Navigating product management and leadership: Career advice with Edward Scotcher
This week I'm joined by Edward Scotcher to talk about his role, which focuses on the intersection between product management and leadership. We talk through his career journey and discuss how being interesting can be more useful than having qualifications, and the importance of good storytelling
Participants
- Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
- Edward Scotcher - product manager and leadership coach
Transcript
Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You. The podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Prospects. I'm your host, Emily Slade. And in this episode I chat to Edward Scotcher about product management and leadership.
Edward Scotcher: So my name is Edward Scotcher. Everyone knows me as Ed, and these days I'm an independent consultant and I specialise in the Intersect between product management and leadership. And I guess what, what that means is, is that these days I've developed the experience and credibility to help ambitious organisations. I say I like working with ambitious organisations to make sure that they're doing the right thing for the right people at the right time and making sure they're building the right products, which is quite.
Emily Slade: Often not the case. Amazing. And how did you? Get into that.
Edward Scotcher: Well, it's been a journey and I have to say I think that the journey. Is. Probably the most interesting thing about it. So if you'd like to hear about that, I'm I'm more than happy to to walk you through it.
Emily Slade: Yeah, start at the beginning.
Edward Scotcher: Yeah, well. So I think it probably actually goes back to when I was at school, I developed a certain mindset. I I really enjoyed school up to about the age I I did my GCSE's, which was 1994 and I I went to a school which was very much about encouraging people to be the best they could be. And then. When I went to do my A levels, that school then turned into a a school that was all about meeting targets. And it really put me off, and I remember even at that young age, thinking to myself, I think I'm going to struggle just to just to follow the crowd. And actually when I left school, my teacher said, Look, Ed's in life, you're just going to plough your own furrow and it's going to be hard. And actually, that's. Been a real truth for the rest of my career. I then went to university where I studied what I was really interested in at the time, which was sound recording really interested in that but. Actuallythe.com Boom was happening at the time and I realised that very few people make money out of sound recording, so I thought what I'll do is I'll do a module in HTML which was kind of all new at the time and I did that and I learned how to build very, very basic websites. I mean in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, websites were incredibly. Basic I mean there was no e-commerce, no online shopping, very little communication, no video online. You know, it was absolutely Wild West of of it. But I ended up from that getting a job as a software engineer and I was rubbish at it. Actually, I was terrible at being a software engineer. I really wanted to do a good job of it and and I was terrible at it. And after a few years as working as a software engineer, my line manager went on maternity leave. And the the company I was working for at the time, the BBC in fact, didn't really want to pay for someone to come and take their role over, get a new person in. So I volunteered. I volunteered to do the job. But actually what I found out was. Was was that my strength wasn't in software engineering. My strength was in people and I then developed a career in which one of my customers nowadays calls me a a social worker for tech companies. And that's probably true because what I do these days is I I go in and I help organisations organise themselves. And develop the right products, but lead those products and develop the best teams and all of that has come from appreciating that. The problem that I solve. Even though I work in the tech industry, the problem that I solve is people problems.
Emily Slade: Yeah, that's fantastic. So you've really sort of created your own. Job in a way.
Edward Scotcher: Yeah, I and I think this is probably when I talk to people about their jobs and their careers. I I think that's probably my lesson, which is there are patterns to what makes a good career. There are certainly things you can do that makes a good career. So for example, you can work hard, you can read a lot, you can meet with other like minded people. You can try things. You can fail at things. That's absolutely fine as long as you learn there are interesting patterns. But I don't think there's a very clear. Sort of step by step path. Look if you do ABCD then your life is gonna be perfect and you're gonna have a great career and a great role. I don't think it happens like that. I think innovation starts with yourself and you know innovation. And innovation that I think is is such an interesting concept because people I think, just apply it to to roles and there's a big difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity is a bit like art, right? If you if you draw a picture, you're being creative, you're creating something that's that's never been done before. But if you innovate. What you really do is you. Cache previously existing concepts and ideas and you mash them together and what comes out of it is something new and there's lots of examples of that that I could bore. You. With if you're interested, but I think your your your career is always gonna be about personal innovation and personal innovation is really about looking at what other people do. It's looking at the technology that's around you. It's looking at the means at your disposal. Whatever you've got and it's thinking about how you bring the best things that you've seen other people do or the things that you admire that other people have done and you smash them together yourself to make something unique, and that's how you become an interesting and unique. Player in in a marketplace and someone that people are are interested in.
