The Product Shop – Episode 3: Shifts in Product Management with Top Hat

 

 

Welcome to the third episode of The Product Shop. This is a show where we get to chat with product leaders to understand their journey and story when it comes to building great products.

For our third episode, we’re joined by Zhi, Senior Director of Product at Top Hat as we reflect on her roots in Singapore, how she determines what makes a great Product Manager, some things Product Managers should expect in the role, the growing pains of a startup in the growth phase and how the team at Top Hat adapted their core product offering during COVID, which resulted in a very interesting discovery that may set a new way of learning post-COVID.

Michael:

Thank you so much for joining Dexter and Zhi to start off, could you give the audience a quick summary about yourself?

Zhi:

I moved to Toronto about seven, or eight years ago for work. I’ve been here growing my own career, and I definitely feel that I wouldn’t have been able to learn all the different skillsets that I have from a PM perspective if I was still in Singapore.

Michael:

I know you spent a little bit of time in Singapore after you’ve graduated working for Games Ventures. So I guess you had a little bit of an intro to the tech scene in Singapore, but how would you say those two compare and differ?

Zhi:

Especially the past few years I think there’s been an acceleration in the government side like investment on startups, and really building up that scene. I would say back then, the startup scene was very nascent. So when you compare startups in Singapore back then, there were just a handful which means that from a product management perspective, it’s not a very known role.

If you’re looking for a product manager role it’s hard to find. Not because there isn’t anyone doing the job, but there isn’t an industry recognition that a product manager is a formal role that you should have in your company.

That’s very different from this part of the world, so I did a year and a half internship in Silicon Valley. That was my first entry point as a product manager and back then they already had a good grasp of the value that product managers bring to the table.

They were further along in understanding what this job entails. It’s so fluid even now you need to find the right fit between what the business needs are and the skill set of the individual. I’ve definitely seen a product manager excelling in a company, but just isn’t a great fit in another place. So it’s not even about the individual, it’s also about finding the right fit for what the business needs at the moment and all the different industry domains and all those different knowledge around that.

So for all those reasons in North America, there’s a better understanding about this role. There’s a better support system as well. And so the community, the people that you meet, the people that can actually share best practices with you, what the different skill set you need to have is a lot stronger in this part of the world than in Southeast Asia. The other good piece of this area is you find people who have been there, done that.

So tapping on the community piece, you are able to find more experienced product leaders to emulate or work with directly cause a lot of the pieces about being a product manager is that you’re learning on the job. Being able to learn from someone who actually has done the job before goes a long way in your own learning journey.

Dexter:

Like you said it’s a relatively new community that’s grown pretty fast over the last five, 10 years or so. But the product management role and space is still very much a black box. A product manager at company A is going to be doing very different things than company B.

How have you helped define what those roles and responsibilities are throughout the org?

Zhi:

That’s a great question. We generally look at it from three lenses. The first one I’ve mentioned already, from a business perspective, what are the key needs that we need right now.

I’ll use Top Hat as an example, we are somewhat in the growth stage right now meaning there are a lot of changes, there are growing pains. So when you are looking for an individual some of the characteristics that you want to lay down is that you’re not just hiring for the now you’re hiring for the next 12 months.

Meaning between now and then you’re looking for an individual that’s able to go to where the puck is at, someone that has a growth mindset, you need those individuals that are going to be able to roll with the punches. But if you’re in a much more stable situation as a business, you don’t necessarily need someone who is in a growth mindset who leans into the chaos. You’re going to look for someone of a different attitude or mindset in general. So I would say the business needs will lay the core foundation of what is the kind of individual we’re looking for from the get-go.

The second piece is for the particular hire that we’re making, what is the general area this individual will be owning, and that tends to have specific requirements that come in. So if it’s an area that is more customer-facing or user-facing, then you want someone with good UX instincts, good representation of those skillsets including understanding the business side of things.

If it’s something that’s more backend and more technical then you want an explicit call out about technical savviness, not to the extent that a PM needs to be able to code all our programs because that’s not what the job is about. But being able to speak that language with engineers, run alongside them, be able to keep up mentally, and just be able to speak the same language or be a good translator to the business side as well.

So those are some specific skillsets based on the role or the hire in the area that you’ll be owning. I’ll say the third piece that we try to look out for as well is whether this individual can level up the entire PMT. So again, using TopHat as an example you can either be a really good, PM with a good PM skillset or you are an individual with good domain knowledge of a certain space or you can level up the team as a whole.

