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High Stakes, No Shortcuts: What Medical Device Product Managers Can Teach Us All
Episode 105
Most product management content assumes we’re all building software. But the world is physical, and some of the most consequential products are the ones where a bug isn’t just a bad user experience, it’s a patient safety issue. In this episode, JJ talks with Simone Hugar, a biomedical engineer turned product manager who started in SaaS and now leads commercialization of Class II and Class III medical devices.
They dig into what’s different when you can’t ship a quick fix or track adoption in an analytics dashboard: getting feedback from surgeons and nurses in an ICU, navigating years-long regulatory timelines, and why the higher the risk, the more rigor your decisions demand.
Simone also shares her nonlinear path into product, from coding to hospital operations during COVID to an NHS research project that changed her career. She offers grounded advice for aspiring PMs: stay curious, treat failure as “not now,” and remember that the product always belongs to the user.
At the end of the discussion, Simone turns the tables and asks JJ about the mentor who shaped her and the one trait she’s seen in nearly every Product Voices guest.
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SUMMARY
Topics Covered:
Why product content needs to cover physical products. Most PM thought leadership assumes software, but much of what gets built is physical. The episode looks at medical and healthcare products in particular, where the human stakes are highest.
Software vs. medical device PM. Medical devices move more slowly and with more structure. There are no quick theme changes, no real-time analytics, no “debug as we go.” Regulatory approval can take up to two years, and there’s no room for mistakes.
Getting feedback when you can’t instrument the product. Feedback means going into the field, working around ICU and patient-safety rules, and using paper tick-box forms with clinicians. For Class III devices that dissolve after surgery, it means multiple patient follow-ups. All of it depends on relationships with doctors.
Empathy for the people giving feedback. Nurses and surgeons are caring for patients. Asking them to fill out forms for five new devices is a real burden, so PMs have to read the room and be “more human,” not salesy.
Voice of customer at scale. Simone ran VOC forms that drew responses from about 2,500 surgeons. She kept the forms short and simple out of respect for their time. The results fed R&D, stakeholder decisions, competitive analysis and launch timing.
Clinician hesitancy. Doctors are wary of new, unbranded devices when an established, proven option already exists. Earning trust takes relationship-building, and so does equipping sales to carry the message.
Decision risk. JJ’s takeaway for all PMs: the higher the risk to users or the business, the more effort you put into getting the right data before deciding.
Simone’s career path. She went from coding to biomedical engineering, then hospital operations during COVID, then content writing (via Wattpad). That led to an APM role in SaaS, which felt like it lacked impact. Next came a master’s at the University of Bristol and an NHS MRI quality-improvement project that helped a hospital launch a new surgical pathway. She then moved into her current medical device PM role.
Advice for aspiring PMs. The path is never linear. PM welcomes all backgrounds. The core traits are loving problem-solving and being hungry to learn. Treat work as experiments, accept failure as “not now,” and don’t get attached to outcomes.
Role reversal. Simone asks JJ two questions. The first is how JJ got into product: she stumbled in from marketing, and a manager, Shelly, mentored her by welcoming endless questions. The second is the common trait across Product Voices guests: comfort with ambiguity.
Knowing when to let go. They discuss separating a problem worth sticking with from a solution that isn’t working. Type-A PMs often treat a failed idea as personal failure.
Key Quotes:
“A bug isn’t just a bad user experience, it’s a patient safety issue.”
“We can’t really debug it as we go… we need to be really specific and perfect and on point.”
“The product is always going to belong to the user, so we can’t be biased.”
“Sometimes what you think the user needs, the user actually doesn’t need.”
Takeaways:
Match your rigor to the risk.
When mistakes are costly or can’t be undone, invest the cycles to get the right data. When a fix is cheap, you can decide faster with less.
Feedback is a relationship, not a widget.
When you can’t instrument your product, trust and access become your data pipeline. Every PM benefits from building those relationships deliberately.
Respect your customers’ time. Make feedback asks as short and easy as possible, especially for busy professionals.
Tap into shared incentives. Customers who want a better product, as clinicians do for their patients, will help you build one if you make it easy.
Impact is a powerful career compass. Simone’s moves were driven by finding work that changes lives. Tying yourself to a passion protects against burnout.
Anyone can get into product. Curiosity, problem-solving and a hunger to learn matter more than your starting background.
