If you’ve spent any time navigating the intricate world of product management, you’re likely familiar with the constant balancing act the role requires. Heather Inocencio is the founder and CEO of The Product Consult, a team of product managers helping companies innovate and scale. In this episode of Product Momentum, Heather joins Sean and special guest co-host Sheila Herbert to share her recipe for how fractional product management works – and where it works best.

When fractional PMs join a new organization, approach the opportunity with curiosity, Heather advises. Use that curiosity as a conduit for building trust with your new stakeholders. That way – echoing the words of Bruce McCarthy in episode 156 of Product Momentum and in a recent blog post with Sean Flaherty – you can fairly represent each stakeholder’s needs and motivations.

Here’s what else you’ll learn:

A Balanced Approach: Customer Obsession + Business Value

Find the right balance between being customer obsessed (as described by Christian Marek in episode 162) and delivering value to the business. Meeting user needs is paramount, Heather says, but product managers are also responsible for delivering on the broader business strategy.

“Product people are constantly being pushed that they must be ‘customer obsessed.’ And I couldn’t agree more,” Heather explains. “But we have to tie that obsession back to the work we’re doing: the features we’re delivering and the platforms we’re expanding. Then we have to explain how those user behaviors are tying back to adding real business value.”

Understanding Fractional Product Management

By providing organizations with product management expertise – without the commitment of a full-time/long-time hire – the fractional approach helps both startups and small- to mid-sized businesses that need senior-level product leadership but may lack the resources or consistent demand to justify a permanent position.

“At The Product Consult, we embed with clients either full-time or fractionally,” Heathers adds. “And we do hands-on product management work, whether it’s me or someone on my team. To the client, it feels like we’re part of their team. It’s a great way for a company to add skills to the team that they don’t have.”

Trust: The Key Ingredient in a Recipe for Product Success

A thread woven throughout the conversation was Heather’s take on building trust across stakeholder groups. Trust is no longer a “nice-to-have” in product management; it’s fundamental to the success of any relationship. She shared her recipe for success – the key ingredient of which is trust – which starts with product managers building connections that transcend superficial collaboration.

“The one difference in product management versus other roles at a company is that we touch every aspect of the business,” Heather points out. “Trust enables teams to navigate tough conversations, align on priorities, and execute with clarity.”

Sheila Herbert is VP, Product at Butler / Till, headquartered in Rochester, NY. Sheila’s expertise and passion for people-first product leadership add a dynamic layer to our discussion.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference is returning to Rochester, NY on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sean Murray [00:00:09] Hey everyone, welcome to Product Momentum. I’m Sean Murray, Director of Product Management here at ITX.

Dan Sharp [00:00:15] And I’m Dan Sharp, a Product Manager at ITX. It’s our privilege to continue the product momentum journey, a platform that celebrates the thinkers and doers who are shaping the future of software development.

Sean Murray [00:00:25] Our goal is to introduce you to industry leaders, innovators, and practitioners, and bring you their insights, advice, and innovations. We talk with experts from product strategy, UX research and design, security, engineering, leadership, and more. We’ll discuss how their approaches to problems help empower teams and build trust, and we’ll explore trends, tools, and techniques that your team can use to deliver the software solutions your users need today. So tune in, stay curious, and join the conversation.

Dan Sharp [00:00:53] You can catch us on your favorite listening platform, or if you prefer the video experience, you can find all our latest episodes on the Product Momentum YouTube channel.

Sean Murray [00:01:01] And if you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe, like, comment, and share. That way, we can be sure to provide you with the best podcast experience.

Sean Murray [00:01:14] Sheila, that was an amazing episode. We just got done talking to Heather Inocencio. She was amazing. You and her are like peas in a pod. You guys talked the entire time. I got to just kind of hang out in the passenger seat. Tell me your favorite parts about your discussion.

Sheila Herbert [00:01:30] Besides the fact that I have a brand new friend, I really just enjoyed listening to her approach to coming into a new organization with curiosity and using that as a conduit to build trust and to understand stakeholder voice and ultimately represent stakeholder voice.

Sean Murray [00:01:45] Yeah. That concept of the fractional product manager is, is a trip. And I think people are going to get out of today’s episode. Let’s do it.

Sheila Herbert [00:01:53] Sounds great.

