[Interview Series] Lola.com’s Director of Product, Rachel Neasham
By: Julie Brown
Tags: Product, Product Management, Tech, Leadership, SaaS

Take a look at the interesting perspectives of Rachel Neasham, Director of Product at Lola.com. You’ll also find Rachel is speaking about how to price and package SaaS products at Project Product: Uniting Product Marketing & Management on March 19, 2019, in Carmel, IN (just outside of Indianapolis).

Rachel Neasham, Director of Product, Lola.com

What do you love most about working in product management?

My path to product management is unconventional. After serving as an Army officer for over five years, I wanted to experience the opposite of a “big company,” which led me to a tech startup. I joined Lola.com in 2015 only a few short months after the company was founded. I started out on the service team and navigated my way into product management after a year. I strove to be on the product team because I thrive in environments where others are counting on me. In business, and especially startups, your company’s success or failure is largely dependent upon the product team setting a strong vision and strategy, then seamlessly executing. I go to work every day knowing that I have both the responsibility and honor of doing critical work for my company and that is incredibly motivating. What have you found to be the most challenging?

There is a constant barrage of information and feedback flying towards product teams. Numerous emails and meetings with management, other business functions, customers, and potential users on a daily, if not hourly, basis. If a product team does not have a system set up to receive, analyze, act on, and communicate on that feedback, then it can quickly become overwhelming. However, the chaos and learning how to manage it is part of what makes product management fun and engaging. What has been the most rewarding?

Our team at Lola.com uses Slack for internal communication. Whenever a customer shares feedback, we post into a product feedback channel. We often hear constructive feedback which fuels us to improve the product, but one of the best feelings as a product manager is hearing a quote from a customer about how our product improved someone’s life. What has been your favorite feature/product you’ve ever worked on?The type of product I work on now aims to make managing business travel easy. We launched our first product about two years ago, a mobile app for booking travel. We quickly realized that our “mobile-first” approach was not comprehensive enough because people simply love booking their business travel on a computer. When we decided to build a desktop product, I was given the opportunity to be the product manager for it. A desktop travel booking tool is not a new concept, but since we were focused on business travelers, we were able to create and build a product specifically for them. This led us to develop a flight search where we returned non-stop flights grouped by airlines because that’s exactly the way a business traveler searches for flights. We were able to focus and solve problems for one user instead of trying to solve half a problem for a bunch of users. It was an awesome feeling. How do you think product management has evolved over the years?

In the early days, many product managers came from the engineering world. As product management has grown as a discipline, you now see many different types of people succeeding in this role. It is critical that we continue to explore and build product management teams that have a diversity of thought and perspective. This diversity is how teams will be able to build truly great products. How do you think product management will be in the future? Will it be different?

As a product leader, one principle I feel incredibly strong about is product, engineering, and design treating each other as thought partners. I’ve seen product managers who operate in a bubble then expect everyone to be bought into their idea of the world. I have no doubt that the best way to build products is by bringing together product, engineering, and design early in the product discovery and definition process. Not only are your design and engineering thought partners bought in, but they are thinking about the problem, designing, and building for the future together with you. Where do you envision yourself five years from now?

One of my favorite quotes is by Mark Twain who said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.” In five years from now, it is my goal to be leading a product team that is solving a set of incredibly hard, but rewarding, problems with no known solution. There is freedom in uncharted territory and I hope to have the chance to help discover it. If you could give someone new to product management advice, what would it be?

There are a million different ways in which a new product manager could spend his/her time and energy. My one piece of advice would be to slow down, sit still, and listen to your users. As the world continues to speed up and attention spans get shorter, listening is one way to really differentiate yourself as a product manager. Your users know their problems the best and they want to share them with you, so stop and listen. Is there anything else you would like to share that I didn’t ask about?

Product managers are often referred to as the CEO of the product but rarely have any authority. As a former Army officer, I’ve always believed that anyone can be a leader regardless of authority. In fact, I believe that more businesses need leaders who are not managers in order to create cultures that are inclusive. Therefore, as a product manager, I challenge you to think of and hold yourself to a standard of a leader, not just the CEO of the product.

Have any thoughts or comments on these questions? Feel free to share! And if you want to meet Rachel and other leaders, reserve your spot at Project Product. (And use the discount code, CRAFTED, and save on the registration price!)

This post originally appeared on the 56th Street Productions blog.