Emily Slade: Yeah, completely. What would you say the starting point for that is? Or are there several?
Edward Scotcher: Yeah, it's kind of a thirst for knowledge. I think if you if you, if you are interested in things around you, the world around you, if you're interested in what other people do, I think that you're unique point that you are in life and your unique experiences, whoever you are, wherever you've come from, whatever your background is. You can look at things and you can say from my unique perspective. That if I take a little bit of what all of these people are doing and mix them up, then actually that then makes me all so unique with a unique viewpoint and a unique outlook on on what I'm doing and anyone can do that and anyone can do that at any point. I mean, innovation can happen absolutely anywhere at any time. But the more the sort of thirst for knowledge you've got, the more you're likely to. To to to effectively broaden your horizons and broaden your understanding of what's going on. And the more you broaden your horizons, your, your understanding of what's going on, that the larger the kind of like the pool of information that you've got to innovate from. So I think that kind of thirst for knowledge is absolutely critical.
Emily Slade: Mm-hmm. What are the downfalls? Like what can go wrong on the? Path.
Edward Scotcher: Well, we can think about that from a a couple of places. I I mean I would say the opposite of downfall is what makes people successful is humility. So probably the downfall is hubris, right? So people that believe their own hype and people who think they're absolutely amazing and that they've done it all themselves, they're really hard to work with. And sometimes they're really hard to like because the reality is we all stand on the shoulders. Others, so certainly one of the things that I do when I look to employ people, if when I'm recruiting is humility. Humility is what are the most important things that I think that people can have. So the willingness to learn, the openness to be challenged, and the ability to think about new things and embrace them. I think they're the things that really make people great. The people who have that arrogance of thinking, they're somehow magically special and they've done something that no one else has done. Number one, it's never true. And #2, it's a really difficult attitude to put up with. So I think you end. Alienating a lot of people as well.
Emily Slade: So how did you go from software engineer to product manager?
Edward Scotcher: Yeah. So I think one of the things that you've got to remember about moving into product management is that you need to have ideas and you need to be someone again who's got that interest in. Sort of like problems to solve, and I think in some ways I've always seen myself as a bit of an innovator, or at least a lateral thinker, right? So what I will do is I will, I will find myself naturally, for example, give you a stupid example of I'll find myself standing in a queue and I'll think to myself. It's interesting, isn't it? I wonder how this could be done. Better. Why do we need to be queuing here? What what? What is it? What is the problem that we're actually trying to solve? Right and and I think that is a really great example of that kind of product. Mindset is if you go or or or learn right. It doesn't have to be like a natural thing you're born with, you can teach yourself this. You find yourself in a in a situation and you can say to yourself, well, what's the problem that we're all trying to solve here and quite often. The problem that people are trying to solve is quite different from the thing that they are told to do or the thing that they expect to do now. You can say, well, why does that lead to a product mindset? It's because the product mindset again is all about people. It's all about the customer. If you go to an organisation quite often you'll walk in and an organisation will say you. Know. We are building a recruitment system that's such a that's sort of a typical thing that you could expect. You know, we're going to build a system. That's going to allow HR people to recruit people. And it's kind of like, well, fine. But the problem that they've done there is what what's happened is they've started off with a solution. They've gone we, which is the HR people. So as HR, people want a system and they want that system so that they can get people through their process. Right. So that's what they're doing. But that's not a product. Mindset that that's a that's. A. Project management mindset because you're just being told to do something and you're doing it. A product mindset is something which is much more sort of needs an inquiring mind, and let me let me give you an example of what I mean by that. So the question that you would ask if you came from a product mindset is people want to have a job. It's a statement people want to have a job. How would you go about helping people who want a job? Get a job and what you're then doing is you are then developing the mindset of understanding the problem that you've got to solve, and then you can think in terms. Of an outcome. So an outcome is defined as a change in behaviour that improves results, right? So what a product manager would do would say I want an outcome and the outcome in this situation is you help people that want a job have a job, whereas what a? Project manager would do is they would focus on a target which is they would say. We want people to use a system and then we want to make sure that, you know, 95% of people are on the system, right? And that's that's that ends up with a completely a completely different things. So why do I say all of this? It's about mindset. If you want to be successful in product, what you do is you go around thinking. What is the problem that I'm trying to solve? What are the creative ways that I've got to make sure that I can solve a problem? Them, whereas people who come from that project mindset are just trying to get a thing done, and they're probably just doing what they've been told to do, create a system, build a tool, go to a place. Do you see what I mean? There's a there's a sort of a subtle difference in it. And I can, I could give you a real example, if you want of of where I had a really unlikely. Umm. Result of following that, if that's of interest to you.