Redefine failure. Features will miss, much like baseball’s best hitters fail most of the time. Treat misses as “not now,” and stay unattached to your own ideas.
Separate the problem from the solution. Stay committed to problems that matter, but be unbiased about dropping the wrong solution. Sometimes customers will tell you the problem itself isn’t worth solving.
Comfort with ambiguity is the defining PM trait. You’ll rarely have all the data or a clearly right answer. The job is using judgment to move forward anyway.
Mentorship compounds. Good mentors give room to be curious and not know things. JJ got that from Shelly and passes it on to her students and clients.
TRANSCRIPT
JJ: Hello and welcome to Product Voices. You know, we spend so much time in product management talking about software products and the technology products that we build, and frankly, most of the content out there and the thought leadership on product management is solely around software products. And the context is such that almost that physical products don't exist.
If someone were to go search for product management content, they may think that software products, technology products were the only thing in the world. Um, obviously, technology is a huge part of our lives, but the world we live in is a physical world, and there are so many physical products that exist in so many different domains.
So today we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about what's the same across products. We're gonna talk about what's different, um, how to navigate the product role across those, regardless of where you sit. And even maybe more exciting to me is we're gonna focus the conversation a bit on medical and healthcare products.
I, I think that there's such an importance on the human impact side to those products. In addition to being both technology and physical products, there's just such a human impact to those. And so I'm incredibly excited about today's conversation and about my guest. I have with me today Simone Hugar, a biomedical engineer turned product manager, which is just fascinating to me.
She's in the medical device space, whereas she says, "A bug isn't just a bad user experience, it's a patient safety issue," which was such a great quote, and so something to really keep at the core of product work in this domain. Simone has led commercialization for Class 2 and Class 3 devices in the UK and internationally, and started her product career in software, building features for a SaaS platform used by over a million users.
So she has a very unique perspective on this. Simone, thank you so much for joining me.
Simone: Um, thank you so much for having me. It's great being on this product podcast 'cause it's something really different from what, what's going on in the world, and I'm really excited for what's coming.
JJ: Yes, absolutely, and I can't thank you enough for finding the time for us.
Again, I love your background, so let's start with that. So I mentioned just briefly in, in your very short bio, your interesting background, that you have worked across both software and physical, and that you have a different e- education. Again, most people don't start in product, but you have gotten to product like, like myself and so many others.
Tell me more about your experience. You started pr- in product and software. You moved to medical devices. You have a healthcare background, a medical background. While the core of building products, regardless of what they are, may be similar, customer understanding, et cetera, et cetera, the operations of them may be a bit different.
Tell me what you have found across your career spanning those different types of products.
Simone: Okay. So the major differences are definitely, like, there's more structure and speed. So the speed- Mm-hmm ... is relatively slower than what we have in, like, software. 'Cause, like, we can decide today, right? "Hey, JJ, can we, like, get a different color on?"
And tomorrow's Valentine's Day or tomorrow's Halloween. "Can we get a theme? And can we get, like, colors?" And these bats are coming flying or hearts are going here, and we don't really have that concept in medical, right? Even though that's super exciting in SaaS. So how do we really sunset a feature in a medical device?
How do we really track the analytics? So what I felt what's different is, so today I released a feature in, like, a app, I can track it like that. It'll already be tracking on Google or any other analytics software that you know, okay, this is being adopted. This many users used it. This many people are having difficulty after the onboarding.
This is not happening in a medical device. You cannot track this in a medical device. So what I have really seen is that even to get feedback on how it's working on a patient, either I have to go on the field and talk to people. For example, in a Class 2, I can talk to the person 'cause it's, you can just insert the device out of the patie- insert the device in the patient and then you can ask them that, "Hey, is this okay for you?
Are you comfortable?" Or ask the nurses that, "Hey, are they okay with it? Are they, like, feeling discomfort? And how long are they feeling discomfort?" You can ask those things, but you have to be there, and it's not that easy to be there. Like, there's a lot of, like, rules and regulations going on when you can be like, okay, you have to ask the doctors, you have to ask the nurse.
It's an ICU, so you have to... It's not that accessible, right? Uh, 'cause there's a lot of, like, patient safety stuff going on and you can't really... It's not like you can go to a client and be like, "Hey, are you liking our app?" So just to have that feedback, we have made, like, forms and then anybody who's using it, for example, the surgeon, healthcare professional, nurse, anybody, they have to make a tick mark on it.