Sean Murray [00:02:03] Okay, hi everybody. We are here today with Heather Inocencio. She is the founder of The Product Consult and she has 30 years of experience helping companies innovate and scale. We’re really excited to have you here today. We also, you notice that Dan looks a lot different today. Sheila is here. Sheila Herbert is the VP of product at Butler/Till. And Sheila’s here because she’s awesome and she’s gonna help us with our conversation with Heather today. Sheila’s been a friend of ITX for a long time so we’re really happy to have you back here on the pod.

Sheila Herbert [00:02:32] Thanks for having me.

Sean Murray [00:02:35] You’ve introduced this really cool concept called the fractional product manager. We want to hear more about it and how it works.

Heather Inocencio [00:02:42] Sure. When I left my in-house career, I decided that I wanted to continue to do product management work, but I didn’t want to do it in-house anymore. And so I started doing fractional CPO work. That was a long time ago before the word fractional was really understood.

I still see a lot of questions around what is fractional versus interim? How does it work? It worked really well. I found that I could help multiple clients at one time. I also found in-house. Most companies, I was, I had gotten so. Adept at the things that you think about when you’re executing on product that in 40 hours a week, the amount of output I could create for the team, the teams usually couldn’t keep up with.

And so it was fun to help clients in a way that’s more affordable for them. Instead of a client paying me for a full-time job, plus all of the benefits, they’re paying me in a fractionally, or part-time way. It’s just a fraction of the full-time. And I’m giving them all of the value and benefit that they would get from someone a little more junior and in-house.

So I started a company of product managers and we embed with clients either full-time or fractionally. It just means either full time or part time. And we do hands-on product management work. Whether it’s me or someone on my team, we show up in an embedded way. We feel to the client and often to ourselves that we’re really in-house and part of that team. And so we plug in, get work done. It’s a great way for a company to add skills to the team that they don’t have. Maybe they’re building a new product line and they want some expertise. Temporarily increased bandwidth or otherwise get outside opinions and influence from product experts with just a more diverse point of view.

Sheila Herbert [00:04:18] I’m fascinated by this concept and it’s something that I thought about a lot. So I’m so excited to talk to you, Heather. Can you tell me a little bit about companies that may not be a great fit for fractional or even what you kind of look for when you’re assessing a new situation?

Heather Inocencio [00:04:34] Well, let’s see. Companies that probably aren’t a good fit for a fractional product leader would be a company that has a really fantastic in-house product leader. They’ve built the team. They know the product. They are successfully taking the company forward. Although in those cases, we have added a lieutenant, if you will, a part-time or fractional product executive who supports that in-house product leader, other companies that that wouldn’t be suitable by a fractional product [manager].

There are some companies that want to pay primarily in equity. And less in cash. And in that case, there’s a lot of discretionary work expected by the person. And so when a company wants someone who’s gonna be all in 80-hour work weeks, really plugging in arm and arm with the team, not necessarily needing salary paid in cash and willing to take on equity, they’re embedded with that team in a way that an outside consultant isn’t going to be. So we do try to, you know, we roughly estimate how much time we’re gonna be working with the client. We try to adhere to that. Always. Go over. I think that’s the nature that we see in a lot of product people is we want to over-deliver.

Some other companies that wouldn’t be ready for a fractional product executive or even a full-time but out-of-house product executive would be really early-stage companies where the founder is leading product management. Maybe they have that background, maybe they don’t, but in any case they’re not going to be ready to turn over that baton and give some of these really critical strategic decisions to someone who is new. Might not be worth it financially for them to bring someone in, and there probably really isn’t the room for them to contribute in the ways that they would want to with regards to really influencing strategy. What about them? Yeah, what do you see, Sheila?

Sheila Herbert [00:06:17] I’ve made a career out of building product practices from within an organization, which is part of why I’m fascinated by what you do, because it’s the kind of coming in, establishing, and then leaving. And I always wonder about the leaving part, so it’s an interesting concept for sure. Part of what I’m asking or what I think about when I think of this temporary approach to it is. How do you really balance making quick progress, so delivering and getting this team up and delivering, but also establishing a solid culture for product, which is part of what I heard from you when we chatted previously, because that culture is what helps sustain after you go. So I’m curious about that.

Heather Inocencio [00:07:00] Mm-hmm. One thing to keep in mind is that bringing in out-of-house product management support, be it full-time or fractional, be it an executive leader or hands-on product manager is doing the work, doesn’t have to be short-term. I think a lot of companies that I talk with expect this will be a two to three to maybe four month engagement. We stayed with many of our clients for well over a year, and so. Mm-hmm.

