own strengths and focus on the things that I am really good at. Leaders who are afraid of hiring people better than them are hurting themselves and their orgs, at the end of the day.
The other piece of advice for product leaders is to be hyper-aware of possible trends and constantly collect data points about your team. We do this as product managers to understand industry and market dynamics, so why not use that for team dynamics. What are the data points and trends that I am seeing on the team that might be hurting us?
I, like many, have suffered from imposter syndrome. What has been really interesting to learn over time is that you may feel like an imposter, but that doesn’t mean the people you compare yourself to are always right.
When I joined my team, I revered our engineers: they went to school for this, they invented our technology, they know everything! I thought they must have the correct answer to most problems because they are systems thinkers and they can pick apart problems and they see every unknown or potential unknown. That was a complete misconception.
I started seeing trends, for example when engineers were really confident about a task, but they ended up being wrong — oh, so wrong. I started tracking relevant data points, not to point fingers that any one person was wrong, but to more confidently step into conversations and ask better questions in the moments where they might not realize that they are making an assumption about something that needs to be validated before we really choose to do X, Y or Z.
Working more closely with engineers is one of the top highlights of my transition into product. I am so lucky to work with the people that I do. And for what it’s worth, my team has never made me feel like an imposter, it is all my own doing. I am forever grateful for their support and acceptance of me.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I recently listened to a podcast on the 20 Minute VC — an interview of Annie Duke who is a famous poker player and now helps investors make better decisions and evaluate risk when they are investing. She covered so many topics. I had to listen to it twice and took four pages of notes! One challenge that I face is a heightened effort to grasp deeply technical concepts and how they relate to how we might iterate on them or invent something new around them. I am very verbal, I like to discuss things, where my engineering counterparts are typically more comfortable reading up on technical docs and research papers. I have always felt like the ugly duckling because I prefer to talk to people, as opposed to going and digging into research papers. Annie made me feel so much better about my method of collecting the data. She encouraged listeners to seek out 1x1 discussions; the more that you can gather individual perspectives, the more that you can frame your own perspective — and it gives you a more narrow written research task if that’s necessary. Hearing that podcast I was able to tap into what my preferences are for gathering information, as opposed to judging myself because others around me are doing something different. Especially in this hyper-growth phase of my career, I have to be okay with who I am and how I do things.
In that podcast, Annie Duke recommends the book Superforecasting, The Art and Science of Predicting the Future. I have not read it yet, but I’m stoked to dig in! As product leaders, we need to figure out how to see around corners. It seems impossible to do so; we only have our past experiences or history to work off of. But it is something that I am working on honing: how can I start to see around corners more?
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
We are building an enterprise feature store at Molecula, tackling the complex and expensive data access challenges organizations are faced with as they work towards operationalizing advanced analytics and AI. In the machine learning space, feature stores are a nascent category. Machine learning models get inputs, and those inputs are features. What makes our product really exciting starts with looking at technology trends and database evolution. What we have seen in terms of storing and formatting data over the past 30 years is that there have been evolutions of data formats to meet demands as workloads become more complex at much larger scales. The world went from storing data in relational row-based databases to putting data into columnar formats and our core engine is an evolution from from the columnar format. We leverage a feature-first format that extracts features from data, further deconstructing it into an extremely high-performance format optimized for large scale analytics and machine learning.
We are tackling massive data access challenges by bringing this performance format to market. I had a meeting with our sales team today talking about potential customers who use the most recent evolution of columnar databases. These customers are astonished when they see our performance compared to those products. And so bringing to market an evolution or a step function improvement for how we manage and store and access data has been super exciting and I love seeing customers react the way they do when they witness it.
Plus, we invented it ourselves. To see our engineers learn more things about it every day as they continue to invent it is super inspiring. There is an electricity amongst our team that is directly tied to the novelty and specialness of this product.
What is your biggest product challenge currently?
One of our challenges is the market: the feature store category is nascent and we are hyper-focused on data ops and solving data engineering problems. All of the other feature stores are focused downstream on ML Ops. So we have to separate ourselves when we are in sales conversations and educate our prospects. We know that every company needs better data access. That is why we focused on this piece of the stack and defining the market with a different take on what a feature store is and should do has been a fun and interesting challenge. The beauty, though, is that before we established ourselves in this market, we were fighting a much different battle. We were in a noisy data market having to constantly describe how we do what we do under the hood. It got so technical so quickly, and joining this category has helped us transition out of the weeds to a more tangible go-to-market conversation.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
Before COVID as I was exploring the product community and trying to embed myself in it, most of the attendees of meetups and groups were people who were new to product or were looking to get into product. I very much support that, but there are many of us who are a bit more established in product and also need networking and community. I remember Dan Corbin talking about starting a small mastermind group. I would love to have a mastermind group of people that are in my product niche, in data infrastructure or, in the level of the stack that I am in. It would be great to share and discuss relevant trends that we are seeing in the market and have conversations about lower level technology challenges and trade offs that will impact some of the decisions that we make at a higher level in our businesses.
And then, I do ask myself, how can we continue to mentor folks who do want to get into product? We do need our product community to grow and become more diverse because there are so many product opportunities here. I would love to hire product folks onto my team that are from Austin that have come up through our community.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
I have three. The first is my Nespresso machine. Our office used to be above Houndstooth and I was spending $8 a day on one coffee. So with my Nespresso machine, I can have a cup of coffee, and it’s a dollar. And I love that, and it tastes good.
I have two apps that I love. In the past, I have been softly diagnosed with narcolepsy. I really don’t have problems with this anymore. But because of that, I used to be hyper obsessed with my sleep, and I still am and really conscious of it. And so I use Sleep Cycle, and it monitors all various data points of my sleep. I think sleep is so critically important.
And finally, I love Skyguide which is a VR application on your phone that you can point up at the sky and it will tell you things about the stars that are above you. And I’ll show you all the constellations and you can click on things and it will tell you about different stars and planets.
Thank you, Sarah!
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