Okay, this device is showing the light at the correct time. This device is making noise at the correct time. This device is troubleshooting and then they have to call us, so there's, like, forms for this. When you think of a healthcare professional, like they're in an ICU and they're taking care of so many patients, so this is like a logistical nightmare for them as well.
When you think of that, it's like just okay, they're just gonna take, what's the big deal? No, it's really hard for them to, like- Can you imagine if there are like five new devices and they're like ticking, like ticking stuff on five different new devices, and they have to read the questions every single time, note down the time, note down the date.
Like this is a real person in like a- Right ... healthcare atmosphere, in an ICU, or like in a, somebody's there, they're tending to someone. So it's, it's more of you have to be more gentle, you have to be more empathetic towards how they're feeling and towards even the patient, towards like the whole atmosphere.
Like you need to read the room sometimes. Sometimes you can't get this data. So usually, let's say it's a class III, then sometimes it's inserted inside during surgery and it just dissolves. So you need multiple patient follow-ups as well- Wow ... to get to know if it's working on, on point or if it's having any side effects on the patient.
If the patient has a different reaction to it. Even to track this, you need to chase the doctor or have a really good relationship with them and have an established like communication platform with them that, "Hey, listen, like I need to know, is this okay with the patient? I need to know if this batch was good.
I need to know if you were able to open it fast enough to tend to the patient, if it took five seconds more, or if it took, if it took some time, if it didn't fold properly," if it's a sponge or something like that. So when you see things in that atmosphere, like it, it takes much longer to get something out there 'cause you have a lot of regulations and then you have...
It's a necessary insight, right? Because when we think, "Oh, it's just a tick mark. We need it. We need to know if it's good to make it better." So that's us from a business perspective. But when you see it like a person and you're chasing this person who's like tending to I don't know how many patients, you have to be a little more soft and you need to be gentle and you can't be all salesy and markety.
You have to be more human. So that's also an addition to when it comes to medical device. Um, and even to develop them, we need to attend international exhibitions, we need to talk to surgeons and collect forms, and then this goes to the R&D and then it goes to stakeholders, and then medical device regulations take up to two years sometimes, and then we get a new device.
So not any room for any mistakes.
JJ: Yeah. It's really fascinating. Thank you for walking the listeners through that, because I've worked in... I haven't been a product manager for a medical device company. I've been a product manager and leader in the healthcare world, but not a device. But I've worked with device companies in my work at Shyft and, and it is fascinating, the, the operational hurdles that you run into.
And when I then talk to someone who has only built software products, which is not easy to build, and I don't in any way mean to s- make it sound like that, but there aren't those logistical operational regulation issues, uh, at least not the same ones that you have, in addition to literally the materials and the engineering behind it and the supply chain and all of that.
So it's, it is just fascinating, so I love that you started with th- with that because it sets the context of how difficult this can be. And I wanna dig a little bit into, to something you talked about in terms of the, I call it the customer web, which is h- all of the different constituents and, you know, customers or players involved, and that can be a buyer, that can be a user, that can be a, in, in the kind of the medical space, it can be a surgeon, and then procurement at a hospital, and then of course the patient and other providers in the room.
And you made the point of how the providers have to provide feedback to us on the product, but that's the last thing on their mind. They can't think about that when they're literally taking care of someone's health and wellness and life in s- in, in cases. So how do you best navigate that? And even those out there listening that aren't in the medical device space will glean some good information from this, because we all have difficulties getting good customer feedback.
How do you find it in such a really difficult environment to get good feedback? How do you find the best ways to navigate that and really tap into as much data as you can from providers and other customers?
Simone: So as we all know, like doctors and nurses, healthcare providers are like super detail-oriented, and it's obviously because of the nature of their job and rightfully because they want our device to work well as much as like we do.
JJ: Right.
Simone: Uh, so the, it bear hand in hand, right? We need the best outcome, let it be a clinical workflow or let it be something related to a patient's general health. So when we know what works and w- we know what they know what works, we have like discussions. And to get this discussion happening is not really as easy as it, as I'm actually saying.