And at the level when I’m in doing fractional CPO work, I decide that a good time to exit is once we have an established product team, practices, operations, the product management work and the team are fully integrated across the company. So relationships have been built with marketing, with sales, obviously with our designers and with our engineers. And so expectations have been set, established. Conducted in a routine way for many months and many cycles of how this product management organism works within the company.

A time for me to exit would be when I realize, okay, your team is basically running, I’m just overseeing things now, it’s time to turn this over to an in-house leader. At that point, maybe it’s a full-time VP level person, maybe another CPO, I can make recommendations at that time. But what I really look for is that the team is executing in consistent and expected ways, meaning that the rest of the company, as well as the product design and development team, they understand how they operate and they’ve been through many cycles of this now.

If they’re working in sprints, they know what those look like. They’re estimating velocity. They have pretty good sense of what their velocity is and they get better at estimating. And so it’s when I realized that I’m giving more oversight and less actual direction. That the team is getting ready to be able to live on its own without us there. And that can take a couple of months, depending on what situation we walked into, what kind of product leadership was there, what practices existed when we joined. That can take lot longer if we’re helping a company build it from scratch, or in more cases, when we’re inheriting some type of product function, but it feels broken, meaning the executive team doesn’t believe the product team is delivering on the highest-value items. The executive team, the other departments, we hear this all the time, right? They think product management and therefore the development is moving slower than it should. So when I see those concerns appeased, I see everyone happy, their expectations are set, they’re consistently being met. That’s when I know we build a team that can sustain itself and grow internally now without us.

Sheila Herbert [00:09:37] Really interesting. Some of those measures that you’re reflecting on are similar to when I know I can bring in my next layer of leadership. So when I’m growing a team from the ground up, often everyone reports to me in the beginning, I establish practices and then I can bring in the next layer. So a lot of overlap there. I hear you talk a lot about product culture and that means particular things to me and I’m curious some of the things it means you in particular. We hear a lot about innovation in our roles. We hear about user-centric or customer-obsessed behavior. Again, how do you kind of instill that in an organization where maybe that value isn’t strong for them yet?

Heather Inocencio [00:10:15] Let’s start with the customer centricity. This is a big one. Product people out there in the world were constantly being taught by people that write books and teach trainings that we must be customer obsessed. I couldn’t agree with that more, but we have to tie that customer obsession back to the work that we’re doing. Now the features we’re delivering, the platforms that we are expanding, and then how the user behavior in response to those updates, those changes, those improvements, how is that tying back to adding real business value? Customer-obsessed, I see at many earlier stage companies, so I’ll say anywhere from seed to series B, vary significantly. Once a company gets to a stage, and I’m gonna generalize here, once a company get past that seed stage, maybe past that series A stage, the company has outgrown the ability for that founder-led product model to continue to work. They probably didn’t have a product leadership background before.

And so now it’s time to bring in an outside person, whether they hire them in house or they bring in someone temporarily to lead the team and get them up to speed. And that’s where some of the customer obsession I’ve seen starts to get lost. In that early, early stage, the founder, they’re building, they’re so connected to the customers they’re building for, they are seeing every nuance of what works, what doesn’t, what do our users like, what don’t they like.

As a company grows, new people come in, the founder is no longer in the weeds of every, you know, daily product. Decision around our strategy. Customer obsession can get lost a little bit in lieu of wanting to move faster. Now you’ve got outside investors that wanna see this quarterly roadmap get delivered quickly. Everything on it should be done on time and we need to be working on the next roadmap. And it becomes about output and getting things rolled out and less about are we finalizing that loop to hear back from the customers, not only hear from them, but observe through their behavior. What impacts are the new behaviors that we’re creating having on business value? Meaning, are we creating top line revenue, reducing churn, increasing longevity, hopefully increasing referrals?

And so being customer obsessed is something that there’s, I’m sure this happens across stages, but especially as a startup really begins to grow. Series A, Series B, there’s a push to move faster, to get more done faster. And there becomes less of an observation of How is product delivering value to the business by delighting the customers?

