Female Disruptors: Sophie Lalonde of Productboard On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
I would try to take on every request, and carry the team if needed, all because I thought that’s how I could best contribute. After getting burned out a few times, I realized my best self wasn’t coming through, I wanted a change. I started focusing on what sustainable success could look like, and the more I learned, the more I started seeing anecdotes about putting yourself first. It seemed counter-intuitive to me, but as I tried the different tactics, I started seeing a difference — a difference in the way my better mood impacted my team, a difference in my collected thoughts during a presentation, a difference in my output towards the things that actually mattered because I had deprioritized what didn’t matter. I was in almost all regards a better employee, boss, teammate, friend, contributor, and leader.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sophie Lalonde.
Sophie Lalonde is Group Product Manager at Productboard. Sophie has a unique POV when it comes to product as she began her career in venture capital and management consulting at Bain, helping entrepreneurs strategize building products to different industries, and then was the first ever GM of Churn at Box, where she was responsible for 100M SMBs.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Jill of all trades, master of none is what likely best describes my early career. My experiences ranged from asset management to consulting to venture capital. While it made for some great learning opportunities, and many of the jobs I did enjoy, I left business school at the University of Chicago knowing that I wanted to finally become an expert in a specific field.
Taking the time to find the right field was incredibly time intensive, and at times discouraging, but it ended up paying dividends tenfold now that I put in the work then. Something for me finally clicked when instead of focusing on what sounded cool, I started digging into the personality traits that would make someone successful in each department or field. It started to become more evident that product management would best leverage my natural and learned skill set, and I was pleased to see this come true at Box. I had the opportunity to work with a very high-functioning engineering, product, and design team, and I found ways to retain Box’s $100M self-serve book of business. ,
After Box, I started working at my current company Productboard where I serve as a Group Product Manager, building our first free offering and more recently our Customer Board. Working at Productboard is a very “meta” experience as product managers are creating a product for product managers that helps them engage with their customer base for feedback to better their own products. Thus I constantly have to check my biases and not just build a tool for myself, and listen to hundreds of product managers talk about their pain points and what they would like to be solved.
Jill of trades no longer, burgeoning product expert 🙂
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
69% of product teams say that the products and features they release are not consistently well-received by customers, and Productboard is on a mission to empower our customers to build the right products to market, faster. Leading brands like Toyota, Microsoft, Zoom, Volkswagen, and UiPath use Productboard to understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and align everyone around their roadmap. Without putting customer centricity at the center, brands would never evolve to meet the dynamic and changing needs of customers and risk falling behind the competition.
From my personal perspective, what excites me most though is how fast our market is growing in terms of size and maturity. We have prospects that tell us overnight every brand manager at their CPG company has become a product manager. We have customers who tell us that their number one goal of the year is their digital transformation. So I’d venture to say that the most disruptive work Productboard does is educate a new set of product managers on how to do their jobs well. Given that it is a role that I love, it really energizes me to see junior product managers come up and tell me they follow Productboard’s academy to create the right prioritization frameworks or shareable roadmaps. Productboard is not just a solution, but it is defining a new category.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I confused UI and UX…in front of the CEO. Facepalm 🤦♀️. One has to do with how it looks and the latter has to do with how it is used.
My lesson learned here was that taxonomy matters. Speaking confidently, like you are encouraged to do in consulting, only helps you so far in product if the content of what you are saying is correct. I’ve taken this lesson to many facets of my job now — I do not pretend to know what I don’t know. This allows my engineering and design counterparts to educate me and also feel empowered to become an equal part of the triad relationship we are striving towards. Bottom line, you’ll look smarter if you admit you don’t know something than confidently saying the wrong thing.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Where disruption can go wrong is when a company takes too big of a chance without doing its market research and understanding the right customer problems to solve. A product manager’s most valuable tool (other than Productboard 😊) is customer feedback and not just any feedback, but the question behind the question. What is the customer trying to solve, not what feature is the customer asking to be built.
