Wayne Lopez of Vertify: Product Managers Are Rooted in Business Value
Identify the value to the business that your product brings, shared Wayne Lopez, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Vertify, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #108
What was your path to product management?
I like to make people laugh and say that I have been doing product management for 20 years. And then people say, well product hasn’t even been a discipline for 20 years, right? When I think back on my career path where I worked for a lot of big firms early on IBM, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Capgemini, the things I was doing back then all led to it. I was doing business analysis and I was even doing some programming and some of these skills fit in a product role. It was not until about 10 years ago that I actually took on my first official product role. I was a Director of Engineering at a company down in Houston. We acquired some SaaS companies and I got promoted to VP of Product and Technology. But again, even though I had never had the product role before, I had the background in terms of the technical skill, the analysis, customer research, things like that that all led to what makes a good product manager. And since that time I have realized that this is what I was born to do, I was cut out for this role. Over the past 10 years I have come to love product management. I try to preach it to people all the time. And what I like is that there is no one path to product management. I have seen people come from customer success, from sales, from engineering and that is what I love about this discipline. I had a more traditional business path by starting with technical business analysis at some pretty large companies and then getting into startups. Overall, it has been a great path for me.
What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?
I give two pieces of advice. The first is that product managers typically are good in one of three areas. The are either really good at being the voice of the customer; they can listen to the customer, have a lot of empathy, distill that information and turn it into something that is valuable to those customers. The other is that they are really good technically. Maybe they had a technical background as an engineer or can do database queries, write code and can sometimes build prototypes. Or the last is that they are really good at design. And it is not to say that a product manager cant be good at all three of these things. But my advice is that if you are trying to get into product, which one of those things do you feel that you are really good at and double down on it. For example, be the go to person for voice of the customer. Then build those other skills because they are totally achievable. It is not like you cant be good in them.
The other piece of advice I give is that in everything that you build, be rooted in business value. It is so easy to get wrapped up in our biases. You have to understand the market and have talked to customers. And what you have to do is attach something objective to what you are working on that you can measure — revenue, retention etc. Until you do that, you are just going to bring your biases. Business value needs to be a data point. And you need to incorporate that into your habits when you are a product manager.
We do not want to build this cool feature because a customer asked for it. We want to achieve some kind of business value. That has to be first and foremost and you can’t lose sight of it.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I believe in product you are always learning and should never stop learning. I am reading The Product Led Organization by Todd Olsen, the CEO of Pendo. The whole Product Led Growth (PLG) movement is something that I don’t feel like I am an expert in yet and I am trying to see if this is something that we should be doing as a company. When you look at the numbers in terms of companies that are having success with it, it hits you upside the head. So that is a book I am doubling down on reading and I am also spending more time reading about product growth in general.
The other thing that I work on is building empathy — really putting myself in a user’s shoes. And I like to do that by experiencing different products and getting inspired by them and seeing what I can learn from them. For example, there is a company called Sander — an AirBnB competitor. What they do is buy apartments and condos and you can rent it for vacations and overnight stays. So it is not an individual renting their place — no people are involved. It is all technology — even when you check in and go to the door, it opens with the mobile app. So they are disrupting the current norm. And I have been staying at these places to see how it works and understand that experience and see what I can learn from it. Is this something I can take away to apply to what we are doing at Vertify? So this is how I insert myself into different products to learn from it as a user.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
We have been around for a few years now and our roots are in data integration. We are integrating things that are in the revenue stack: CRM, marketing automation platforms, sales enablement data warehouses. But we always knew that we wanted to evolve the product too and provide more value than these integrations. We wanted to provide answers to the revenue team based on the data that we are collecting through the integrations.
We rolled out a product called RevOptics that does just that — answer common questions that sales, marketing, customer success teams have about the things that they are doing. Is what I am doing in marketing actually impacting revenue. The way that they are doing it today is through spreadsheets, which has poor data quality and is very manual. When you are talking about thousands of rows of data and trying to stitch together data from multiple systems, it is just not scalable. Or they use a traditional BI solution like Tableau, which you have to wait in a line to get help from the BI team. We are building something that is more turnkey. It is literally push button and it is answering common things that sales and marketing teams have about validating their impact. Identifying the right customers, making sure you are spending money the right way, getting the right return. We have taken that connector and integration technology and evolved it into an analytics platform.
We knew it was something we wanted to do, but it was also listening to customers. And we had a few customers that were linchpins. We had access to the data and they wanted our help in solving their problems. And that is what we needed to say we are on the right path with our idea and our hypothesis to get started with it. And it has totally taken off ever since.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
So one way we can do that, especially being in Austin is more events with more beer. I say that kind of tongue in cheek. I think that there are a lot of good networking events for product folks in Austin and lot of good opportunities to learn. But also what I have realized is some informal things are really good just to get people’s guard down to network and learn from each other. I do something pretty informal with about four or five product managers: we get together for beer once a month. As a result of that, it has created huge networking opportunities. And sometimes we talk shop. I think that we should do some things that are a little bit more fun. And if we do things like that naturally we will also talk shop and learn from one another. So being from New Orleans, that is always a part of me: how can we have fun and incorporate fun and learning at the same time.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
One of them is actually ZoomInfo which you might find odd from a product person because it’s kind of geared towards sales, but I find it extremely useful for doing research on existing and potential customers. They call them Scoops. They collect data from interviewing some of these companies and they gather news information to see the pain points that they have. And I leverage that to understand different segments of the market in different industries.
The second is Asana which I think a lot of product folks are familiar with. I have become a power user and they call me all the time when they are launching new new features to get my feedback. I use it both personally and professionally. Here at Vertify, we live and die by it. It is so easy to use that it creates transparency and accountability within an organization. You can see what everybody is working on, you can assign things to people, and then we are all on the same page and have that visibility into the work. It is just so easy to set up and easy to use. It is a core part of our daily workflow.
Thank you, Wayne!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to inspire the next generation of product leaders.
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