So I would say those are the three things that we try to look out for when we suss out what are the things that we want to put into the recruiting side of things and  guide the job description.

Dexter:

If you were to advise your younger self of those three things, would you weigh one of them heavier than others? Like domain knowledge versus PM toolkit skills, being able to prioritize, and whatnot.

Zhi:

I would try and coach my younger self to optimize for things that are the least coachable. What is the thing that when you come in, you can provide the most value immediately.

If you optimize for domain expertise, it narrows down your job opportunities from the get-go. If I optimize for education, I will always only be able to bounce between education and also, from a value standpoint, if you’re joining a company that’s in that particular space, by default, there’s already a lot of people who know more than you.

The value that you can bring to the table from a domain perspective is much lower. Whereas if you are a PM with really good PM’s craftsmanship, that’s much more fungible. That skill set is going to carry with you no matter where you go.

And even though there are nuances in the roles that I spoke of earlier, there’s still a core foundation. The way you think about prioritization, the way you think about stakeholder management, your communication skillset, all of those things are soft skillset that is just generally applicable, no matter where you go and so that’s probably going to go a long way from a general ROI standpoint.

Michael:

I was doing a little bit of research on you and there’s this one point where you said as a Singaporean, the culture that you grew up in you were raised to be a little bit more conservative, but pragmatic at the same time. Why do you think that’s helped you become more empathetic in how you view product and how you’re iterating?

Zhi:

I think from a pragmatic perspective, the default motion that I do is what is the biggest impact we can make here. That gels really well, especially when you’re trying to negotiate and collaborate with engineering because they’re on the hook of deliverables.

They’re on the hook of actually getting things out in a timely fashion. So the pragmatic side of me resonates with them really well because a lot of it becomes. Let’s be realistic here. What is it that we can do? From a reality standpoint, then the question becomes, what is the best thing we can do within this chunk of time that we have.

That mindset feels natural for a PM to have that kind of conversation with engineering and then the conservative side comes in as well. You’re not providing any sort of false hope, especially from a stakeholder standpoint. You generally add a lot of buffer to the things that you say when you’re representing people. So those traits just help you build trust, especially when you’re representing the design engineering side.

You’re not over-committing on their behalf. It can get very tricky and you lose that trust very easily with the team that you’re actively working on.

Dexter:

I think you totally hit it right there. You need that to manage the trust of both your engineering team, your product team, but the stakeholders as well. There’s no good way to do it, but how have you handled your roadmap, and then all of a sudden it gets blown up. Do you have a toolkit or a playbook on how you communicate that back to the stakeholders and constantly keep them in the loop so they’re not, you know, coming in and exploding everything.

Zhi:

It’s definitely something that you have to keep juggling along. So one is when I am interfacing with design and engineering because oftentimes it’s the complexity that kills us. Like something that we didn’t anticipate that is going to be so difficult comes up.

So when you’re in those discussions, especially from a PM perspective, I keep drilling in where is the complexity going to come from? And you can sense from them when they kind of tell you an effort that I’m not super confident on.

What is it that we need to do to gain your confidence? Is it a spike we need to go to just do our own due diligence? Get as confident as possible when we formulate a roadmap because ultimately we’re in control. I think that’s the piece that people don’t sometimes recognize that you’re in control of what gets done when. You need to communicate for sure.

But ultimately you’re in control. That’s one piece of the puzzle, understanding what you’re putting down is realistic and is actually achievable. Then on the stakeholder side when plans need to change. My first goal is understanding the why because if I need to make that change, I can bring the context back to the team and have that conversation again.

If things are always changing on their side without a good understanding of why as a PM, you’re probably optimizing for the wrong thing. This change is coming in, is it because we feel that’s another thing that could bring us higher revenue, or are we optimizing for renewals, retention, user engagement?

What has changed in our overall business objective, or is it from a product perspective? I’m optimizing for the wrong roadmap item that’s maybe another thing that could give us the biggest bang for buck. If that’s the case then I’m accountable.

If it’s a business objective change, that probably is outside of my control. But from a company standpoint, we still need to be able to contribute to the overall success of the company and from a customer standpoint, too. I would say constantly staying in touch with the business side, understanding if something changed, why has that change to the extent that maybe that change is actually irrational, then the PM needs to step in and push back. Let’s say you wanted us to do this thing, you feel is going to give us bigger bang for our buck. I can come back saying I know, based on my analysis, this is actually the case here.