It's taking a long time 'cause some doctors actually even hesitate to read into like new devices. They're like, "Okay, if this works and this is already established safe, why do I need to try something that's like tech savvy and new and not really that recognized from..." Let's say it's not in, from a brand name, right?
So they'll be more hesitant towards that, "Okay, this brand is also not established, so what am I going into? And I'm taking my patients into this, I'm taking my team into this, my staff into this. What am I getting into?" So when it comes to those kind of conversations, you really need to establish good relationships, which is obviously a big part of product management.
You have to be very good with your clients, you need to be good with your team, you need to be very gentle also with how it comes to translating like information to sales team so that they can speak and get our word forward. So this kind of thing, the data that we collect, normally, let's say it's an established product, right?
We can just attend exhibitions and we can Get the forms out there and have a good conversation and be like, "Hey, listen, we have this form and we're trying to do a new device," and voice of customer and stuff. Well, I have actually been part of this and had made some VOC forms and got a feedback of 2,500-ish surgeons.
Wow. So we just make a form as easy as possible, as simple as possible, 'cause obviously everybody is low on time these days, and especially them, right? Being surgeons and healthcare professionals, they're like, they are very time, like particular about time. So we get this feedback and then we go forward if we need to for the R&D, and then we go to the stakeholders, and then we decide, okay, how is the competition looking like?
Is this an established, like, field to get into? What are we really looking at, like competitor-wise? Or if we need to launch, what is the right time to launch? Who are the right people to talk to? So it's not as simple as just, okay, we can just back and release it on Google Play and then do a release note and, okay, on, onboard, like we can debug the device.
Let's say there's a feature on an app, and like I've been part of software, right? So I know that you can debug it as, as we go. Mm-hmm. We can just be like, "Hey," like, "QA guys, there's a bug. I'm not able to go to the next screen." We can't really do that here, so we need to be really like- specific and perfect and on point when it comes to these things because we can't really estimate something.
It has to be well-researched, it has to be proven out there, maybe in some other form, but we need to make sure that we have a good base, run clinical trials, do, like, lots and lots of research and development, and then it comes to the pricing. So we do take feedback very seriously. So when people say, okay, customer feedback in, like, apps and stuff, it's less so serious than when it comes to these kind of conversations because it's not that difficult to kind of give them, it comes up on your screen, right?
Did you enjoy this ride? Five stars. It's not that easy. You have to go and talk to them, and to even talk to them, it takes sometimes months, sometimes, like, years-
JJ: Yeah ...
Simone: to be like, "Hey, did this work on you? Is there a reason why you didn't continue with our product? Is there something I can do to improve this product that'll help you out?"
So- Yeah ... very serious and very, like, real. Like, it's not easy to even, like, catch those people on time for us. So it really relies on customer relationship building.
JJ: Yeah. It's, it's such a fascinating way. And again, the, the folks listening out there who aren't building medical devices and don't have quite the logistical challenge of getting customers, there's still a lot of lessons there.
It's how can we tap into their need to have our product be as, as good as it can be, right? W- they, if they help us build a better product, that gives more value to them. And every, I think every product can say that. So if we can tap into that. The other thing that I think's a, an important lesson there is for us as product people to understand the risk scenario and the, uh, maybe decision risk scenario is maybe a way to say that.
E- to your point of we can't just debug this quickly, and if we can, if there is a, a, s- I'll say simple, relatively simple solution, then maybe the decisions we make can be made with less data in, in quicker time. But in, in any case, whether it's software, physical, any other product where there's a, a big risk to the user, to the product, to our business, then we have to put the, the cycles in to really get the right data.
And I think, again, regardless, this is why I'm so excited about this conversation because I love to talk about medical products, but I also think there's a learning across all of them.
JJ: So I wanna talk a little bit about your career, cause we have a lot of people in, in our audience who are either aspiring to be product managers or have become product managers and are trying to manage and navigate their careers and where they go and how they get there.
So I wanna ask you first, how did you parlay your passion for healthcare and medical into product management? What was that transition and that, that, that journey like for you?
Simone: If I'm being completely honest, I was not into biomedical engineering out of my high school. I was more into coding and software, and it was all the hots at that time, so I was really good at it, too.
But somehow, biomedical fell into my lap and I took it. I took it like a pro, and I was like, "Eventually I'm gonna do something coding heavy, but let me get into this first and see how it looks like." And I got into a couple of internships where I did research and development along with clinical trials, and I actually was in hospital operations during the COVID-19 pandemic as well.