Many of the Series B companies I worked at, I was directly told by the person I reported to, don’t talk to customers, don’t worry about what they’re doing. All that matters is you just get your roadmap done. We’re gonna worry about the financials over here. Product has to be so tied to financials, but we wanna be customer obsessed so that we know how what we’re doing is actually having an impact on the business. And so customer obsession, I Personally, as a product manager growing up in my career, I insisted on becoming the end user as much as I could. That meant literally taking on and understanding of what their life looked like from the inside out.

Now we had all sorts of ways, and I love what Teresa Torres talks about about continuous customer discovery and scrappy research. But I do feel like that can get lost a lot of times along the way as a company matures. Seems like there tends to be this notion internally, usually amongst the product leaders. That we know what the customer wants. So let’s just build it. We know what it is. This is what we need to do. And in many cases, they may be right for some portion of that. But what I found is some of the biggest value that can be added to a business is by really hearing the nuances of what the customers has to say and maintaining that feedback loop from the customers, as well as looking at the data, right? It’s the voice of the customer and it’s the usage data. They can say one thing but not actually wanna pay for it, so. I see that as an area where things break down for businesses as they grow. And then bringing it back after a company has grown to a certain point can feel cumbersome. And why are we adding extra time to have to talk to the customers and hear what they think? Now it’s going to take us longer to deliver that quarterly roadmap of things we have to get out. And a good proportion of what we get out, to be honest, doesn’t impact the metrics the way that we hope it would.

Sheila Herbert [00:14:29] And sometimes gets thrown out, right? Like sometimes we’re building the wrong things because we’re not talking by the customer enough. It’s an interesting cycle. I’m hearing you talk a lot about founder CEOs and that happens to be an area that I am also fascinated by. How much has your role been helping transition a founder CEO to another role or taking them out of those day to day product decisions?

Heather Inocencio [00:14:51] That’s a good portion of it. So the second half of my in-house career, I moved to the startup space from enterprise companies. And the majority of companies that I joined and worked with, product really was being led by the founder. And so what I found, it takes a couple of different key areas to focus on, to build out, in order to effectively help that founder transition at least enough of the product leadership that that product leader in place, in many cases, where it was me. I can be effective, meaning, effective for me is, I can influence and inspire my team. That’s not just the product people. It’s the designers, it’s the engineers. Keep them inspired about why they’re doing the work that they’re do and how it actually delights the customer and then how it adds value to the business. And so there’s a lot of trust building, a lot respect that we have to give and then we have earn.

I see too many product people jump into a company. Take over that product leadership from the founder. And it’s like, they don’t want to pass the baton. And it is a bit of tug of war without realizing that we first need to get in there and build that relationship, build that trust, demonstrate to them, that founder, that CEO, that we understand what keeps them up at night. We understand what the company goals are. And we understand and are learning the product and the team so well that we can influence. It’s a dance, honestly. It’s bit of a dance and it never really stops. Different founders or CEOs will let go of product strategy and thinking to a point, but they should always feel involved, able to chime in as needed. And so it’s a delicate balance as we continue in our roles of that first product leader where it’s been founder-led product. It’s this delicate balance of how are we helping first build those relationships, that respect and that trust, and then second, keep them informed enough. That they feel like they’ve got their finger on the pulse of what’s happening and they can jump in if something is going in a direction that maybe they wouldn’t be happy with, but not so informed that they feel that they need to be looking at and signing off on every detail.

And a lot of that ties back to the product culture that you mentioned. I spend a lot time thinking about culture of product teams, of a product organization within a company culture. And I prioritize making sure that people are inspired. They are motivated, they’re knowledgeable, they understand why the work that they do and they show up every day matters. And that means making sure that we are setting the vision, we’re plugging in with our people, we’re getting to know them individually, what are their needs are. And that product culture for me is one that I know I feel comfortable and that things are going well from a culture perspective when I can look the other way and trust that the team together, individually, collectively. They’re making the right decisions that are aligned with the vision that has been set out and the objectives and the goals for this period of time, be that quarterly, annually, et cetera.

So when I know the team is gonna rock and roll and do their thing, even when I’m not there in every meeting to oversee it, and I see that they’re enthusiastic and they’ve got great relationships with each other, that’s when I feel like we’ve got some good product culture. When they feel a little more empowered, but I trust that that empowerment is aligned to the company’s vision and objectives. I love that.

Sean Murray [00:18:14] Hey, let’s take a quick break from our conversation to bring you the latest updates from the ITX Product and Design Conference. This year is going to be the best yet.

