Ohh my! What a privilege for us to host Jon Alferness at one of our events in Sydney. I wasn’t there myself, but my colleague Kath Shepherd-King interviewed him, and by all accounts our community was lapping up his words.
Jon’s pedigree in product runs deep, but he didn’t start there. Like most of us, he got his foot in the door somewhere else; for him, that was sales at Google.
I found myself taking ownership of the syndicated products we delivered to the AOLs and Amazons of the world, and trying to optimise and improve them. I realised it was kind of silly to do this individually for every partner; if instead I could take ownership of the product itself, we could change it as a whole and bring everybody along. So I started doing this from the sales side, and I was lucky to be at Google early enough that around 2005–2006 I leapt over to the product management organisation.
He says everything he learnt about product management came from Google, but that grounding came with a catch:
Some of that got beaten out of me when I went to other organisations and realised there isn’t just one way to do things. If you try to do things the Google way in non-Google environments, you’ll get shot. So you have to find ways to be a bit more flexible.
That’s gold. We all know, in theory, that you can’t lift a process wholesale from one company and drop it into another. It’s still good to hear it confirmed by someone who learnt it the hard way.
Speak up, even when it’s risky
The story behind Jon’s move into product is a good one, and worth telling. About nine months into his time at Google, working the AOL account, his boss’s boss told him she’d be going to represent the account on an upcoming trip instead of him. He didn’t think that made sense, given he was the one embedded in the relationship, so he said so.
One of the things I learned growing up at Google very early on is: if you have a conviction about something, you should speak up. What’s the worst that happens?
He went around his boss, appealed to her boss, and the AOL team backed him too. He ended up on the trip. His boss wasn’t thrilled. But it worked, and the relationship he built on that trip became the reference that got him into product management a few months later.
It was my set of connections, and continuing to show up well for the customer, that brought me closer to the product management organisation.
He’s since made a habit of leaning into the parts of the business other people avoid: sales, legal, later risk and audit. The areas everyone else goes “ugh” about are exactly where the relationships pay off.
Stay close to the customer, wherever you sit
Again, we often emphasise spending time with the customer, immersing in their environment and understanding their context. Jon, as a Board member of Woolworths, continues to do that, using those insights to shape discussion and decisions.
It’s super important for us to get out in front of customers ourselves. One thing I always push on my teams: think like a customer, be the customer, whether that’s using the product, or, for me now, being on the board of Woolworths. I live in San Francisco, so when I’m here for a day or so, in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever, I try to immerse myself and understand what life as a human being is like here, because that gives me a better mindset as an end user.
There is no substitute for undertaking that activity ourselves.
Sales, partnerships, marketing, plenty of people can tell you what customers are doing and seeing. But unless we as product managers put ourselves in their shoes, it’s hard to separate the noise from the reality. Everyone thinks “I sit down with customers, I know,” but everybody brings their own bent to it. As a PM you need your own point of view too, and you can only build that by standing in the customer’s shoes yourself.
When the metrics don’t add up, do the unpacking
At Varo, the online US bank, Jon and his team were pushing hard on user growth under pressure from a founder CEO who wanted numbers moving. They hit constant churn instead. So they stopped and spent a week pulling the business apart at the per-user level.
It turned out that when we started, the per-user contribution margin was about minus a dollar, meaning for every user we worked so hard to acquire, we were spending an extra dollar a year.
That number landed hard with the board. It took reworking onboarding and being honest about which users were actually creating value, but it brought that margin from minus a dollar to roughly zero, which doesn’t sound like a win until you realise it meant the company could grow again without cratering itself.
I think that’s the important thing: balancing what your CEO is telling you with the commercial reality of the product, and also intimately understanding users and the user journey, to find that sweet spot.
Culture eats process, every time
Jon’s stint at Walmart is a good reminder that “real” product management looks different depending on where you land. He went in with a mandate to bring Silicon Valley product thinking to a business with 2.5 million employees and business owners who held the P&L and the roadmap.
We were able to move the needle, but in general, getting more traditional businesses, retail, healthcare, telecom, finance, to understand that product managers should probably own the business too was one of the hardest things I’ve held onto.
He’s candid that he didn’t always get the balance right, and even more candid about Pinterest, where he assumed his Google experience would transfer easily and instead found himself lost.
I have a tendency to come in and go “dude, this is all broken, why are we doing it this way, we should be doing it this way,” and that tends to get me shot. Thankfully not literally.
I think it’s a good reminder that a ubiquitous way of doing product management does not exist which is why its difficult to describe what we do as product people simply.
Hold your conviction, but hold the timing loosely
Another useful story was about Google Shopping. His team built a way to check out directly from an ad, convinced it would work. It only worked for a slice of users, the rest wanted the old path to the retailer’s site, so they built an “escape hatch” so people could choose either way.
A few years later, he tried something similar with Google Assistant and voice shopping, well before the technology or the users were ready. The idea was sound. The timing was years off.
You’re going to have things you have deep conviction in that seem so obviously true, and there will be a whole bunch of people you talk to who just won’t see it. Hold on to that conviction. The one thing I’ll caution you about is that figuring out the time horizon for those predictions can be pretty tricky.
Product management is here to stay
He finished on a note that feels worth sitting with, given where our heads are at with AI right now:
Please don’t let anybody tell you that in the world of AI, product management is all going to become automated. It’s the judgment calls we make, the relationships we build, the way we can ultimately communicate. I don’t see AI taking that away anytime soon.
Hooray, I say!