So as much as possible, make the whole conversation more quantitative, so that you have evidence to point to and say, is that change actually the best thing we should be doing for our business and for our customers. Until that line pops over, you show the chaos right from the people actually doing the work and I would say that’s a lot of what the PM’s are doing as well. You’re absorbing the chaos.

Dexter:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When we hear a lot of our clients talk about communicating to push back against irrational changes and the quantitative aspects of that and like the evidence that they use we see a lot of our clients use standard KPIs for the quarter, for example, every experiment that we’re running is going to be trying to optimize for opt-in or checkout conversion. So they’re constantly showing those same benchmarks.

So every conversation is, do we increase one, two, or three? Is that similar to how you’re operating?

Zhi:

Our top-line prominent objective needs to be super clear. Let’s say for this fiscal year, we’re all going to be focusing on renewal. Then it’s for a PM to come back with what are the roadmap items that could help move a needle of renewals.

Renewals you can slice in multiple different ways, too. So then you can have a secondary discussion around from a renewal standpoint are we optimizing for usability is usability the biggest problem? Is it because our products just flat out unusable people are not renewing or is it that they’re not seeing value, then we need to add more value to the product. I would say because our product right now is pretty big. The thing to optimize for at the secondary level is probably going to look very different from team to team.

So each PM will need to do their own due diligence to identify what is going to be the biggest bang for our buck, all charging towards renewables. The objective is like a rallying cry because beyond renewals you could optimize for a new setup. But in our sake, renewals is the key thing to optimize we are basically saying no to any investments relating to a new sale, or maybe the lower priority.
So then it gives the PMs, a general framework around out of all the different product backlog ideas that I have which one should I let bubble up based on this objective that’s been set out and how does it relate to the overall business strategy as well?

Because again, for a company of our size, you probably have a few different business strategies in play. Renewals are probably just one of them. Then maybe other departments are focusing on new sales since it would be very weird if no one in the company is thinking about new sales.

It’s just that product this half of the year is not actively contributing to that. So sales you’re on your own kind of figuring things out. We’re going to be actively working with our CS counterpart to make sure that we have a handle on renewals for instance.

Dexter:

How far ahead are you normally setting these objectives?

Zhi:

I would say some of the contexts here are unique to Top Hat in the area that we are in. So in higher ed, we are very much a seasonal business, it works by the academy semester. August to December, that’s our peak season. Right now, May to July, that’s our dead season cause you don’t see a lot of summer courses running.

Because fall is our peak, a lot of the sales motion is sometimes fall to fall. So sometimes we do need to give a longer time horizon for sales to understand a little bit more where we’re going. The general rule of thumb that I think a lot of product teams do as well as anything that is now to three months we’re hyper-competent.

We want to get those things out the door. Especially for the B2B side, on the sales side, on the CS side, they can speak confidently about a three-month timeframe. That is on us to make sure that the team can stay focused within this time period.

Anything that’s three months out, it starts getting fuzzier and fuzzier. Then those are all subject to change and you can’t hold us accountable to timeline perspectives. So we generally abide by that. We constantly remind people at every chance we get that roadmap is a living document. It’s not a static piece where when this block is identified, it’s always going to stay there.

Michael:

That’s super interesting how you talk about being in ed-tech specifically that it’s more seasonality, but how do you go about your feedback loop? For us, it comes mainly from sales and tech support, but for you where are the different areas that you grab your feedback loop, is it many students, professors? What’s that combination look like?

Zhi:

Customer input is definitely an area that we look at and there’s a few different channels that we get feedback from users directly. The other bucket of feedback is internal, and so again CS is a good team that we work with very closely because they are essentially a proxy to customer sentiment. From a value perspective, and also from user experience standpoint, that department is one that from a product perspective, we stay very close towards right now. Beyond that in terms of input, we obviously look at our data as well to see where are the different areas that people are touching the most.

That’s also signaling the areas that people find the most value from as well. And then the higher pieces, which is looking at the market, especially for higher ed last year, just trigger a bunch of change because of COVID.

I think because of that it accelerated a lot of people’s perceptions of digital adoption. For instance, if I am a professor who has been teaching in a certain way for decades, now we would have had a lot of uphill battles to convince the professor you should think about introducing technology in the way you teach.

