Latest / Talk Commerce / Mastering Platform Products and Ecommerce Complexity with Elena Leonova
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:02.254) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today we have Elena Leonova. Elena is from Spryker. She is the SVB of product for Spryker. Elena, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life. Elena (00:17.831) Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to join you. It's been a while and good to see you again. And hi everybody, my name is Elena. I am an SVP product for a company called Spryker. We are a digital commerce platform for sophisticated use cases. Ultimately, we solve some of the hardest problems that people typically have when they do commerce, not the trivial use cases, and there are lots of fun and complexity that comes with that. Ultimately, I guess that's one of my passions, but outside of that, I'm super passionate and very passionate actually about product management, about platform products. And I also started recently mentoring a lot of people on those two topics because I feel like there are lots of things that can be shared and said to people who are just starting their careers in those areas. Brent Peterson (01:09.262) Yeah, thanks for that. So before we get started on our content, and I do want to talk about Spryker, but I also want to talk about product management and maybe a little bit about your experience at Magento and then through some of the other platforms you worked at. But I do want to tell you a joke and all you have to do is say, should that joke be free or do you think some point somebody should have to pay for it? And as a caveat, I'm using the Rapid API dad joke open or API to get a joke on the fly. And I'm going to tell you the joke. So here we go. My wife asked, my wife asked why I didn't buy her flowers to be. Okay. I got to start over because this is like, I didn't get a chance to practice. Okay. We're going to do one more time. My wife asked why I didn't buy her flowers. To be fair. I didn't know she sold flowers. Elena (02:00.807) Do you think this joke should be free or somebody at some point should pay for it? Brent Peterson (02:06.766) Yeah, what do you think? Elena (02:09.351) I... I think it should be free Brent Peterson (02:12.942) Alright, yeah. Maybe this live format is not the best. Alright, I got one more because I did two, I hit it twice. How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh? Ten tickles. That's much better. That's a good quality API jokes. Elena (02:29.671) Three. Brent Peterson (02:34.958) Yeah, we better keep moving, huh? Okay, good. All right, so let's first, you know, I think in the green room, we did have a talk about some of the differences between, let's just say, an e -commerce system that says they fit everybody. Elena (02:36.487) Yeah, well, I think it's funny. Brent Peterson (02:56.046) and use cases that don't fit into the box of a SaaS -based or some commercial B2C e -commerce system. Tell us a little bit about what you led into with the sophistication of Spryker and why merchants and B2B users or whoever users should be looking at those things. Elena (03:20.903) Absolutely. When it comes to sophisticated use cases that we actually let's focus on, there is no one definition on what it is. Ultimately, we have customers across different industries, across different regions, and with completely different business models. But what unites them is their majority of them are large enterprise companies, which means that they have already a lot of established processes. a lot of business rules and how they actually want to run businesses. And it's not something that is easily adaptable to the commerce platform. So ultimately, what they want to do is they want to run digital commerce, how they've been running their commerce practice in general. And that also means that in most of the cases, the available solutions that fit everybody don't work for them. Just to give you an example, for example, we have a customer... who is thinking about selling their products to dealers. And then those dealers are going to be down serving other customers. And there are lots of different processes on kind of what you can decoder, what you cannot decoder, at what point kind of those products are going to be manufactured for them, and at what moment those products can be sold or shipped or delivered in kind of all of that level of complexity that your standard one size fits all digital commerce platform. doesn't solve. We have another customer. It's actually one of our live customers. And they have built a really interesting business model on Spryker where they have powered with Spryker solution a lot of really small mom and pop shops that sell groceries. And what's really interesting about that is kind of those mom and pop shops have been ordering from other like a big food store, grocery store. through this mobile app that adds where they act as a merchant on the marketplace. They will have their own consumers who live in this village, for example, who will come to this completely offline physical store to buy groceries. But they would use the spiker solution to pre -order, to track what products have been purchased more frequently, and then order those products to be delivered from the grocery chain. That is something that a lot of... Elena (05:42.887) the standard digital commerce solutions cannot solve. And then if we go to even more complicated use cases, like for example, we have a customer who sells industrial grade printers, and those printers are commerce powered with Pryker. So they are ultimately kind of reordering their like supplemental materials, whether it's paper or ink, and all of those materials actually come from other suppliers. So there's a lot of dropshipping, supply chain issues, and complexities when it comes to digital commerce in the sophisticated way. And that is exactly why we say that we focus on sophisticated commerce because there are no other digital commerce platforms that actually do it effectively. And we built our platform to specifically be extensible in all those places to solve for those complexities. Brent Peterson (06:38.926) I know that you've been at, you were at Magento for a long time and then you were at BigCommerce, now you're at Spryker. How has the experience of being a product manager changed as