Oh, wow. So that's probably where I was like, "Okay, this is not just a field." It was not very recognized. It's just coming into recognition, right, biomedical engineering. So I was like, "Okay, this is serious stuff. This is creating impact." And then post that I was obviously, I was straight out of graduation.
It's a hard market. So I got into what I could get in first, like freelance content writing, and I have a base on Wattpad as well, so that's how I got the content writing gig. And that led me to my first APM role as a, in SaaS. Nice. So super exciting, but I kept feeling, okay, there's something missing. And now retrospectively speaking, I know that it was impact.
JJ: Hmm. '
Simone: Cause I wasn't feeling okay, like this is great stuff. People are giving me access to everything. It's a small company, it's a startup, so they are giving me access to a lot of things, and I got to learn a lot of my early product manager skills from them, and I carry it with me to this day. But I just wasn't feeling it, like there was no impact.
Like, how am I changing somebody's life by introducing a new feature, which still is by the way, in the app to this day. But- Hmm ... it's not, I'm equipped to do better, right? I'm equipped to do more than what was, like what I was doing in software. So being from the software field and then I realized, okay, let me just do a master's.
And then I went to the UK and I got into my master's in University of Bristol, where I met a lot of people who have shaped the way I think, like Dr. Conor, who was always supporting my curiosity. And then there's Dr. Alin, who was our HOD, and he was like, he was our like rock. He was the rock that we were all stable because of.
And then I got chosen for this NHS research project, which was QRI for, QI for MRIs. And it's basically quality analysis of seeing how the MRI works throughout the day. And I had my team at NHS, Dr. Holly, Dr. Sian, Dr. Jonathan. And to be honest, they are the people why I got so passionate about my whole healthcare journey.
And I was like, "Okay, no, this is what I have to do." 'Cause they entertained my silly questions, they entertained all of the crazy, imaginative ideas that I was having, and they always encouraged me to create it into something that will work in our project. And that project actually led to something really great.
It saved a lot of time for the hospital to release a new surgical pathway for the hospitalized. So that's what kind of got me passionate about, okay, I can do PM in healthcare. Yeah. And lucky for me, at the same time when I was, like, just before I had my graduation ceremony, I got this job with AMS and my team, Beate, Ulrike, Peter, George, all of them great people, they gave me a seat at the big table.
JJ: Hmm.
Simone: As someone... I was the youngest one there, and they really trusted me with it, and they shaped me to be the PM I am today, and I'm very grateful to these people. That's my journey as to why I became a product manager in healthcare.
JJ: That's amazing. And I love the journey, and finding that passion that, that thing that drives each of us is so important.
Sometimes it's a domain or an industry that we end up tagging to our passion. Sometimes it's a product. Sometimes it's just c- just being able to work on hard problems, whatever those problems are. But I think that's such... Product management's not an easy job. Uh, there's so many moving parts. There's so many different people that we work with, and so it's not...
It, the, it's an easy job to get burned out on, and so tagging yourself to a passion I think is so important, and we're, we're blessed when we're able to work in a field that we love on a domain or within a domain that we love. So my last question for you is what, what advice would you give to someone who wants to get into product?
Wherever they're coming from, school, university, maybe they're already in their career and they're moving somewhere else. What, what advice do you think, is there a particular path or a particular development plan skills-wise to work on regardless of where you are in your career? What good advice would you give to someone who's trying to get into product or trying to move around in product?
Simone: It's never linear, right? Being a PM, I'm sure you know this as well.
JJ: Yeah.
Simone: Uh, product management is a very broad category, and as a field, we really accept a lot of kind of different backgrounds and different people. Even if you're in marketing, if you're a developer, if you're a UI designer, you can just get into product.
It- it's, we don't discriminate, right? We need everyone's mind. But what I do think is that as a PM, it's really important that you like to solve problems and that you're really hungry to learn. These two things, I feel, are what makes, like, a successful product manager. Since I come from a technical background, I see everything with a sciency lens and like an experiment, and open to see how it goes, open to see how it fails, how we can make it better.