Emily Slade: Yeah, completely.
Edward Scotcher: Yeah. So I did some, I did some work for a an organisation once, which was one of those one of those companies where you can effectively order ingredients, which you then cook at home, right? And what they realised was was that they were trialling something in London at the time and near them there were these a a couple of sort of like housing estates. And in those housing estates, they were just saying, look, we're we're not selling anything to these different housing estates. And someone said, well, what we need to do is we need to find out why the people on those housing estates aren't buying our product. It's like, well, fine. So someone goes well, what we need is a survey, right, which is pretty logical, right? If you're going to go and ask people something, you. Need. A survey so immediately what happened? Is the tech team went away and started to build like a SurveyMonkey, like customised like SurveyMonkey Tool. And they were like what we can do is we can get people's e-mail addresses and we can send the e-mail addresses out. To people and what those people can do is they can feed back into the survey and then we've completed a survey. But of course actually whilst that might solve the problem, it didn't really apply a lot of sort of lateral thinking, whereas what we ended up doing is we ended up saying well, why don't you just go and stand. Outside of the door of that, you know tower block or walk around that estate between kind of like five 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM and just ask people and and note it down in a notebook. Right. And get those ideas. And it just gives you that that understanding that there were two ways of dealing with this, there was going for the obvious answer, which is let's get a tool and build a survey but without any idea of how to contact the people. We didn't have their e-mail addresses or phone numbers or or whatever or you could just take a notepad and pen and you could go and meet people in which you build. Relationships. You talk to people. You have a discussion. You get much deeper information and insight than you would do by filling in a survey, and you actually get to come back and say, look, we've met some people, this is what they say. This is what's going on in their lives. And that in itself was really successful. That's what we did in the end. But the way of going out and meeting people, it was cheap, it was easy. We had the people, we got really rich information because we were building relationships. And the other thing was gonna take, you know, building the survey in and like an online tool, it was gonna take time. It was gonna be expensive. We're gonna have to put a whole team on it. And then we weren't sure about how to deploy it. So we're solving the same problem. But we're solving it in different ways and the the result of how we solved it was completely different one from the other. So it just gives you an idea that even in a tech company, again, it's people that matter and going out and meeting people and building those relationships is the critical thing. But that's all that's that's product mindset is. Thinking the problem that you're trying to solve through thoroughly to make sure that you get the right result.
Emily Slade: Yeah, completely. Would you say that these are skill sets and traits that you're essentially born and infused with, or can they be learnt and?
