Casey Winters: commitment

Transcript context

…And then what does it take to get there? Just like what should people work on most if they're trying to get to CPO someday? First off, when you think about what's the job, the way I think about it is I'm responsible for leading and facilitating the development of products and features that deliver value for Eventbrite's customers that will translate into value for the business. And each of those words were chosen pretty carefully. Now in terms of the scope of the function, a CPO role can lead a few different sub-functions. In my case, I lead product management, product design, research, and growth marketing, but different roles have kind of some or not as many of those, it can be pretty custom depending on the size of the company and what the leader's skill sets are. To talk a little bit more depth about the role. I think it's my job to make sure Eventbrite chooses the best possible product strategy based on the information we have, that we can adjust that strategy as we learn and continue to build that feedback loop. It's also my job to define and consistently improve the process through which we set our product strategy, how we prioritize projects, how we execute on them to make sure we're delivering that value to our customers, we're delivering those tangible business results. And to do that in a way where the rest of the company understands it and is able to participate in it as well, so this is things like identifying bottlenecks that prevent us from delivering value, or quality, or doing that at the detriment of speed, working with people across the company to remove those bottlenecks, making sure people outside of development are aware of what we're building, participating in the development and feedback of what we're building, as well as in helping deliver that for like a GTM perspective. And last but not least, and we've talked a little bit about this earlier, training the team on what it means to be an effective product manager, product designer, user research, et cetera, at Eventbrite. And then of course hiring people who can augment our existing team on everything I just mentioned, so I'm accountable for what we build driving value for the business. And there's of course going to be many times where what we build doesn't end up driving value. It's hard to predict sometimes, but it's my job to improve that conversion rate and the magnitude of impact over time. It might not be that everything we build delivers value, but I want most of it to, and I want the impact of that value to be higher and higher over time. You also asked about what it takes to get to the CPO role. And I think my journey's been more irregular than most of the people you probably talk to. Product management when I started my career, it was all a waterfall. It was built around massive releases, it was a totally different job from what we do now. Marketing was a lot more agile in the lowercase sense of agile and it mapped to my mind better as someone who's really influenced by the book, The Goal. as a totally different job from what we do now. Marketing was a lot more agile in the lowercase sense of agile and it mapped to my mind better as someone who's really influenced by the book, The Goal. I think the tangible pieces of advice to get to this level that may be helpful is I always focused on where I thought there was leverage. I wanted to learn everything I could and focus on the things that had a big impact regardless of the org structure or the career path that meant, I wanted to really have a deep understanding of the entire business so I knew just what was worth focusing on to help the business. I think one of the things that's different about being a chief product officer versus other product roles is how much of a company leadership role it is versus a functional leadership role. You're expected in this role to optimize for the entire company, even at the expense of what's good for your team, so you really have to learn how to optimize for company first. That's like a key thing to learn that I think new executives can struggle with. And what advantage I think I had is I've basically been working with executives since my first job at apartments.com, so I learned to speak their language and understood what they cared about pretty early in my career. And this is a really important element, assume that questions from them are them trying to learn versus them assuming you don't know something and testing you about it. I find that a lot of people get intimidated by executive questions when the executive is just trying to understand things. And then that changes the interaction you can have. The other element that served me well was just refusing to specialize. I thought if I could learn all the skills that would allow me to combine them to work on the most important things versus only work on the thing I knew how to work on. And that definitely led to slower visible progress in terms of career growth or titles, but it was a much faster path to the true executive role because I could speak better with CEOs about more topics than most of my peers. Obviously this is all my individual experience there are many paths to get to this type of level, but those are some things that have worked for me.…

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