If you disregard the problems, needs, and expectations of customers, even if your product looks snazzy and innovative, is it truly disruptive?
For example, Google Glass fits into this category. It seemed next generation but mostly focused on the technology because Google ‘could’ build it. Even the positioning around the release did not talk about the value customers got from it, and if we are honest with ourselves the technology was more about newness than it was about solving customer problems. Ultimately this ‘disruptive’ new product flopped.
Some of the best disruptions I have seen keep it simple (think Gusto’s slimmed-down HR platform) or play into leveraging something already existing (think Amazon Web Services). It doesn’t have to be flashy to be innovative, but it does have to matter to the core audience you are targeting. If your team cannot communicate the problem, the why, and the solution goes back to talking to prospects and customers. It’s better to spend that extra cycle than contribute to another feature that will not be used.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We are just getting started at Productboard! We are going to shake things up by focusing on personas outside of product managers in the coming years. We believe that product is a team sport and not just a vertical category. I want to be at the forefront of solving friction and problems for stakeholders working with PMs on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. After all, great product teams are 40% more likely to beat the Rule of 40 performance metric.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
I respect that you asked this question, and I hope you respect my answer as well, because well there isn’t really a perfect answer, and it is very nuanced. I’m often asked this type of question — a question that has to do with how women face more obstacles in the workforce. And to me, it always feels like a mental conundrum, one that leaves me with not the best feeling. While I certainly believe in the challenges women face, and I’ve written at length about imposter syndrome, I also realize it takes away space that I could otherwise leverage to share my expert viewpoint. This question, after all, would not be asked to my male counterpart, and this 129-word paragraph would have been dedicated to a different topic.
One way to think about it is that talking about gender equity and inclusion is more important than any product topic, and I do believe that to be true. However, then is the right way to gender equity and inclusion by giving women less time to shine as experts? Is the best way to inspire the new generation of women to highlight the obstacles or the successes? I really don’t know the right answer to those questions yet, but what I do know is that I am inspired every day by women in technology. Whether it is Caroline Clark bringing Arcade from 0 to 1, Marie Gassée consulting Silicon Valley on what it means to be product-led, or Jasmine Shells approaching employee engagement from a different perspective, these women are paving the way.
In product, when we aren’t necessarily sure what we should say yet, we call it a divergent thought, a process that helps solidify with time some convergent thinking. In the years to come, I look forward to having a better answer to this type of question when my thoughts start to converge more. Until then, I welcome different perspectives on the matter, especially from other women who have been asked this type of question.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
As the Federal Aviation Administration likes to remind us before every takeoff ‘put your oxygen mask on before helping others.
This took me a really long time in my career to realize. I would try to take on every request, and carry the team if needed, all because I thought that’s how I could best contribute. After getting burned out a few times, I realized my best self wasn’t coming through, I wanted a change. I started focusing on what sustainable success could look like, and the more I learned, the more I started seeing anecdotes about putting yourself first. It seemed counter-intuitive to me, but as I tried the different tactics, I started seeing a difference — a difference in the way my better mood impacted my team, a difference in my collected thoughts during a presentation, a difference in my output towards the things that actually mattered because I had deprioritized what didn’t matter. I was in almost all regards a better employee, boss, teammate, friend, contributor, and leader.
For practical advice, here are a few things to try out. Asking others to prioritize their requests for you, going on a 15-minute walk when you feel really busy, disabling Slack notifications on your phone, getting outdoor sunlight before 9 AM, happiness meditation, setting boundaries, empowering others less busy to take on the work, and above all forgiving yourself for not being perfect.
Let me know how it goes. And if there is anything else I should add to my list to try.
How can our readers follow you online?
I’m on LinkedIn at Sophie Lalonde.
I’m on Twitter at SophieALalonde.
Check out Productboard’s blog.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Sophie Lalonde of Productboard On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.