Dan Sharp [00:18:23] Conference will be here before we know it, June 25th and 26th at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center here in Rochester, New York. The speaker list is tremendous. Day 1 will have exciting and informative product and design workshops. Day 2 is Keynote Day with Usha Iyer, Ioana Teleanu, Sophia Prater, and Matt LeMay. And our friend, Mike Belsito, is gonna be coming back this year to MC the event so we know it’s gonna be fun and energetic. And when Mike takes the stage, there’s gonna be over 300 product people like you in the audience.

Sean Murray [00:18:57] Keynote Day is a unique blend of product and design content that really has no equal in the conference setting. It’s gonna an amazing day where you, outside of the keynote presentations, will be able to choose your own adventure and see spotlight sessions, work with your colleagues and Good to see live podcast recordings with Dan and I, where you get to participate and be the one who drives the questions. It’s gonna be an amazing day. If you wanna see more information about the Product and Design Conference, go to itx.com slash conference 2025. That’s itx dot com slash conference 2025.

Dan Sharp [00:19:31] All right, let’s get back to the conversation.

Sean Murray [00:19:32] Let’s do it.

Sheila Herbert [00:19:37] Have you ever struggled with your product folks feeling a sense of belonging in an organization that’s maybe larger and didn’t historically have that product culture?

Heather Inocencio [00:19:45] Belonging is an interesting way to put it. What I’ve seen for larger organizations, if the product people aren’t really clear on the why, behind why this company exists, why the work we’re doing this week is happening, and worst case, what I’ve see is when product managers are handed their roadmap for the next quarter by some team above them that met without them being present, that maybe isn’t connected to the users that are looking at the data. And so they’re telling the product manager, this is your task list. These are the things you need to get done. That product manager can feel like they’re being cornered into just a task doer, right?

Heather Inocencio [00:20:24] The, a project manager. And project management is a hard job. It’s getting people that often don’t report to you to do things on time and within budget that you’re asking them to do. But product managers, again, we’re in the world out there being told that we should be empowered. We should be thought leaders. We should be strategic thinkers. Takes a lot to be able to do that, and it’s hard and it is very disempowering when you’re told here’s what you’re gonna do, not even gonna take the time to have a conversation with you about why these are the things we’re asking you to do, just get it done.

Motivation lacks, and you can start seeing apathy happen, disconnection happen, and ultimately that hurts that whole product development organism. So yes, I’ve seen that quite a bit. To one of the key areas that I focused on when I joined a company. Most of the time I joined a company I was inheriting some product function that was at a less mature stage. So my job was to bring that product function to a state of maturity that it could deliver in line with the business and become thought leaders. So I spent a lot of time inheriting teams where the product managers on the team had one foot out the door and then turning that around so that the product managers are in a position where they are empowered. And it all starts back with you’ve got to build trust, demonstrate knowledge, and to see a product manager’s face light up when they are recommending what should be on the roadmap for the next quarter and those recommendations are being listened to and acknowledged. Even if everything they say doesn’t make it to the roadmap, they feel heard and they feel a part of the crafting of the strategy. They feel like they have a seat at the table. It changes everything.

Sheila Herbert [00:22:03] I absolutely agree. Talk to me more about building trust. I’ve heard you mentioned that a few times and I hear your recipe, I think, in between the lines a little bit, but I’d love to hear more. Like you’ve done this a few times. You must have kind of a standard kind of recipe for building trust in any organization. Can you tell us more about that? Because I think it’s relevant to every role as you come into any organization?

Heather Inocencio [00:22:27] It makes sense. Yeah, it is. The one difference in product management versus many other roles at a company is that we touch every aspect of a business, depending on how large the company and how segmented the PMs are against their area of work. But generally, the product management team as a whole, we’re touching everything from the front end customer facing, which is what most people think of when they think of product management. We’re helping build functionality on websites and apps. But there’s product management that happens throughout the entire tech stack for a company, all the way to the back end. You’ve got warehouse operations and supply chain. You’ve the people that are producing whatever it takes to be able to sell that physical good if you’re selling physical goods. And then you’ve got the folks in the middle, the CX people that are trying to speak with the engineers and trying to talk with the product people and the marketing team.