Somebody who's not used to coming from a background where there's, like, turbulence or, like, there's something, there's a pathway where you're not able to do a breakthrough, you should know when to give up on a certain feature or a certain thing that's just, it's not clicking, right? Maybe somewhere along the way it will, but you need to be having that acceptance that, "Hey, this has failed for now, but maybe later."
It's not a, it's not a no, it's just a not now. So you need to have a very strong mindset as to, no, you can't, you can't be like, "Oh, I can't fail. I need to win." No, it's okay. Maybe you'll find a better feature or maybe you'll release something better into the world that's actually more useful. Because sometimes what you think the user need, the user actually doesn't need that.
Yeah. You'll see, you'll be surprised to see that a feature that you might have worked, like, for months on or for, like, years on, you've put so much, so many of the brains have gone into it, so many teams have gone into it, and then the users are just not interested in that feature. So you need to accept to fa- like, failure, and you need to accept that some things are just not meant to be.
And it's okay that, you know, there's no outcome. Don't be attached to an outcome and-
JJ: Yeah
Simone: The product is always going to belong to the user.
JJ: Wow, that's great. Yes, I love that. Say that again. Say that again. That's important for f- folks to hear.
Simone: The product is always going to belong to the user, so we can't be biased.
JJ: Yes. Wow. Okay, that's amazing. I really want people to listen to that because it's such great advice. The, the, we just, we don't win all the time. Quote unquote, "win," right? And by the way, I think part of that is redefining winning or redefining failure, and it's... Like I, I have this, this, this speech that I give at certain lunch and learns and events and things, and it plays on the idea of baseball and the fact that base- the best baseball player in the whole world, in the history of baseball, hit 36% of the time.
In other words, failed, quote unquote, "failed" 64% of the time, did not get a hit. Those... And it's similar in product management. We, like, all of our features aren't gonna work, and at the end of the day, it's what does a user want? No matter how much we want it to work, it's the user's value that matters. I love that so much.
That is, that's amazing. Now, all right, before I, I let you go, I think that you told me earlier that you have some questions for me, so you're gonna turn it around on me, right?
Simone: Yep. Okay, let's do it. I know, I know it, I know it's probably the first thing a guest has done on your show, so I'm really excited.
So I have two questions for you, which I'm really- Okay ... excited to, for you to answer, and I'm really grateful that I get to do this today. What got you into the field of product, and was there someone early on who shaped you in the way you probably shape your students now?
JJ: Oh, I love this question. Okay, what got me into it, I happened into product, and folks my age and kinda my generation, that, that happened a lot.
We were in some other role. I was in m- sales and marketing. A lot of people were in engineering or finance or whatever, and to your point earlier, it takes people from lots of different domains, and anyone can really be good at product if you've got kind of some foundational things. So I was working in marketing, and I had dabbled with the product team, and then I just...
They asked me to start to lead this prod- new product development, and I really literally just happened into it, and I said, "Sure, why not?" Had no idea what I was doing. So that was my first foray. But the person-- there was a person who really helped me build myself in the domain. So the next company I was at after, after that, just magically finding myself in product, I, I-- that's where I really cut my teeth in product and learned the discipline in a more formal way and was in a more formal kind of product environment and not brand new to the role, but new-ish in my product career.
And there was a manager I had who, her name was Shelli, and she was just phenomenal in that she... Similar to what you were saying about some of your professors, about just allowing me to be curious and to not know things and be okay with not knowing things and being okay to walk out of a meeting and have a list of five things that I needed to ask her, very specific, sometimes just contextual, "Why did he push back there?"
And sometimes just cultural, just... And she was always... And th- we were-- This was back in the olden days when you actually worked in an office with all the people in, around you, and so we would walk back from every meeting, and I would just pick her brain. I would ask all these questions. And so she just allowed me to do that.
She allowed me to go to meetings with her that I wasn't needed in, but I could shadow her and see things. And those are the kinds of mentors that y- we all need. It's like bringing us along, answering our questions, allowing us to live in that ambiguity that product is and be okay with it, build ourselves and who we are.
And so what I have tried to do is become that type of leader and try to teach my students, and that, that's both my client students at Shyft PM and also, of course, at Johns Hopkins, is we're never gonna know everything. You don't have to know everything. It's not about ego, it's about curiosity, and it's about bringing yourself to the table and being okay with asking a lot of questions, internal questions, external questions, being that curious person who w- is okay with ambiguity, but also is trying to get as clear as possible on anything we're doing.