you've moved through the different platforms? Elena (06:52.743) Yeah, no, that's a really great question. Thank you for asking that. I would say my biggest aha moment was with Magento because all of my product management experience before that was working for product companies that built consumer products. And what was a really big eye opening for me is how Magento was building this platform where there was a huge ecosystem. all the partners that were so important to the success of the platform that as product managers, we had to tailor to those partners. We had to understand how exactly they were extending the product, using the product, what worked for them, how to make them efficient, and how to not make some of the mistakes that we actually did sometimes for not catering to the most important persona, even though the end product is then being delivered to the merchant, to the customer. who is doing digital commerce. And that was something that was another first aha moment. But another aha moment with Machento was that it was back then on -premise product. And ultimately, we had zero data. Like in the world now, when people talk about data -driven decisions, we were getting all of our decisions from Twitter. We would tweet about something. We will ask community what they think about. We will get a lot of data points. and we would be like, okay, we have decided, like, we're gonna do this. So I would say back then we were like Twitter driven decision making, which is not necessarily your common practice. But in most cases, it was really successful. Brent Peterson (08:31.918) Yeah, I can say that, yes, Twitter was an important factor in the growth of Magento. And there was always a gap too. And there was an opportunity I felt, especially in the open source version, to collect a lot of things from people that maybe Magento overlooked at the time. Did that change when you went to Big Commerce? Because you went from then a self -hosted single tenant to multi -tenant. SaaS, right? Is that, is it, was it a lot different from a product standpoint? Elena (08:59.687) Yes. It was. It was a lot different because ultimately when Magento was open source and open code and it was highly extensible, not for just integrations and API based implementations, but literally for anybody to go into the code and build whatever they wanted. In Big Commerce, it was first of all, obviously multi -tenant SaaS was API being the primary way of somebody integrating. So there were lots of limits that kind of I had to understand how to work around as a product manager because I'm used to kind of like we built the foundation, but then from there, everything is possible with Magento. And also what was really interesting when it comes to data, because being at Magento, I was always dreaming of having the data and data insights and understand how customers actually use our product. At Becommerce, we had data for everything, like literally every single click, whatever you were. dreaming of all that was available. But it was so much data that the quality of our decisions or my personal decisions, I wouldn't say go up or went up significantly because it was just a data overload with all of those different kinds of things that we were able to track. And it was really, really hard to understand what is the most important indicator that gives you the indicator of success. So I still kind of had to rely a lot on qualitative feedback. talking to partners, talking to customers. And that was really interesting because a lot of the product managers and a lot of people who built products and platforms, they always dream about having the data, which I went from zero to lots and ended up still kind of using something in between kind of a little bit of data and a lot of data feedback. So that was definitely really interesting. Brent Peterson (10:54.606) Do you think if, and let's go back 12 years when you, I'm not sure if you were on the team that helped with Magento 2, but when they made decisions to build those features and functions inside of Magento 2, and there wasn't this, like there could have been a callback or just a data collection that the core platform would use, and as a callback to central headquarters, you're sending some data just to understand how well things are going? Elena (11:24.231) Mm -hmm. Brent Peterson (11:24.718) Is there, is it different now? Is the culture different in terms of building a platform to try to collect that data? And then as, as you said, even with big commerce, being able to use the data you need to use is that have things changed dramatically now in the last 12 years to make that happen? Elena (11:42.699) Yeah, things did change a lot because the reason why something like that has not been done with Magenta is because Agenda 2 was still, in most cases, until we introduced the Cloud Edition, was offered as a self -hosted solution. So, that was a lot of legal things that we would need to consider to allow for the data collection to be sent explicitly. While now all of the products, even if they're single tenant or multi -tenant, they are cloud native and they're hosted with a software vendor. So that has changed a lot. Like you ultimately have a lot of responsibility as well as obviously access. And now the other thing that you have to be considering now more than ever before is the data privacy and the data security. Not even talking about the AI and how AI also influences that. But I think that is the big shift that all the vendors now strive to host and provide their products and platforms as a service. And that does give you a lot of flexibility, but also lots of responsibility at the same time. Brent Peterson (12:49.742) Yeah, I also think just like a Tesla where they view when you start your Tesla now you get this little screen that says you have to you agree to send them data right and I suppose nowadays a self hosted platform could do the same type of thing where you're opting people in and even I guess with Apple League today would you like to opt in to get error feedback? So. Elena (13:15.783) Yeah. Yeah. Brent Peterson (13:18.158) Tell us how things are different now at Spryker. Elena (13:22.245) Well, I think there are lots of differences for kind of like with my experience kind of working first for Magento in open source self hosted product. Mostly focused for SMB but also for upper