Michael Park is former Chief Product Officer at BombBomb, a video messaging software company. He began his career in product design at Havoc, where he transitioned into product management and eventually became VP of product. Michael then served in leadership roles at Danielson Designs and Rendi, a customizable frames and signs company. Most recently, he spent nearly nine years at BombBomb, where he oversaw the product life cycle, managed a 20-person product team, and expanded the customer base from SMB to enterprise.
In our conversation, Michael talks about how he worked to adapt BombBomb’s product strategy as the pandemic revolutionized remote work. He shares how he manages and minimizes the HiPPO problem in teams he works with, as well as how he prioritizes the people, a.k.a., “relational,” side of product management.
Adapting product strategy to the pandemic
At your last company, BombBomb, things looked a lot different pre- and post-pandemic. Could you talk about the way that COVID changed the business and how you were thinking about product management?
Because we had an asynchronous product that was perfectly suited for a work-from-home modality, the pandemic sent us in the right direction. All our basic success metrics — like efficiency, shipping efficiency, hitting the right releases and growing, moving the financial needles, etc. — exploded. We were at the right place at the right time with the right product.
One of, if not the most, important things to do in this situation is demonstrate trajectory and why we’re building what we’re building. That is inherently controversial no matter what stage of the business you’re in. If you’re an early-stage business, it is the founder or executive teams asking, “Why are you choosing to build this?” As you scale, the whole company starts to ask that question. As they get more aligned to the numbers and they’re clear on what their outcomes are, they will start to ask, “Why aren’t you building this to help and support these efforts?”
It’s always a challenge. We had to focus on building a digital environment demonstrating the what, the why, and the when of what we’re building.
How did this new normal change the way that you measured success in what you were building?
No data chart could say, “How aligned are we with the executive team?”, or, “How clear is the marketing team on this?” The way we measured success changed because, for the first time, we had to invent new metrics to describe our alignment with the rest of the company.
The challenge was not just updating a spreadsheet or putting tasks into Asana — it goes beyond that. That is absolutely an important part of the job, but the more work that you do on paper, the more you risk people not seeing it. We knew that we could be quicker and more succinct with verbal communication. Tools like BombBomb allowed us to record asynchronous videos, which was fantastic for sending updates that people could watch in off-hours or across different time zones.
A big part of facing these questions today is the relational component of product management — how balanced are these relational dynamics? That is probably the most difficult to answer, but that answer separates the good from the great and the great from the exceptional.
Gaining momentum on product discovery
In terms of the actual product work you were doing at BombBomb, did you have to reinvigorate ways of building the product to address challenges with COVID and remote work?
We absolutely did. Our intent was to expand from the SMB space and go into mid-market enterprise. This is a common expansion tactic, so we were already planning for it for about 18 months leading up to the pandemic. When COVID hit, however, that catapulted us to a bigger market than we intended. For the first time, we had big corporate clients and had to cater to enterprise-level requests.
For the first time, we were asked to audit the virtual backgrounds we offered on our platform. This is because BombBomb was predominantly focused on serving property and financial tech clients, and there’s a certain perceived professionalism associated with that, so people wanted more professional background options. It was always on the roadmap, but when we started getting questions about that from our enterprise customers, we had to push it forward. Zoom set the tempo for the whole video industry at the time, and even though they weren’t an asynchronous product, customers asked why we didn’t have that capability when Zoom did.
We started blurring backgrounds, offering new virtual backgrounds, and creating a way to virtually touch up one’s appearance. These kinds of features were never asked of us before the pandemic, but kept getting more sophisticated.
It sounds like this brought in a lot of new issues to your team. How did you bring your team together to solve them, and how did you resolve that 10-year-down-the-line product vision with building for the moment?
It was tough because we were now in a fully remote environment when previously, our sprint reviews had 100 people in a room every Friday. We were starting to gain momentum on product discovery and pushing a lot of discovery development work, but something was still missing. There’s a certain charisma, a vibe in the air, that can fill in the gaps of missing defects, and that was gone.