Edward Scotcher: Ohh absolutely they can be learned and taught. Yeah. And and I think you know, some people are are are better at different aspects of this than others. Right. So if you look across. A spectrum of personalities. You're gonna have some people who are much more analytical and organised and into the data and the information and they good at processing numbers and spotting patterns and all of that. They make excellent product managers because they're really good at getting insight from information. And at the other end of the spectrum, you've got the creatives. You've got people that come from like a user experience, like a customer service design background. They're usually much more creative now. They might not spot the patterns and get the insights from numbers, but quite often what they're really good at is building relationships with people, going out and meeting. People having conversations with people building, you know, I think I said, building relationships, building relationships and getting to know them and all of those people have something that they can bring to product management. So I don't think anyone is excluded at all from getting into product management. I think what we have to do though is as an industry, I think we probably have to stop. Kind of saying, look, if you've got certain qualifications, if you've passed certain tests. If you've done certain stuff only you can be a product manager, because actually what we're doing is we're representing humans and humans don't all fit into one category, and therefore product managers shouldn't all come from one category as well. And I think that's probably one of my criticisms of where the industries gone is. I think people have tried. To sort of paint it into a corner and say look, product managers have to come from a certain mindset, they have to have certain experience and they have to want certain things. I think that's nonsense. So I think I think product managers are good when they come from a really varied. Background and you know and when we talk about diversity as in diversity and inclusion, diversity is as much about diversity of experience and diversity of thought as it is about any other form of diversity. And I think people forget that, which is really, really sad.
Emily Slade: Hmm. No, that's a really good point. So can you take us through a typical day in the life of your role?
Edward Scotcher: Ohh well, of course these days I I work for myself so it it sort of depends. It depends what you'd want that to look like so I could I could walk through what it's like when I go and work with some of my customers for example, yeah.
Emily Slade: Yeah. Fantastic.
Edward Scotcher: So as an independent consultant, what happens is is people get in touch with me because they know that something's wrong, right? They've got a feeling they're they're looking at their. Product team or their engineering team or their data science team or whatever it is. Is and what they're doing is they are kind of going. Look, I think something's wrong and I don't get what's wrong. Can we get someone in who can just give a bit of experience and generally speaking, what I will do is when when I get asked to go into an organisation, I spend my time meeting people. I will I will. Ask for a huge cross section of people to meet and I will meet those people and I'll just talk to them. You know what's good, what's bad, what's indifferent, what's going on, what's not going on? What do you like? What you don't, what do you not like? And I capture all of that information. And from that information I spot patterns and and I look at those patterns and from those patterns I ultimately make recommendations about what the organisation can do differently. And I think from that there's there's a lot which actually comes up frequently. And I think the things that come up frequently are #1 quite often in a business, there's a lack of product vision, and people aren't really thinking about where the product is going or who the customers are. They've got to a stage where they're focusing more on what the business wants or what they're want up to up their CEO or whatever has. Asked them to do rather than solving the problem, and that's what are the what's what are the main things? I think another thing is I think quite a lot of organisations just have too many product. They're called product people, but they're not really doing product work. They've sort of become. Project coordinators and what they're doing is they're spending a lot of time writing requirements or user stories or going to, you know, reviews or retrospectives or helping, you know, organise the backlog. What they're not doing enough of is actually getting out meeting customers, understanding that. The need that the customers have got the pain points the customers have got and the the pains they want solved. And they're not really thinking about creative and innovative ways to solve those products. They've just ended up being, in some cases, like glorified admin assistants and one of the things that I do there is I help organisations just think differently about how to how to deal with that. And I think it's one of the great sadnesses. As you know, my career now having done product work, you know, in a 25 plus year career I've done product management for 20 years of it. And I think there was a real interesting point where product managers were needed massively to sort of sit between the exec of an organisation and the tech team to make sure only sensible ideas were going down to the tech team for the tech team to build. And now it feels that that's got watered down and instead of thinking. You know, having product managers that are spending their time, you know, working to help the organisation build the right thing for the right people, be creative, come up with really innovative good ideas. I think a lot of product management has ended up being more like the project management of the past and I think that attitude has got to such a critical mass that a lot of people have actually just forgotten what product management is really altogether and a lot of product managers I meet are very sadly just project managers. They've fallen back into that. That old way of thinking, and that's what I help organisations break out of right is. Is to say, look, you know, stop, stop being project managers and get back to being product managers that represent the needs of the business and the needs of the the needs of the organisation that you serve.
Emily Slade: Yeah, fantastic. So what advice would you give to somebody who's feeling a bit stuck in their career at the moment and they've got ambition and they do want to make a change, but what would their next steps be?