mid market. Then with BigHummers it was Obviously, SaaS product multi -tenant starting from SMB and then we were growing to mid -market. So it's completely different type of users, completely different needs because a lot of our customers, they were not necessarily really big enterprises. They were small entrepreneurs who were starting their businesses and they wanted a lot of guidance and consulting. Now when coming to Spiker, we work with large global enterprises like... and others where those companies have established processes, established rules and governance and also really strong ideas and outlook for the future of like what they want to do. And it's a completely different way of working with them, whether or not, for example, you can collect their data for analysis or not. So those are the biggest differences. But I personally find a lot of joy working with those customers who require a lot of complexity in the product, mostly because they have really forward -looking ideas and we are trying to tailor in the products that we build, now some of the foundation that would allow them to stay with the platform within the next five to 10 years. And that is a really cool type of work that I get the chance to do and we'll see what's going to happen within those next five to 10 years. Brent Peterson (15:10.638) Do you think the way that, so you started with Magento when a lot of those companies just mentioned were on Magento, maybe on Magento One. And then now times have changed. Maybe the enterprises have become more sophisticated and the software has become more sophisticated, sorry. What is the difference then that Spryker adds in terms of both? management and infrastructure and technology that sets them apart from some of the other near players. Elena (15:45.927) Yeah, absolutely. So, as I said, when I started the Striker, I obviously had to learn from our customers and partners why they choose Striker and why they have chosen Striker already and decided to stay. And it was all from their words, not from our words. It was all about the platform being future looking and future proof. So, ultimately, for example, we had a customer... who has been able to extend our product to have the digital marketplace on the platform that never had the digital marketplace capabilities built in. So that is kind of like that level of flexibility that allows them to go above and beyond just like adding or customizing a feature to build completely new business model. And then like later on, we introduced enterprise marketplace capability. Now, like all of our customers can have marketplace on Striker if they decide to do it. But we did have customers who did it even before the platform itself did it. There are also a lot of things about our focus on value services. So we, besides just software, especially at the beginning of the sales cycle, we work with our customers to consult them on the best way to build digital commerce strategies and all the trends and kind of what we see and how they can use technology in the best possible way. And that is extremely successful with our customers because ultimately we have a chance to kind of work on this innovation mode with a lot of customers where they have their crazy ideas for the next five to 10 years. And we can also learn from them, but also consult them on how to best go about it. Like what was going to be the first MVP that they can launch. And I think like that's actually what sets us apart because it's not just kind of selling a software. We actually always in there. together with our customer to help them succeed and ultimately that's what we known for with another customer base. Brent Peterson (17:47.406) You started off with talking a little bit about your product management experience and also about mentoring others in product management. Tell us a little bit about what it's like to be a product manager for a platform instead of a regular maybe whatever, but in your specific industry and then why you chose to do some mentoring. Elena (17:56.999) Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Elena (18:07.943) Mm -hmm. Elena (18:17.959) Yeah, so when it comes to product management, my journey in product management started as for pretty much majority of the people also by coincidence. I didn't necessarily know about a role like this, but I had been reading lots of books about how to build software, the customer side of it, the business side of it. And I was... lucky enough to actually find Magento at that time, which was, I'm from Ukraine and Magento had a huge presence in Ukraine. So I didn't know much about what Magento was, but I've been lucky enough to actually start at that company back then. And product management in typical, and it's like core definition is building the products that customers love. And all the books and all the courses and all the materials and everybody kind of goes through pretty much the same. talks about how to build a product that customer loves. And through many years, I've been trying to apply all of those different practices and approaches to my work at Magento. And I was always stumbling upon that something doesn't necessarily work, something doesn't click. And at some point, I realized, because there were no other materials, and still there are not, that when you build a platform, you ultimately build a platform that you have... your developer ecosystem that where they extend, they customize, they actually create solutions for kind of specific customer. So you don't build a product that customers love immediately. You actually build a product that your developer ecosystem loves, and then they actually take this product to customers. And yes, I by approximation, you can say that you have built a product that customers love, but that middle step, middle layer is so important and the whole success depends on it. And when I realized that also by a number of mistakes and also some successes, I started explaining that to all the new product managers who were joining Magento at that time. Then I moved to the commerce, I was doing the same thing. Then I joined Striker, I was doing the same thing. And I kind of just realized that that is a common thing. It's not written, nobody talks about it, and that's just a huge gap. However, platforms do exist and all the product managers... Elena (20:43.527) actually just within