In a product manager’s role, when we come in and join a company, first we need to understand very clearly, like, what is my role of this company? Am I the leader? Am I building a team and motivating a team? Am I a product manager coming in to own a specific function? I think listening is probably the most important thing to do at the beginning. So, when I join a a company I say, invite me to all the meetings. Any meetings that you have that the team, I wanna hear, I wanna observe, I want to understand. And so as part of being on a listening tour during those initial stages with the company, I also start to begin empathy for the internal stakeholders that I’ve got that I’m serving. And so that means having, you know, asking people, can we grab a lunch? If you don’t have time for lunch, can I come by for 20 minutes? Maybe do that a few different times. I wanna know what keeps you up at night. How is your success measured? Where are you finding that you feel you get stuck when you interact with the product team? And you know, what does success look like for you if we are able to work with you, partner with you and deliver great things that give value for you.

And as I build those one-on-one relationships, for me, those don’t happen in team settings. So that listening tour, I’m going broad. Broad net, I wanna hear everything. And then I start to dig in with individuals and it takes a lot of time, but I’ll often find that, you know what’s important to one person over one department is very different and sometimes at odds with someone in another department. So I’m developing empathy for all of my internal stakeholders. And as part of those conversations, I begin to be able to give them the ability to develop empathy for one another. And this really helps when you always have more work to do than you can possibly get done as a product manager. And so you’re having to explain to your head of marketing why their item isn’t going to happen, but this item over here for your head of merchandising is going to happen. And maybe not happen today. Maybe it’s going to happens a couple sprints from now. But helping the teams internally develop empathy for one another is important. And through all of that, me as the product person, again, whether I’m the leader or the hands-on brand new product manager here, I start to become seen as someone that they can trust.

Because I know what’s going on in their head. I can talk their talk. I can successfully represent them when they’re not in a room. And we’re battling it out about what’s going to get built, what’s gonna hit the roadmap. And so a lot of that is normal trust building. Say what you’re gonna do, do what you say you were gonna do and continue taking the personal time to invest in those one-on-one relationships.

That trust building is really important. So that’s the beginning of my recipe, broad listening, individual trust building and at the same time, I’m doing that with my own team members. So I’m it with the PMs on my team, I’m do it with engineers. One tactic that I’ve employed, is I’ve said before or after work hours, I’ve got a two-hour window open. If you want to meet me for coffee at 6 a.m., know that you can book with me. I don’t keep that going in perpetuity, but for a while at the beginning I do. And it’s always fun to see who shows up and says, I’ll meet you at 6.30 on Wednesday morning for a coffee. Like, let’s talk. So that’s always nice to know that people want to plug in and get more engaged. And then while I’m doing this… I also do something that some companies have found disruptive, but they only find it disruptive at first. And then they’re so thankful that I did it, which is I want to start getting on the phone with your customers. And now that looks different at different companies. At one company, we were building technology for the end users out there, the ones that are making the purchases. But we also had technology we were building for our internal salespeople. And so I saw them and that was our primary avenue of revenue was through this incredible sales team. It was a white touch or white glove high tech service. We were in people’s homes. It was a custom clothing company. And so our sales people were out there with tape measures, measuring clients in person. And, and so I spent several weekends for like the first two months. Just setting up 30-minute calls with a break in between to get to know them, introduce myself, let them know why I’m here and ask them, what’s it like in your world? How are things going? Where could you use help? Where do you feel like you’re not being listened to? Where have you seen the company do some really great things in response to what you have to say? And again, even in that case, when I said at the beginning, I wanna get on the phone with this team. This team is a really important part of this business. I got a lot of head scratching from others. Why would you want to talk to them? But the credibility that I had after several months, there were some that were local to me. I said, come on into the office, come see how we work. And me being able to quote that group of people, quote things that they said, was a powerful area of leverage for me with the executive team when you had the hippo saying we should focus our development team on this thing. And I would say, well, let me tell you actual excerpts of conversations I’m hearing. And so that’s really helpful too. So that’s what I do, broad listening. A deep building of one-on-one relationships and trust, and a deep understanding of the customers, deep understanding of my team and the motivation, the morale on my team. And when I say my team, if there’s a CTO who is running engineering, I consider us all one big family inside a company.

Sheila Herbert [00:28:38] Makes a ton of sense. Tell us all what a hippo is. I wonder if the whole audience knows what that is.

