Product Roadmap: Building a Platform for the Next Decade with Craig Saldanha

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today we're joined by Craig Saldanha, who's the Chief Product Officer at Yelp, responsible for bringing in huge investments in the implementation of AI and LLMs to their services. Craig spent almost nine years working his way up the ranks at Amazon, from an internship all the way through to being Director of Product and Engineering for Prime Video International. I'm excited to talk to him about how he leads product management teams at scale. But before we talk to Craig, it's time for Dear Melissa. So in this segment, you can ask me all of your burning product management questions, and this week we have a caller. So let's go to the phones.

Hi Melissa, so I'm a biomedical technician and I want to pursue product management in the health tech industry. So do you have any advice on how to achieve that position, the steps I need to achieve, and also can you recommend a book or a person that I need to follow, some companies that have product management in the health tech industry? Thank you very much.

So breaking into product management is complicated, I'm not going to dismiss that, but there are ways to do it. There are two different ways to think about entering product management and what kind of companies you might want to target. There are actually a lot of software providers out there for biomedical things. I've worked with two of them, MetaData and Citel, that do biomedical data and they build software for people like you. So you might want to look at what kind of software you use and see if there are any openings in those companies for you to come in as a junior product manager and learn. Or you might want to start in a different role where your expertise and your clinical knowledge could really help, and then try to transition your way into product management. So that's a start. You can go to a pure software company and look for where your experience as a biomedical technician is really going to help. There are a lot of companies out there who really need that domain expertise, so that could be a good starting point. The other way to look at it is to go to a place that has software as a component. Maybe they don't sell software, but they use software in the way that they run their business, and express that you want to learn product management. You have the expertise already in your domain, you want to learn product management. I'm not exactly sure where you work right now, but let's say that you work for a lab or a pharmaceutical company. In pharmaceutical companies, they do have a huge engineering department, they have a bunch of product managers. I work with a couple of them, and they have thousands of product managers. That might be an opportunity for you too, to switch inside of your company and say, 'Hey, I'm really interested in it.' If you want to do a switch internally, what you really need to look at first is making that known. Make it known to your boss, go find the people who are doing product management, find the leaders, tell them that you're really interested in these things. A lot of companies have a way to develop people and help them transition into product management. That might be a good opportunity for you to get your foot in the door there too. So I would look at those two options. If you want to go pure software, try to leverage your expertise to get hired by somebody who builds software for people like you. Or internally, look at where the software department is and see if you can make a move internally. Express that you really want to learn this and then do that. You're going to have to learn other things though, besides just your domain experience. So I would look at trying to understand what product management is, what some of the tools of the trade are, and make sure that you really want to do this first, because a lot of people get into this role and then they hate it. It involves a lot of people dynamics and involves working with engineers and tech. So I would really get up to speed on some tech concepts. We do have a course at Product Institute called Tech Fundamentals for Product Managers that might be a good place if you want to learn more about technology. We also do have a Basics for Product Foundations there too that you could take. If you want to read a book, Inspired is a great place to start with Marty Cagan. I'll plug my own book, Escaping the Build Trap, for you to read as well. There are lots of product management books out there for you to start to get up to speed on what that role actually entails. I think if you walk in the door knowing some of those things, knowing what it entails, that's going to make it a little bit easier for you to transition. So I hope that helps and good luck with your search. For those of you listening, if you have a question for me, please go to dearmelissa.com, drop me a line. We do prioritize these voicemails, so I love to hear all your pretty voices. Let me know what your question is and I will answer them on an upcoming episode. Now it's time to talk to Craig. Welcome Craig, it's great to have you here.

So it is the 20th anniversary of Yelp being around, and I think everybody out there knows Yelp. That's where we get our reviews, that's where we figure out where to go and what restaurants to eat at, what service places to visit, all that stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about what Yelp looked like when you walked into the organization?

That's awesome. I love that. I mean, I use Yelp for the same reasons, and I like that it has such a unique part of your relationship there too. When you talk about future-proofing Yelp, can you tell us a little bit about what the situation looks like for Yelp? There's Google reviews out there, there are other places for reviews. I know Yelp was one of the first ones on the market. Tell us a little bit about what it looks like from your perspective and how you think about differentiation.

I had a friend in New York City who was one of the Yelp top users, and we got invited to all these restaurants and launch parties and all these different things all the time. I know she was very passionate about writing her Yelp reviews. So I know you've got a collection of people who are really the backbone. Do you structure how to engage those people all the time? Tell me a little bit about the customer obsession.

So when you're looking at the product strategy as a Chief Product Officer coming into a new organization, it's got to be slightly overwhelming. I think you had an interesting time too because you were fully remote onboarded, right?

That's got to be different, and Yelp is not a small company by any means. When you came in, how did you get up to speed with what was going on and what problems you needed to tackle? What's your way to get set up there?

What are your five tenets?

I love that you baked in the diversity tenet in there too. I see a lot of people not explicitly call that out, especially in consumer-based products. How has that helped shape the thinking for your product managers on how they build products for scale or for many types of different people?

That's such a good point. I feel like there's almost a war sometimes between our OKRs and our goals that we want to hit on our product strategy, and then coming back to our tenets or the principles that we actually believe in. So often in companies, the tenets will get sacrificed for the OKRs because people will see them as higher priority. How as a leader do you make sure, or how do you work with the executives or your product managers to balance what you want to hit from the OKR perspective but then drive it back to that mission and goals? Where's the leeway? I think a lot of people have a question about how do I know these things need to get done? I've heard this from product managers: 'I know these things are going to be good for us, but I'm trying to justify it back to our OKRs and it might not align perfectly, but it's one of those fundamental things where I think it's going to make a difference.' How do you balance those things?