the last couple of months, been talking to a lot of platform product managers to understand their experience. And everybody goes through the same thing. They're like, we've been hired by this company. We were hired as product managers. And then all of a sudden we realized that our product is a platform and we were supposed to be talking to partners, but I know we didn't realize that early on. Made a bunch of mistakes, got yelled by them. And now all we have to do is get them the right way. So ultimately that's what I'm trying to do now. Like I want to help. in sharing knowledge and all of my mistakes and learning from it was the product managers who are thinking about platforms who work for those companies, who maybe have been already working for those companies, but not realizing that this huge difference and kind of help them be successful, build successful products and also be successful with their careers. And that's pretty much kind of what led to me kind of talking about it a lot, but also mentoring other people so that I know this knowledge is not going to be lost and just... never spoke to him. Brent Peterson (21:44.686) Yeah, that's, I mean, that's really interesting. And I, I do want to make a distinguishing, a distinguishment between project management and product management. I think that project management is when you have a single, you're working on a project that you're trying to get completed product is where you have an ongoing thing. When I first started talking about project management, I gave a talk in Germany and it was too, I was, I thought I was going to be addressing the merchant. Elena (22:12.295) Mm -hmm. Brent Peterson (22:12.366) because it seems like the merchant is the one that always needs help in the project. And all the people that raised their hands were developers who said, I didn't realize we should be doing that. And it goes to show how you need to have everybody on the team and everybody kind of speaking some of that same language and doing and working in the same fashion to make it a successful project. I would imagine products has the same or everybody has to be Elena (22:36.263) Yes. Brent Peterson (22:40.494) in that same momentum, the same workflow, the same language. Elena (22:45.287) Yeah, no, absolutely. I think obviously like when you build a platform product or a consumer product, like you do need to have the project managers who are, especially like if there is a project that is being launched with the customer specifically, like all the different milestones, coordinations, what happens when, to make sure that that project or solution is being launched successfully. That's absolutely important. The role of the product manager is to make sure that we as software company make the right decisions. Ultimately, we're building a product or a platform that is going to last for many, many years. And because developers are going to be using it and relying on it, you cannot just easily go and like deprecate APIs. You cannot go and easily kind of say, oh, here I have developed this technological solution, made a mistake, it was an A -B test, I'm going to do something else. because it's a lot of investments that actually go into that. And that's why understanding this multi -layered approach to building platform products is really important. And also making sure that everybody speaks the same language, understands the importance of it, and enables all the players in the right way. Brent Peterson (24:05.454) Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. How do you think then that you as a good product manager or a mentor to product managers can help or how do you help other up and coming product managers and what is the biggest area they need help in? Elena (24:24.327) Well, I think there are multiple areas. So I started offering this mentorship opportunities for anybody who's in product management to come and talk to me, but ultimately it can be regular product management or platform products or growing and having more leadership roles and growing their area of responsibility. And... across like all of those different people who come to me and kind of ask me questions, I realized that besides just kind of what we just talked about, the platform products, a lot of people also don't realize that product management is not about just building the product that customers love. You build products that you ultimately need to sell to customers. And especially in the market that is kind of dynamic and challenging like it is right now. it's really important to build products with the right economics. Like it needs to be commercially viable for you as a company to offer, but also commercially viable for the customer to be able to purchase. And that is kind of something that in most of my mentoring sessions, I talk to product managers because everybody's like, oh, I would like to move up. I would like to grow. I would like to expand my area of responsibility. But most people think about, I want to build a product that customers love. So the only thing that I should be doing is going and asking questions of the customer. What would you love? And then I'm going to go and build this. But ultimately the product management is all about like, yes, you need to do that. Also, if you're building a platform, go also talk to your partners and ecosystem to make sure that you actually build it. For example, using the language, like development language that they can use, or not something that is completely outside of their area. comfort, but also make sure that you consider all of the different business variables that go into building a product that is going to be used for years to come. And that is a really big eye -opening for lots of people because that is yet another thing that is typically not being talked about as much in the area of product management. Brent Peterson (26:37.174) One of the things that I always and still find it hard to get project managers to do is communicate often and effectively with their client. I would imagine that you sometimes have the same issue within your own team that maybe a project manager doesn't feel as though the client needs to know something in so much time or... They just sent it to them in an email and there's all kinds of things that get lost. And I'm a big proponent of having a written report and the more urgency in or