There’s a whole laggard situation going on as well with COVID that’s not an objection that can come up, you need to adopt the technology. So that opened up a lot of people’s perceptions about what technology could offer for them in a good way, but I think it also changed some of the teaching behavior.

In the grand scheme of things, one of the things that the industry right now is talking about flexibility for students. You can dial in anywhere you want, you can participate in ways that you can. So I think that changes a lot of the ways people are thinking about teaching, which naturally should change some of the ways that we’re thinking about adding value to our customers too.

The market is a channel at which we think about how to draw upon what things we want to invest from a roadmap perspective. And then the last thing is probably from a business strategy standpoint, from a go-to-market perspective, what segment do we want to target? How do we stay in alignment with sales or with marketing? So that’s more of the top-level, strategy alignment that would be another piece for us to align on that could influence the roadmap as well.

Dexter:

This pandemic and everything has completely thrown everything upside down. Especially last year in the early stages everyone was just scrambling and trying to refigure out what their 2020 roadmap looked like and realistically, what they’d be building.

We had a bunch of customers that had to pull forward a bunch of features that they weren’t planning on making til like 2023. One of our customers, they’re a fast-food chain in the US and they were planning for their physical stores they were going to geo-fence the parking lot. So you would park and then check in from your phone. Like, no, we need to do that now. So things like that are there such drastic changes in your goals and your alignment from something that you had done like probably a year ago from planning.

Did anything like that happen with you and how did you handle that?

Zhi:

Yeah. I think the context for us is pre-COVID. The sweet spot for Top Hat is in-class interactions between professors and students that’s the space that we play in. Because of COVID, that’s not an arrangement that was happening across all our customers. Everyone was online, every course was remote and so a lot of our bread and butter value proposition was just not relevant in that year itself and so we needed to react very quickly to stay relevant as a teaching toolkit for our instructors and professors as well. So I would say last year we brought to market a few different net new products as a means to stay relevant for our instructors.

Also obviously the business impact that it would have if we did make some of those drastic moves that we needed to do. For instance, we launched this product called virtual classroom, which is a way for instructors to deliver their course fully throughout our platform so you don’t have to turn up, Zoom, turn up Microsoft Teams. You just have this one platform to go to and everything is delivered there and it worked nicely, especially for a lot of the returning customers who may already have their course materials on our platform already. So it’s just a button to hit and you can deliver your course and you can still engage with your students again, synchronicity, virtually through our chat functionality. For instance, get good reactions from your students, get a pulse on how they’re doing are they understanding sort of keeping pace.

So like a simulation of what professors would want to be able to do if he or she was in person with their students, except the only difference is it’s run online virtually. So we launched a new product, virtual classroom over a span of three to four months, really from ideation to hitting the ground running or delivering something.

I think we at best had four months to really just get something together for the fall semester. Then we also launched a product called remote proctoring again, it’s in reaction to some of the mid-semester moves online back in March and April when it was basically in the middle of a winter semester.

Then by the time the remaining activities or midterms were exempt. So they’ve already gone through a big chunk of the teaching materials. You’re at the end of trying to assess whether your students actually learned the materials or not and so we launched remote proctoring.

On top of our assessment offering, so a way for instructors to run their exams, especially if you planned on running those exams physically in an exam hall or an exam center, none of those things were going to be happening. So you were kind of scrambling to figure out how do I actually run my midterms or run our exams, all those different tests.

Remote proctoring became a scalable way for instructors to run those tests through the Top Hat platform, without having to physically invigilate or proctor every single student. So there is an algorithmic detection aspect to the overall offering itself. But that’s another example of key needs that we’re addressing as a reaction to the circumstances that a lot of instructors were put into because of the transition.

Michael:

Yeah, that seems a little hectic. You’ve been very reactive and trying to build new products. That must’ve been so stressful.

Dexter:

Are you guys in the office and then went remote?

Zhi:

Yeah, during the same time period, March and April, we were also busy trying to get everyone to work from home as well.

If I look back, I was super proud with how we all stayed connected while in the midst of all this chaos, especially I think one thing that you asked earlier as part of your question, none of those two things that we wrote out into the market were on the roadmap.

If you think about it, we’re more a physical lecture engagement product. The notion of the virtual classroom or the notion of remote proctor were never things that we thought our target customers would even find value from. The whole research process, identifying what we need to do, what’s going to be valuable.