Edward Scotcher: Yeah, I mean, that's such a powerful question. And do you know what we've all been there? I think we all want more and I think especially you know you can be at a stage of your life where you know you've gotta do things that maybe you wanna start a family or, you know, buy a house or or whatever it is. Right. And you think, well, I want to do more, but maybe just a bit bored. Right. And and you're kind of thinking ohh I want to be stuck here for the next sort of 25 years doing whatever I'm doing. Yeah. And I and I really feel that because I I definitely went through what Douglas Adams used to call the long dark tea time of the soul. Yeah, for sure. I went through that. And what would? What would my advice be? Let me tell you a story. So a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, I've been invited to. A to speak at a conference. And the keynote speaker, who was meant to be starting at 9:30, didn't turn up and it got to about, I don't know, 25 minutes past nine. And they're like, right, you know, the guy who's the keynote hasn't turned up. What were you gonna do? And someone who knows me and knows me relatively well just went. Do you know what I reckon? Head could do a keynote, right? So they asked me, could you stand up on stage and just do a keynote? And I was like, great, when? And they're like in about four minutes time. It's like it's a bit of an ask, right. But we're gonna do it anyway. So I stood up. And I just kind of. I'd I I sort of told a a story I can't really remember about what, but there was. There's one one point of it which came up, which I will always remember, and it is this. It's everything is made-up, it it it's such. It's such an interesting insight isn't it? But I through my career I've come to believe this everything is made. And the reason that we do things is only because it it ends up being convention, right? So you know, the fact that we, you know, in the UK anyway, the fact that we drive on the left or the fact that we use money to buy things or the you know, the fact that you know that we we drink, you know. Hot tea out of a cup as opposed to a glass or whatever it is. All of these conventions are just stuff that's been made-up. And if you think about it. Something becomes part of your culture, because enough people now do and accept this made-up thing that it just becomes normal and because it's normal it it it just you know because it's normal, it becomes normal, it is normal. You know what I mean? It's it's it's kind of the way it is but. What you have to remember is if you just go through life conforming to what everybody else does all the time, and I'm not suggesting you become an extremist, right? But if you just go through life just following doing what everybody else tells you to do all the time. Then you end up lacking that creativity and you end up lacking the ability to think differently, which is, as we said earlier in the podcast, is the thing that you need to develop. So I found myself at the end of this keynote saying, look, just everything is made-up. So if you are stuck. You're feeling a bit disillusioned with your career and you're wondering what to do next. What? Understanding that everything is made-up does for you is it removes the barrier to doing whatever else it is that you want to do right? Because people saying, especially in the tech industry that you have to have certain qualifications or you have to have certain experience. To go and do something is largely just a mindset, and if you understand that everything is made-up. Therefore, if everyone has made everything else up, you can make things up too. That brings the spirit of innovation. Now, why does that matter? Well, let's play forward this question. You're disillusioned with your job. You now understand that things are made-up and you can do things differently. Basically, you can make up things yourself, is what I'm saying, and it's perfectly valid to. Do. So but you then find yourself in an interview situation. So what do I see as interesting people in interviews? Well, when it comes to product managers. Some of the most boring product managers I've ever met are the people who've got a PhD in product management or the people have got every certificate in product management or they know everything about agile or they know everything about data and they they just sort of want to come across as this kind of. Of intellectual polymath, right? You can say, well, I've got all the I've got all the certifications and I've, you know, I've. I've just know everything about it. So I've got a PhD and you're like, Oh my goodness, you're just like, they're so boring compared to the people who've just got great stories to tell. And some of the great stories to tell some of the best stories I've ever heard. In an interview are the ones where it's been an absolute disaster right where people you ask them a question, you go well, give me an example, you know, give me an example of when something went wrong and they just and what they do is they sit back and they laugh, right. And you kind of like go on. Just just tell me right. And they tell you a story about. Now. They thought something was gonna work a certain way. They sold it to the exec. The exec got behind it. They did this thing. None of it worked out the way they thought it was gonna work out. And and and then, you know, something happened. And usually the most fascinating bit is is like, right, mate. So everything