the closer the time to launch, the more documentation has to be come up with and meetings and all those other fun things that that communication has to be increased. Is it the same in the product world? Elena (27:27.131) Yeah, absolutely. I agree because ultimately, obviously everybody becomes really impatient right now, right? And things are moving really fast. So communication is definitely one of the big skills that everybody always needs to work on. But especially when you work in the client facing roles, if you're building a product for customers and regardless of the size of the customer and their significance in the world, you always work with people and people have... and the jobs and responsibilities. So it's on you to make sure that they actually know how you react to their asks, the promises that you made and kind of just basically help them be successful in their jobs as well. And yeah, now the communication is definitely something that is really key. And I would say also like overlooked quite significantly. Brent Peterson (28:20.226) From a product manager standpoint, what is your outlook now for 2024 and what are you looking forward to? Elena (28:28.743) Yeah, I like from the product management perspective, obviously, there's a lot of huge shifts, but similarly to probably every role right now was. from two angles. So the one obvious is AI. And everybody's redefining how they're be working with AI and also in the era of AI because a lot of what we do as product managers is generating ideas and thinking about what to build next. And there's lots of speculation that people have like, oh, in the future, AI is gonna be just building itself and gonna be building software by itself with, I don't copilots and all of that software. So then what is going to be the role of product managers then? So I think there's lots of things that we as product managers figuring out, but mostly to make sure that we can get help with AI to do a lot of work that is tedious, but we need to find those areas where do we differentiate and innovate in something that AI cannot come up with by itself. And I think that's kind of where this, what we just talked about, communication with customers and being closer to your customers is really important because ultimately when people talk to each other, they can come up with really interesting ideas, something that AI doesn't know because it's been trained on a lot of historical data as well, even though AI can come up with lots of new ideas as well. But like trying to use AI to help, but also bring a lot of innovation. And I think that is... That is kind of something that's a lot scary to a lot of product managers because there's definitely a fear that in the future, maybe not this year, next year, but the role of the product manager who creates specifications for developers might be eliminated. In the other area, I would say, obviously right now, everybody talks about efficiency and everybody's more concerned about the economics of kind of spend in general. So the... Elena (30:35.431) the product managers definitely need to become more financially savvy and kind of understand how to build the products that can sustain and be successful in the microeconomic situations like it is right now. And I think it's going to be a really great skill for the future as well. Brent Peterson (30:49.806) Yeah, that's a good point. Just to go back to your AI comment, there's two things on that that I wanted to talk about or at least comment on was the first one is just having AI build something without somebody ever looking at it. And then I think you started off like you're building things that customers love, right? And if you, I mean, what if like AI is going to come up with something it thinks customers love, but at the end of the day, somebody's got to use it. Elena (31:18.279) Yeah, exactly. Brent Peterson (31:18.986) AI doesn't care if they use it or not. It's like, they're gonna come up with some maybe good ideas and maybe not, but if somebody doesn't check it and that's the job of the product manager, if somebody doesn't make sure it's actually human usable, then AI is useless, right? And I also would, I guess I do agree with the generation of code. I'm guilty of that. I've... Elena (31:21.831) Yes, exactly. Brent Peterson (31:47.022) generated or made my own now API integration so I could get my dad jokes in my terminal, in my Mac terminal, which is completely useless to everybody else, but it does allow you to leverage some more tools to get you somewhere sooner. But you can also get sucked into a rabbit hole of AI hell because it thinks you need something that you don't need and. Elena (31:52.743) I'm going to go to bed. Elena (32:05.093) Mm -hmm. Elena (32:13.349) Yeah. Brent Peterson (32:13.536) Unless you're a human with actual intellectual skills to determine do I need this or not? And then going, coming back to the customers who love your product, they know you need it or not. The AI may think it does. So I think that's, that's a really interesting look on things and thank you for that. Um, so, uh, you know, we have a few minutes left here. Um, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today? Elena (32:24.519) Yeah. Elena (32:40.961) Well, we've already talked about the areas that I'm super passionate about. So if somebody is interested in the topic of platform products, and maybe they work for some, maybe they are the users and the consumers of some platforms, and would love to chat with me about that and their experience and what they love and don't love and their experience of building platforms, or maybe the knowledge that they don't have. I would totally love that. And obviously reach out to me to talk about product management and different mentorship conversations that we can have. And I totally do it for free, but I just love it because I learn as much as the people who actually reach out. Brent Peterson (33:27.246) That's awesome and I have read many of your posts on LinkedIn and I think they're incredibly valuable and very well done and thank you for that. Elena, it's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here today. Elena Leonova is the Senior Vice President of Product for Spryker. Elena (33:47.527) Thank you so much and it was a great pleasure for me talking to you as well. So thank you. Brent Peterson (33:51.95) Thank you.