Glen Ford at Alegion: Product Managers — Find A Mentor

The best way to grow in your product management career is to find a mentor, shared Glen Ford, product manager at Alegion, for my interview series, Austin VOP. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

Austin VOP #31

What was your path to product management?

I had an interesting path: I started as a music educator and taught privately — classical trombone. It was not an economically viable lifestyle though. So I slipstreamed into programming via a start in production graphics, of all things. I was mostly self-taught and spent a decade in this career. Towards the tail end of this stint, I was a solutions engineer at Puck. It was a very customer facing role and I was enjoying it. We had a great culture at Pluck and there was a lot of internal mobility. I thought to myself — what do I want to be when I grow up? Product management looked sexy from the outside looking in. I had a conversation with my manager and he was supportive, but there wasn’t a path to move as yet. At one point I went to the general manager — I saw that there was a need for a technical product manager and convinced him why they needed me in the role. I owe a debt of gratitude to him for taking a chance on me. It all came together well — that was a fertile field that I planted seeds in that ultimately grew into a new career.

How do you learn and grow in this field?

Product Camp Austin has been a great resource — good for learning as well as good for meeting product people. And not just for networking, but I can rely on these folks and pick their brains when I need help.

For reading, I do recommend a handful of books like Lean Product Playbook, stuff by Marty Cagan and Rich Mironov, Intercom’s blog, Mixpanel’s newsletter, and others.

I believe the most important thing to learn and grow is to exercise your product management muscles at work. I don’t have all the knowledge I need and reading is vital to fill the gaps, but most of the learning comes from doing.

Product management is a broad discipline and you can pick various aspects to learn. In music, there’s obviously a huge difference between learning theory and getting into a practice room to play for hours. It’s the same in product management. Learning new techniques is important but it’s a performance art, an applied science.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

I break up my advice based on two categories of product managers. Those that are not product managers but as aspiring to be one. And those that are product managers and are looking to mature in their career.

For those looking to be product managers, I share my experience at Pluck, earning the capital to make the move. I caution that this is only one way to do it — and to do it while you are at your existing company — and that you have to be patient. I believe that very few can make the jump into a product role for the first time at a company they are not in. Of course, this is my experience and your mileage may vary.

For those that are earlier in their product management careers, I share my perspective that you are in a role that sits in the middle of a lot of other functions in your organization — engineering, operations, finance, sales etc. Decisions that you make will have an impact on all these other groups. A mistake that you make can ripple through the fabric of the company. If you can deal with that, negotiate with stakeholders and prioritize their needs, then you are in the right role.

You are at the nexus of your organization and have to be able to deal with competing priorities.

You can read a lot of theory on product management. But you should add capabilities to deal with ambiguity, prioritization, good working relationships and office politics. Multiply the pressure two or three times when you are dealing with a customer directly.

My main advice is — find a mentor. This is the best way for you to grow in your career.

It is easier said than done, but we are in a warm and generous product community in Austin and someone is willing to help.

What is exciting about the product you are working on now?

At Alegion we are in the AI/Machine Learning space. It is a very cool place to be for obvious reasons, but our role is different. We provide human intelligence to data scientists that can help make their algorithms sing. We crowdsource this human intelligence so that they can help AI make better judgments. For example, they can help recognize the shape of a thing on a building more specifically than a vision AI algorithm can so that solar panels can be placed on it more accurately.

So we are not competing with IBM Watson or Google AI or Amazon. We know that AI will fail without good training data. It is nice to be in the business of helping those platforms become more effective in our lives and do it well to benefit people. We know that as their market grows, ours will as well.

What is your biggest product challenge currently?

The challenge for us is almost the same as the opportunity. This market is new and the demand for training data is new. We are trying to find a way to apply human intelligence at scale through our platform. Do we send work to the crowd? How do we do that at scale with quality? Those two aspects are in tension with one another and we are building our tools to help with that.

So our business is to take money from our clients that need human intelligence for their AI and distribute this money to the people that do the work. We already have models for this with Amazon Mechanical Turk. But we have to do it at scale and do it so that people can support themselves. We are aiming higher to improve the wages they earn and make the work genuinely enjoyable for them.

What I get most jazzed about is not the AI. Instead, it is the challenge of helping these people enjoy their time doing these tasks in our product and them making a living doing it.

How might we build a stronger product and tech community in Austin?

When I first started as a product manager about seven years ago, there were not a lot of resources. We had the Pragmatic Marketing training class (that travels around the country), and we had Product Camp Austin. PCA is the heart of the community and I have found it very rewarding. I have met a lot of product leaders and everyone has been so generous and helpful. It has been a great example for me to model myself on. We have a warm and giving product community and I try to give back by mentoring and being generous with my time.

We now have a lot of other meetups in Austin with Product Austin and Product Tank. I believe that Product Camp Austin is still the big tent-pole with its twice a year un-conferences. What I would do for our community is to bring more awareness that these resources are available, proliferate the knowledge, help others learn the craft and leverage the resources we have.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

Spotify for a very particular reason. I listen to all kinds of music — I have a purpose-driven eclectic sense of taste. I am a classical musician though and what I find most enjoyable is to for example compare several recordings of the same movement of a symphony by multiple orchestras in different eras. The emotional and intellectual content in classical music is rich and listening to these various interpretations brings out radically different details in the same piece of music.

In the past to do this I would have two choices. Go to a library and hope that there were CDs to do a comparative listen. If I was lucky, I would find two CDs. The other alternative was to go to a good CD store where they let you listen to the music. There was more variety, but you had to stand there and furtively listen and hope that you would not be seen as taking too much advantage of it.

With Spotify, I can find works that are not as well known. I can listen to eight orchestras from different time periods, take my time to really enjoy the music and get sucked in. It is like surfing the web in the early days when you would follow a scent and go down a rabbit hole.

The instructive part of this is that Spotify did not specifically build the product so I could do this. So how would you apply this with intentionality to another product? How do you stay open to the possibility of your product being used in different ways and how do you discover this?

Thank you, Glen!

Austin VOP is an interview series with product leaders to build a stronger product and tech community in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

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