(2017-05-17) Sippey On Product Management And Pivoting

Transcript of Paul Ford/Rich Ziade interview of Michael Sippey on Product Management — and Pivoting: the product manager’s job is to set that context of, this is the problem that we’re solving, and here’s who we’re solving it for, specifically, and here’s how we want to measure success. Because if you can set that context and you give the context to the team, the team will produce much better results.

I decided that I wanted to start a company, and I had a few ideas. One of them was what became the Talkshow product. And just was doing some early kind of sketching and wireframing, and started to talk to my co-founder Greg Knauss about it, and it got him excited and we both got excited.

Messaging is how people have conversations today. And so the idea of Talkshow was the tagline, and the idea was texting in public

We built a full realtime messaging backend. We used some stuff from some third parties, used a lot of Amazon

So we had a small team of about five of us that were —

Rich: That is the sweet spot, isn’t it? In terms of size?

Michael: I think it is.

And it sort of self-selects very very quickly. If person four on that team isn’t running alongside, it materializes in like a minute

I did like a half-time job with Ev Williams at Medium. Ev and I had known each other for a long time, obviously through Twitter but also through some stuff at Blogger before, so, and Six Apart days. So I started to do some consulting, and really what was great was I got, he gave me the opportunity to work with a really small team. I got to work with a couple of engineers and a designer and, you know, four or five people, and we had our whiteboard and we put stickers on it, and we decided what we wanted to ship, and then at the end of the week we looked at ourselves and said, “Did we ship what we wanted to ship at the beginning of the week?”

what I really loved was working in a really small team and kind of getting my hands dirty. And so I started to think about what that looked like.

you have, as a product manager, three questions that you need to be responsible for answering, which is: what problem are we solving? Who are we solving it for? And how are we going to measure success?

I joined as a group product manager at the beginning of 2012 to work on the platform. So, you know the first thing that I worked on was Twitter cards, which are the things that essentially attach content to tweets. So now you see them as, like, story summaries and YouTube videos and etc. and so, that was the first feature that I worked on. And then I became Director of Product Management and then VP of Product Management on the consumer side, and at Twitter there are two — there are probably more now, but at the time there were two product management organizations

was able to raise a very healthy seed round for an idea and a prototype. And so, you know, on the order of a couple million bucks.

We had fantastic support from Apple, featured us, which drove a lot of downloads of the app and a lot of people that were giving it a shot

What was wrong about the concept was getting people to do simultaneously has a very, very high coordination cost.

we realized, in talking with a bunch of users and actually having the product in market, that really it came down to: the concept was flawed. And that’s, you know, 100% on me.

if you can’t get people to do things simultaneously, it’s very difficult to get people to tune in and watch the conversation simultaneously. Which means they’re not doing that, then there’s no opportunity to give your Talkshow host, the people who are actually chatting, realtime feedback. So there’s no feedback loop, there’s no dopamine hit of actually participating.

Our blog post about the shutdown was like, “It didn’t work, we’re shutting it down, the team stays intact, we’re working on something new, stay tuned.”

for most of the year, I’ve been seeing a therapist

we’re totally in stealth mode

don’t know what form the product’s going to take yet

we went to beta with a couple of hundred people, kind of January or February; we launched in the app store on April 26th of 2016. And then we…it took us about six months. It took us less. It took us about five months to realize, and then another month to make the decision to actually, that it wasn’t going to work.