Michael:

That seems very hectic. I guess now that things are starting to stabilize a little people are getting vaccinated there’s a potential that everyone has to have one vaccine if they’re going to attend on campus. So after virtual classroom and remote proctoring what’s that next phase or what’s that next big feature that you guys have been building and have you guys been able to plan effectively for that, for this coming fall?

Zhi:

Yeah, definitely. I think in terms of coming out of this chaos and getting into a state of stability, the way we’re thinking about our roadmap right now is very customer-centric. Meaning when we talked to all these different professors, cause we definitely stay in touch with them and we do ongoing calls with customers.

When you take a pulse on where their head is at for this coming fall especially, people are actually looking for normalcy. They’re not looking for a new feature. They’re not looking for something different. They’re looking to get back to where they were a year ago, or two years ago at this point and so a lot of the emphasis from a product perspective was intentionally about let’s make sure we have a product that’s able to welcome all the professors. Just make sure they have a very smooth experience this fall that we are not introducing a bunch of new features so that they have to relearn everything as well.

We want to definitely offer a sense of familiarity for the professors that are coming back to the product this coming fall. We were intentionally not trying to introduce too many new features just to meet the mental state of where a lot of our customers are probably going to be at when they’re teaching this coming fall.

Having said that, we definitely have laid down a few different investments that will move the needle in terms of hardening the core value propositions of the product.

So we do have a few different concepts in mind, but a lot of those are actually informed by some of the conversations that stem out of COVID. The whole thing about students’ inclusivity, access, and equity. How do we make sure that every single student is able to engage effectively in a fair manner, no matter their own individual circumstances?

That really came to light during COVID because every student was having different wifi access at home. Everyone has different financial situations, some of them may have needed to work alongside being a student as well just to contribute to a family’s financial situation.

The notion of flexibility and meeting students where they are became a really key guiding principle in how we thought about the other product investments that we needed to make. And with that, making sure that we have a lot more options available for our students.

For instance, one of the improvements that we’re making this coming fall, this whole notion of inclusive access is basically a program in the U.S. but the idea is to offer options for students on how they might want to think about paying for some of the course materials that are needed for a course. So beyond credit card transaction which was already available on our product, or going through your bookstore and buying an access code. Now you can almost defer the payment on your course material and bill it through your tuition and through this program, it needs to be the cheapest option available to students across all the other channels that’s available to them.

There is a bit of affordability of play as well as part of this program. So really getting to the heart of how we can move the needle on the student experience are some of the things that we’re thinking about as well. I’ll say the other thing that we are going to be looking at again, part of the conversation that the market is having right now is how we assess students.

Traditionally, a lot of emphasis is on some of the higher stakes exams, midterms and finals. Those tend to take up 60 to 80% of the course grade. But during COVID the industry realized that a lot of these high-stakes exams are very inaccessible.

Inequitable for certain student groups, not everyone is able to participate in these high-stakes exams in the same way as the rest of the student population. So then one of the shifts that we’re seeing from the market is transitioning into lower stakes but frequent assessment. So then if you miss this one exam, you’re not going to immediately be penalized for 60% of your course grade. That’s drastic, if you’re having multiple quizzes, along the way, if you miss one, that’s not the end of the world, you can catch up.

So I’ll say that’s a shift as well that we would need to take into consideration our whole assessment strategy as part of our platform. A lot of our guiding principles and how we’re thinking about the investments you need to make is really staying in touch with some of the active conversation that’s happening across the industry.

Michael:

I love that you’re focusing on a flexible solution and equitable solution for students because I remember when I was in university, I had an ankle injury and I couldn’t attend my biology class. I was limping in the snow on crutches, it took me like an hour to walk which usually only took me like five, 10 minutes, but I still had to go to class cause there was no other way otherwise I’d miss the lecture.

That’s super interesting that you are leaning towards that more equitable solution for a lot of students. So seeing it’s going to be  a hybrid type of solution for ed-tech and learning, do you see the market where the only benefit of a student going to campus would be more for social reasons? Like it’s going to evolve into a more hybrid solution of learning now where you don’t have to attend a lecture, but you can just access it through Top Hat. Where do you see that going now?

Zhi:

I guess one of the biggest learning that we had over this whole COVID situation is the importance of connection. The connection can come through a few different ways but in the context of a course the relationship between the instructor and the students and the relationship between students and students who are amongst their peers. I would say at face value it might look like if we provide this hybrid option, why would students still go to lectures.

However, we actually find that some students still want to have a close relationship with their professors. Both for pragmatic, but also motivational reasons. What keeps the students going is knowing that there’s someone else at the end of the course that cares about your success.