went wrong. How did you deal with it? Right. And it's that moment where people have had something go wrong and how they deal with it is then absolutely fascinating to me. Right. Because what comes out of it is your character comes out of it, your ability to be patient and calm comes out of it, your ability to have humility. And say, look, it was me, I failed, I got it wrong. That all comes out of it. That's where I see people be interesting. Alright, so. So let's just try and put those two things together because what I've said is is #1. Everything is made-up. Let's just take. Just take that through your life with you, right? Because it's been a huge learning point for me. What? Everything being made-up means it is. There is credibility in you making stuff up. So anyone who's ever been an inventor or an innovator has made stuff up. People don't look at James Dyson, for example, or. People don't look at someone like Steve Jobs and they go ohh. They were just making stuff up. There were such failures. They look at them and they go, gosh, they made stuff up and it worked really well. That's amazing, right? So let's have more people like that and #2 all of those people, especially both those two people that I've mentioned. Got so much stuff wrong along the way and they had the humility to make sure they were learning from those things and take it forward. And what makes them interesting is they were they Steve Jobs was an interesting person. James Dyson is an interesting person, right, because they've got so much wrong. And because they've learned from it. And what they've been able to do is they've been able to overcome the the difficulties that they've had, but no one was ever able to tell them. Don't stop, don't, don't stop making stuff up. Let let me give you an example. Right. So when I was a kid. I once went to round to someone's house and they had a wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow. Instead of having a wheel at the front of it, had a bright orange ball at the front of it. So where the wheel would be? There was just a bright orange ball, and that was one of the first Dyson products that I ever came across. And everyone forgets about the James Dyson wheelbarrow. But the problem that he was trying to solve is. Is that people quite often push wheelbarrows through wet gardens and it leaves this big kind of like line where the wheel goes. But if you put a ball there, number one, it helps you manoeuvre the wheelbarrow better. But #2, it doesn't create a big line in your pristine lawn. Right. So all the time he was trying. Find a problem to solve. Everyone forgets about the James Dyson washing machine, which is probably one of the best washing machines that you could buy. Everyone forgets it. It was too expensive. It never caught on, but it was an amazing piece of kit and you know it's a bit. I feel sad. I didn't buy one at the time they discontinued it, but if you look at Dyson, there's loads of. There's loads of failures that he's got, but what he's done, he's constantly learned from it. He's constantly trying to do different things. It was the same with Apple. It's the same with loads of successful organisations and so that's why it matters. So everything's made-up, have the humility to fail. Tell the story. Just have stories to tell. Right. If you go and you go to an interview or you're gonna talk to people about what you do, have stories to tell because it's the stories that make you interesting and you know, again, you can get all the qualifications that you like. But qualifications, especially like internal tech industry qualifications. They're not gonna make you interesting and and personally, from my perspective, I've always struggled in organisations where people have said ohh, you've got to have these qualifications before you come in and I'm like, but why there's so much more to me as an individual than a qualification that I might have got. Yeah. So so I would, I would say that's a really that for me is is, is solid advice for me about how to how to approach getting out of the disillusionment you might be feeling in your career.
Emily Slade: Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. Any closing thoughts?
Edward Scotcher: Yeah, I mean, I just think I think product management is just a really fascinating place to be and it doesn't matter. Again, it doesn't matter your background or experience, there is a place for you. It might be hard sometimes finding the right organisational personality for you to fit into. So organisations have personalities. Full. Just go for it. There's loads of advice. People are always free to contact me, by the way, through LinkedIn to to ask me questions. Always happy to talk to people. My mentor, lots of people through through their careers and just like, go for it, go for it and have fun. Right? You got nothing to lose.
Emily Slade: That's brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today.
Edward Scotcher: Well, yes. I'm honestly, I'm so grateful for you having me. Thanks for inviting me. I've.
Emily Slade: Enjoyed myself a lot. Thanks again to Edward for their time. For more information on product management you can check out the show notes below. If you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you. As always, for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.
Notes on transcript
This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
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