I think I might have had a l- bit of a long-winded answer, but I loved the question. So I think that's the, the person who made the biggest impact on me and what I try to impart in others as well.
Simone: Yeah, it's great how you carry some of the things that people have told you. Maybe that doesn't really matter to them, but you carry it throughout your life and with integrity and morals and great.
I do have another question for you. After all the conversations you had on Product Voices, have you found one trait that may be similar in all your guests?
JJ: I th... Oh gosh, it's so hard to pick one. There's a handful of them, but I will pick one. I will pick one. That's your question. I think it goes back to that dealing with ambiguity, and there's out- offshoots of that, but we very rarely have clear-cut perfect answers in product.
We very rarely- Mm ... have all the data that we would possibly want, and we very rarely have two scenarios in front of us, one that's clearly the right answer and one that's clearly the wrong answer. Every feature that we're, that we think of could potentially be valuable. Every new product could be valuable.
Every target market, because, 'cause we work within the confines of our existing context, and most of the things we come up with can be- Yeah ... valuable, could be valuable. And so the decisions aren't easy, and they're not made with all of the information that we would like to have. So I think folks that get good in product, and frankly en- enjoy product for the long term-
Simone: Yeah
JJ: are the ones who embrace the idea that y- A plus B doesn't always equal C, and that sometimes we're gonna get surprised, and that sometimes we're going to, quote-unquote, "fail." And it's the process that's fun. It's the process, it's the curiosity, it's the ambiguity that we actually enjoy. And it's also why not, it's not for everyone.
It's not, it's not a career path for everyone because it's not, i- it's, that's just not how some people want to spend their days and their career. And so I think that I would answer it that way. Everything else is an offshoot of that, or there are- Mm ... multiple offshoots of that, how we make decisions, how we judge, how we redefine what outcomes are, those sorts of things.
But at the core of that is being okay with the fact that we're not gonna know everything, and we're still gonna have to make decisions. Yeah. And we're still gonna have to use our judgment to move the product and the business forward.
Simone: I also do agree that sometimes you need to believe and understand that, hey, this is not working out.
Uh, you- Yes, exactly what you said. Yeah I know I've seen, I've seen a lot of founders who just don't give up, and they can see that, hey, this is not working, but they're like, "No, this idea has to work." No, it's okay. You do something else. We are really creative beings. Human beings are, like, really creative. I think that innovation is never gonna end, and you can make it better.
Just talk to a couple people, maybe make it slightly different, but don't get attached to something just because you've put that much effort in it or put that many hours in it. Yeah.
JJ: Exactly, and sometimes it's the prob- the problem is worth sticking with and being very deliberate on sticking with, but the solution we're trying to fit into that, that problem isn't right, and that's where we just- Mm-hmm
we have to be unbiased. We have to say, "This is the wrong solution for that problem." And sometimes it's the problem itself, and we need to go find something else. The, the customers are telling us that, "Eh, it's... That problem isn't a big deal to me. Go solve something else for me." Yeah. Exactly. And we have to be open-minded enough, yeah.
And it's... I love that you actually mentioned that earlier as well, is sometimes we just have to know when it's not working, and we're- Mm ... we're conditioned. Most people in product have had success in some place in their career. They've been successful in university. They've been these people, these kind of Type A people who've won a lot, r- whatever that, however you define that in, in your life.
And so they feel like if this doesn't work, if I came up with this idea and it doesn't work, then I failed, and that is- Mm ... and that was such an important part that you brought up as well. So I think that's the hard part about product. It's the fun part about product, but it's the core of what... If you're gonna be in product, you gotta realize that you gotta keep pushing for data.
You gotta keep pushing for clarity. But it's not always gonna be just crystal clear. It's going to be enough, clear enough that we move forward and then go. So I love your questions, and I... Actually, I love being asked the questions, so thank you for those, those thoughtful questions. It was a great way to wrap up this conversation.
Simone, I have enjoyed you being here. Thank you so much for joining me, and for sharing your wisdom and your path, and for helping those listeners understand how you can get into product, and once you're there, how you can really dig in and be successful. Simone, thank you for joining me.
Simone: Thank you so much for having me, JJ.
It was a pleasure.
JJ: And thank you all for joining us on Product Voices. Hope to see you on the next episode.