Do you do anything to balance that where you're looking at the portfolio roadmap or you're looking at your percentage of time people are spending? How do you also ensure that it doesn't swing in a super different direction where you're not hitting any goals and you're just delighting a bunch of customers but not bringing in revenue? I feel like this is one of those things where product people just fundamentally have such a hard time balancing. They're like, 'How do I make the case for this, but then how do I oversee it and allow people the space to go do that, but not get carried away in a way where we sacrifice the whole company for that?'

So when you set the goals, do you go back to the teams in those planning sessions and then tell them, 'Hey, tell me what we can do to meet these goals?'

Cool. So one other part that I see with organizations when they're doing this top-down, bottom-up type planning is they have a really hard time aligning all these things also across products or across teams. What do you do to make sure that the people below you, directors of product on different types of teams or VPs of product that might be reporting to you, how do you make sure they're all collaborating too towards the same goal?

Are they like, do they have a product background? The product ops people you have on your team, what type of background do they have? Are they looking at data around what you're covering, what you're not covering? Are they putting into the tools? What do they do to build that final roadmap?

When they're looking into dependencies too, what types of work do they do to surface that up and reconcile it?

It sounds like your product ops people are making critical decisions that impact the business, and they have to know enough to be dangerous there.

And are those projects that don't quite align perfectly to a specific area of the product, or what kind of projects are we talking about?

Okay, so they're streamlining the communications between the different areas and keeping them up to date on the progress from the product roadmap and making sure that's transparent to people. Great, yeah, that's really neat. I love hearing about how other people are doing product operations. I think it's always really fascinating. So we talked about you came in, you shadowed the CEO when you started at Yelp, and then you built these product tenets. What else did you do to think about where Yelp was going? I know when you came in, we talked a little bit about it, but maybe you can tell us about how far they came and what else needed to be done. Yelp had moved in 2019 from a sales-led model to a product-led model. When you walked in and you were trying to assess how far did we get or what's changing, what did it kind of look like for you? Because in my experience, that can take years to actually manifest and keep continuing. What do you think was critical to make that change stick, and what do you continue to do as a CPO today to make sure that you don't revert back to a sales-led model?

I love that. I didn't know there was a guaranteed for Yelp thing. I also have to hire a bunch of contractors because I have crazy house renovations and stuff that I'm doing too, so I didn't even know that existed. But that's awesome.

That's awesome, and that's such a differentiator from Google as well, because they don't do something like that. I focus very little on our competition and more on our consumer, so I don't know whether they've started offering that. But I actually use this feature a lot to give me confidence to hire new and undiscovered businesses. We recently bought an electric car and I had to install the charger. I looked up Yelp and found a five-star or four-and-a-half-star business with 400 reviews that serviced my area. I used the request-a-quote feature, and our software recommended I get a quote from this new business. It turned out to be a phenomenal experience. I basically met this pro, he was just starting on his own, his business was only live for like a month. It's such a great story. We really hit it off, and it turned out he was from the city where I was born. In the past, I would have been apprehensive to hire someone that had no reviews and was just starting out, but knowing that this was like a $1,500 install and that I was backed by the guarantee, that actually pushed me to give this guy a shot. He was telling me that he's basically gotten a lot of business from it, which is cool. This is a win for everyone.

Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say. I don't think it only helps consumers. It's definitely what consumers want, but on the other side, it sounds like it's really helping small businesses that are just getting started out there too, to let people take a chance on them. This feels like one of those problems where you solved both sides of that marketplace very nicely.

So when you're thinking about building two-sided marketplaces like this, we have the businesses on one side and the consumers here. How do you think about that balance? We talked a lot about making the consumer happy. How do you also think about what the businesses need, since they're usually the ones who are paying, whether they get advertised or the revenue? How do you balance the two?

How did you land on connections between the consumers and marketplaces as that one metric that rules them all, or the one that you really try to go after as the primary metric? How do you get to that?

The flywheel concept, I feel like, is incredibly important in product management but not super well understood. Can you walk us through how you would, if you were coming into an organization like you came into Yelp, how do you figure out or how should a product manager figure out what their flywheel is? How do they model it so that they can wrap their head around it?

Okay, so for Yelp, you've got your growth metric is trying to make those connections. The more businesses and consumers on the platform, the more you can do that, those connections is what people keep coming back to. How do you think about the product levers connecting that?

The part that I love about you explaining this is that it really all goes back down to deeply understanding your customers on both sides of this marketplace, what they want, what their problems are, which takes a lot of user research and empathy and really modeling that out. How do you instill in your organization as a Chief Product Officer the concept of user research and customer research? What kind of research do you do? Who's going out and talking to people? How do you make sure that you're keeping in touch with your users?

There is this big debate going on right now about companies letting go of user researchers and seeing that user research is not important from a user researcher perspective because they're trying to have all the product managers replace it. This is what I'm hearing from user researchers. I don't agree with this, just to put that out there. You mentioned you do have a research team. How do you see user researchers and product managers working together on these things?

That's really insightful. I like the way that you think about that. Thank you so much, Craig, for being with us here and for sharing your story at Yelp and how you think about product management. I think a lot of people are going to listen to this and have so much to take away from it. If people want to learn more about you or product management at Yelp, where can they go?

Great. We will put all of those links so that you can find Craig in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another wonderful guest, and I'll be answering all your questions if you send them to dearmelissa.com. So make sure that you go do that, and we'll see you next Wednesday.