Q&A with Coach Tony
Q: Where are you from and where do you live?
A: I grew up in a small town outside of Minneapolis, and I currently live in London - but I consider New York home after spending the last decade there!
Q: What’s your motivation for joining PMPros as a coach?
A: It’s pretty simple - helping people makes me happy. As a leader one of the most gratifying aspects of my job is working with my team to help them reach their goals. Having had the privilege of working with some exceptional coaches in my own life for both professional and personal goals, I wanted to offer that experience to others. There really is nothing like a great coach!
Q: Why product management?
A: Product management is the perfect blend of art and science for me. I’ve always been curious about how things work and why they work that way - from Ikea furniture to car engines and everything in between. Building products lets me scratch both of those itches in a structured way that also requires creativity and intuition.
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in your product management career?
A: Either embracing failure or getting comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ll fail or be wrong dozens if not hundreds of times as a product person…you have to recognize failure for its positives not its negatives. What did I learn from that decision or experience? How would I approach a similar situation differently as a result?
As a PM, you’ll often find yourself the generalist amongst experts. A high performing product development team blends together expertise from multiple functions spanning engineering, design, marketing, data and analytics and others. As the leader of this cross-functional team of your peers, you will often participate in (and lead!) discussions where you are the least knowledgeable in the room on the topic at hand.
This is where getting comfortable being uncomfortable comes in. It’s human nature to want to have the answers and be perceived as competent and talented. When we don’t, it's uncomfortable - it doesn’t feel great and can undermine confidence in our abilities. Understanding that this is a reality of life as a PM and mentally preparing ourselves for it can help us overcome those uncomfortable feelings!
Q: What’s your favorite product framework? Why?
A: Mckinsey’s Three Horizons framework. As written, it’s intended to help forecast and allocate resources across priorities over multiple year time spans. However, at its simplest form it is a way to think critically about the intersection of value, resources, and time.
That’s one of the main reasons it’s my favorite - it makes it easier to think about how we can invest in future growth or fuzzier strategic bets without hurting current product performance.
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