Heather Inocencio [00:28:45] The hippo is the highest paid person in the room. And although they don’t have wings, they can be known for doing what’s called the swoop ‘n poop. Which, the highest paid person in their room has ideas. They are the ones that when they speak, people will turn and listen. And if they are not informed just enough, there’s always that risk of, it’s the 11th hour right before a big launch. And this hippo comes into the room and says, whoa, whoa, well, I see what you’re whiteboarding here. This, we’re going the wrong way. And the team’s already spent countless hours working on it. So those hippos are important people at companies, of course. They’re the highest paid person in the room, and that’s where that relationship building and that delicate balance of keeping them just informed enough that they know what’s going on and they can strategically direct the team, go a little more left than right so that they feel involved and we can avoid those swoop and poops. It just happens.

Sheila Herbert [00:29:36] Be a favorite term of mine, so worthwhile spending some time on it. What other questions do I have for you? Yeah, you know, you were talking a lot about building trust across functional groups, I think that a lot of times folks don’t understand how much of a role product plays in breaking down silos and really bridging those communications across teams. And the other thing you said that really resonated to me was the idea that product folks should just know what we need to build without having a conversation with the customer or with the stakeholder group. And that plays into a question that I have for you around the importance of domain expertise. So as you’re going into different organizations, I assume they’re all over the board as far as what they’re delivering from a product or service perspective. How important is it that your professionals that you’re putting in those organizations or inviting in those organizations have experience in that specific domain?

Heather Inocencio [00:30:28] I’ve moved across domains in my career, and I’ve really enjoyed that. It’s one of the aspects of product management that really appeals to me. I can take the core set of things that I do at a company and do that across many different industries. That’s not going to apply to all industries. I mean, there are some that might be very specific, like aeronautics or something that has deeply to do with cellular chemistry and the technology around that. It’s probably better to have someone with domain expertise. But generally speaking, I think the majority of domains that are out there, a product manager can join a company and be very effective. If that product manager is the right fit, and so I know we talk a lot about product manager company fit, not enough about it, I’d like to see us talking about it more, but if the product manager’s the right fits for the company, and that could be a whole set of attributes that you look at, then that product can get up to speed on the domain knowledge that’s needed, usually pretty quickly. I also bring some fresh insights. So the first e-commerce company that I joined when I was being interviewed by the founder and CEO, he said, tell me why you buy clothes online. And I said, I don’t, but I can tell you why I don’t this was early in the days of e-comm, by the way, said I can you why don’t and I can help this company leapfrog the competitors by addressing the reasons why I think the majority of people don’t. So I didn’t have domain expertise and I think that worked to my advantage in that case.

Sheila Herbert [00:31:54] I love that. I think you can pull so much from those other domains, and I think folks that are so used to being in these specialized industries or the importance of the specialization forget that you could really bring something from, I don’t know, the airline industry into the organic food market. And without kind of doing that domain jumping, you don’t have the opportunity to do that.

Heather Inocencio [00:32:16] Mm-hmm, and that breadth of knowledge is really helpful when when that product manager Let’s say they’ve worked across five six different industries different companies now. They’re joining a new company They have such a breadth of different experiences to pull from and so those fresh Perspectives those new ways of thinking some innovative thinking can be made more possible often in those cases absolutely

Sean Murray [00:32:38] I actually think that knowing what you’re not an expert in or knowing you knew that part of the market of why people don’t buy clothes online makes you an expert in that domain in a way, right?

I was, I led a workshop in AI this past week and they introduced me as an AI expert and I had to kind of start at the stop like I’m not an AI expert. At best I’m a fan. Uh, my brother-in-law works at, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And he writes neural nets that beat video games and he’s an AI expert. And I have that, I have the context of knowing enough, you know, to know that I can contribute to this, but you know I’m not, I’m not an expert in that space. So cool. This was awesome. I really enjoyed riding shotgun. Normally, normally I’m in the front with the steering wheel taking wild swings. Um, but I, I, have some takeaways from today. Sheila, I want to get your opinion on some of these takeaways before we. We take off.

So, my first takeaway was that practices and operations are integrated across the whole company. That’s really the fractional product manager’s exit point, right? That is, we are no, when you get into that point where you are providing oversight versus direction, that’s really where you’re out. But really integrated practices and operations across the whole companies should be the North Star for everyone, right. We should, everybody should have that integration with marketing, engineering, project management. Across the company. So I thought that that was an interesting point where you’re like, that’s actually, that’s where I’m out. That’s my exit, that my exit point, right?