Suddenly, we were forced to show our work in a new way that was absent of any ability to pitch and sway. We had to prove concepts and direction through Miro in a way that was very sobering. It was an amazing lesson in discovery and what happens when you remove your selling ability. This facilitated more real and honest discussions within product, design, and engineering. The conversations got a little bit more directed and we got clearer feedback. We got better as a group on our constructive criticism and grew tremendously, just by removing us out of the room.
Minimizing the HiPPO problem and separating ‘good’ from ‘great’
How did you end up reducing the HiPPO problem and figuring out which opinions and strategies had the most value?
When we talk about HiPPO in this case, I’m mostly referring to a couple of key people on the executive team. The biggest one is the founder — either the product founder or the business founder. They hold the primary HiPPO because without them, there wouldn’t be a product to galvanized a team around.
If you want to scale your product and engineering to be best in class, it is the product manager’s responsibility to have the vote. But man, it takes a lot of investment to build that level of executive trust in the decisions that PMs make. Though the product manager is the one who makes the decisions, it’s going to be a 3–5-year investment to upscale and build trust with executive founders.
There are two main components that I find reduce the HiPPO problem. The first is that, generally, figuring out which opinions have the most value is always related to who speaks to the customer most. If you’re speaking to a couple of customers a week but those customers are just implementers, not decision-makers, you’ll never shift the HiPPO effect. The product manager has to be speaking to those key decision-makers because they’re the ones whose opinions ultimately matter when it comes time to renewal. Getting buy-in from and aligning with them is how you can disrupt the HiPPO problem.
The second component is refining business acumen as it relates to the business you’re working in. I found that gaining an understanding of key levers in the business to move specific metrics significantly enhanced my effectiveness. This knowledge is also crucial for solving the HiPPO problem.
What do you see as the responsibilities of a good product manager or someone who leads a team of product managers?
I want to start with the default answer because it’s true. You have to look at the three Ps: product, process, and people.
There are PMs I’ve worked with who were good because they did product well. They had customer knowledge, operational skills, business acumen, data efficiency, etc. — but they weren’t exceptional. Then, there were PMs I worked with who were great at process and process building. Sometimes, you’ll encounter PMs who are mostly good at delivery, and that’s their expertise. However, if you want to be exceptional, investing in the people and soft skills will get you there.
When I come to reviews with PMs, I first start with the design and engineering team that they’re working with and ask, “How brought into the process are you?” I’m always looking for that. The earlier these other departments are brought in, the more excellent the PM is. Same thing with stakeholder collaboration. I let my PMs know that I’ll check in with other stakeholders to see how heard they feel. If they feel like their opinions are finding their way into the roadmap, or at least explained why they weren’t incorporated in the roadmap, the PM is doing a great job.
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Normalizing difficult conversations
How do you encourage scrappiness and a collaborative mindset in the class of product leaders that you’re managing?
As a coach and a mentor, my main piece of advice is to normalize having difficult conversations with executive leaders — the conversations that really did not go as planned. These have to become the classroom for future product managers, product leaders, and product executives. I think it’s important to spend about 10 minutes debriefing how awkward and difficult and uncomfortable it was, and we absolutely should. But we need to then say, “How can we do it better?” These are our wayfinders to becoming better communicators.
For example, say we just spoke with the chief marketing officer and we only have six weeks to change something we’re working on. With my junior team members, we’ll spend 90 percent of the conversation not on where we went wrong, but how we can learn from this and build on it. I want to keep it very casual and frame it like, “As we go onto our development scorecard for the future…”
It’s so simple, but I’ve seen such growth in product leaders when the substance of their challenging meetings became the to-do list for the next six months of career development.
Product management, especially in SaaS, sees a lot of turnover. How do you combat that and motivate your teams to stay working together?
So much of it is a relational game. Marty Cagan calls it relational integrity in his book Empower. I have experienced that to be true. In SaaS, I think the average span of a product manager is 18–24 months. We have a real dilemma there, and I acknowledge that. On my team, the average tenure of my product managers was four years. I’m proud of that. Of course, I always wanted it to be longer, but when their careers are ready to take the next step and move forward, I’m happy for them.
All this to say, I spend a lot of time on the relational side because this is the area that I do best. PMs go from good to fantastic because they move forward and influence. That’s what I hope to instill in my teams.
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