We have talked actually about customer obsession. One of our recent recordings was with Christian Marek, and I like your take that customer obsession also means understanding how customers contribute to the business. Whether you are directly providing, whether your customers are decision makers about the service that they’re using or whether they are going to influence decisions by other people who are going to make decisions about a subscription based service. Understanding how your customers contribute to the business is really important.

And then I really like ensuring that your team feels empowered to make the decisions. You use that example of somebody being delivered a roadmap and being told to execute against this and they are made to feel like project manager instead of a product manager. So just how important it is to give people the opportunity to make business critical decisions versus driving all of those decisions on your own.

Um, and then I really like, you spent a lot of time talking about gaining people’s trust and imagining your business. That’s a super important part of what you do, but it seemed like one of the best ways that you gain trust was by understanding people’s voice, their context and their intent. And if you have those things, then you can have better conversations with them. And I really liked you also, you also mentioned representing them and outside and outside meetings. Right. So with them not there, you can still defend them by knowing their voice. What do you think about those takeaways? Did I miss anything?

Sheila Herbert [00:35:31] I think they’re great and I think I would weave them together a little bit. So when Heather, this is my perspective, but when Heather was talking about building trust, a lot of that building trust was a conduit to being able to have that operation and product teams work together and, you know, a building towards that exit strategy, the same with, you know, moving from a order taker or a, you out. Deliverer of the roadmap to having a strategic voice to what we’re delivering on the roadmap and being a representation of that stakeholder voice. So I heard a lot of weaving of those things together and them building off of each other.

Sean Murray [00:36:09] And if you didn’t take those things away, at least you walk away with the term swoop and poop. So, yeah. Not bad.

Sheila Herbert [00:36:14] 100%.

Sean Murray [00:36:15] Use it tomorrow, right? Keep your key stakeholders informed in order to prevent the swoop and poop, right. All right. The last question that we like to ask everybody, I’m going to ask this of both of you is what are you reading right now? What’s keeping you engaged? What, what are, you know, either from a business standpoint or from a personal standpoint, what is the book that you’re going to go pick up either tonight or whenever you have free time to read?

Sheila Herbert [00:36:39] It should have been prepared for this question, because I know this is the end of every product momentum podcast. Heather, you please go first.

Heather Inocencio [00:36:49] I turned my phone off for this episode, and I’m turning it back on because I fell asleep listening to this book last night, and I absolutely loved it. It is written by Annika Harris, if I get the name right, and I will get you the book in just a moment. I think it’s called, Lighting Up. She’s met with a lot of brain scientists, and there’s this, where philosophy sits, so this is not necessarily on the product management space at all. But everything I do, I weave it into my product thinking. And she is asking the question, is consciousness fundamental? It’s a fascinating deep dive. She does a great job at stepping into it without believing she knows the answers and is interviewing a lot of different people. And she, it’s an audio documentary available on Audible and it’s called Lights On. And it’s fascinating. And getting into that, really thinking about behavior and why people do the things that we do. That’s what we see, is we see people do things. She’s unpacking that a lot further back and a lot more deeply than just something happens, I have a feeling, and I respond to it. And so it’s a deep dive on consciousness and is it fundamental, where does it live in the chain of things becoming alive in our universe? And that, I’m sure, will get woven into how I think about user behavior and understanding the user. So that’s what I was listening to last night.

Sean Murray [00:38:15] Awesome.

Sean Murray [00:38:16] I love that. And Sean, I’m going to pick up that book. So that’s going to be my answer. But more authentically, I will read and listen to everything I come across, which is kind of a cop out answer, but also very real. And so similar to Heather, everything if it’s a road sign or an article or a podcast that has nothing to do with product, everything gets applied somehow back to product. So I can’t name a particular title that I’m reading in the moment, but everything that comes across my desk. And I’m excited to pick up the book that Heather just recommended.

Sean Murray [00:38:50] I’m a little scared about diving deep into my emotions, so I don’t know if that book will be for me, but… I, maybe, maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll give it a shot. Heather, thank you so much for being here today. Sheila, thank you so much for helping to drive the conversation. This was awesome. Really look forward to getting this one out to everybody.

Heather Inocencio [00:39:09] Thank you, Sean. Thank you Sheila, great to see you. I look forward to chatting with you more. Sean, you guys do such a great job. I love listening to your podcast. So it’s an honor to have been a guest here. Thank you.

Paul Gebel [00:39:26] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get. So please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world just like you’re doing. Thanks everyone, we’ll see you next time.