And oftentimes that’s the professor, that’s the instructor, that’s the educator, that’s teaching the course. So having a good rapport, having that close relationship may not have to be every single lecture. That’s where the flexibility kicks in. But from time to time, I do appreciate it if the professors know my name, know that I’m a student in their class, that’s a relationship that I think maybe not all students, but some students definitely gravitate towards that.

The other more pragmatic reason is if I have a good relationship with my professor, they are going to be able to write me a good reference letter or a good recommendation letter. So having a good personal relationship, with a professor has some value regardless, and I think it will be very difficult to build that if you are purely staying virtual throughout the course itself.

Then the other piece is the student peer-to-peer relationship. I would say one of the reasons why you go to university is to build up that network that you can stay in touch with post-university.

When it comes to student bonding there are a few different ways you can build that inside and outside of class. So in some ways, it will be a missed opportunity that students are not capitalizing on building a relationship with the cohort of students that’s taking the same course as them because more likely than not, they’re probably going to be your peers in the same program.

You’re probably going to be seeing them a lot and also, I think it’d be very difficult to build that kind of relationship purely online. That has come up almost more of a fear that if we offer this flexibility, is it a catch 22 situation where that’s going to cost students not coming to class but in reality, I think a lot of the professors are not seeing that really came to play even over COVID. Cause a lot of them needed to pre-record their lecture and put it online, but they do still see a level of engagement or participation from their students.

Dexter:

I can confirm that fear is a good motivation for school. Whether it’s a positive or negative relationship with the professor. I remember we had name cards in front of everyone’s seat. So if you weren’t prepared, prof could just call out your name and ask you to answer.

So for better or for worse, a relationship is a good thing in interacting education. I wanted to ask you, what are some products or consumer apps that you use? What are some of your favorites, what are you spending most of your time on?

Zhi:

Lately, I haven’t been sleeping very well so I have been using this app called Sleep Cycle.

Michael:

I’ve been using that for a year and a half.

Zhi:

I got onto a paid subscription. I find it helpful to understand my sleep patterns and if I am not feeling very energetic or my mental state is not very well the next day I would look back and say, is it to do with my sleep? They give you a lot of data, but they try to trim it down for you to make it a bit easier to consume.

Michael:

I get a little skeptical sometimes about Sleep Cycle, because I’ve been using it for a while, but it gives you your score, like your percentage of how well you slept the next morning. But sometimes I take a look at it and that’s the first thing I see. If it says like 50%, then I know oh, okay I had a bad sleep. I can’t tell if it’s pre-conceiving me into bad sleep or did I actually have a bad sleep? So I get confused sometimes, sometimes it hits 95% and I feel like I didn’t have good sleep, but I guess you got to take it with a grain of salt.

Zhi:

Yeah, for sure. I think it’s more the trend right now.

Michael:

It’s definitely interesting to see the patterns as you collect more data you can kind of see what the common pattern is and how well you slept.

Zhi:

On the work side, I think because we’re working from home we’ve been or trying FigJam, I highly recommend it. We are really enjoying that as a brainstorming ideation tool. Basically like Miro, but we all find the experience to be a lot more social. There are different stickers you can put on people’s ideas, you can be more fun with it. It just adds this social element to the overall brainstorm process. It’s already awkward to do brainstorming virtually anything that could break that barrier helps.

Dexter:

If you had the choice or maybe you do, would you want to stay remote or would you want to go back in?

Zhi:

I wouldn’t mind if we fully reopened and that everyone needs to go back in person. I would mind if we stay fully remote. Those are definitely options that I’m willing to explore as well.

Dexter:

I feel like work from home remote work, probably okay. But the remote socials, I’ve had enough of. I will not do another happy hour over Zoom. I will do anything else, except that.

Zhi:

It’s just very awkward to have back and forth because if you speak over each other, you’re not going to hear anything.

Michael:

You can’t have side conversations.

Dexter:

My favorite though is at the end. Where everyone is kind of looking around to see who’s going to be the first one to be like, I got to run. Okay. Bye, bye, bye. And then all the windows disappear. Is there anything that you wanted to call out?

Zhi:

I’m always available on LinkedIn. If people want to chat, I’m always open to meeting with other product folks. Could be PMs, design, engineering, people with interesting things to talk about.

Michael:

Well, Zhi thank you so much for joining us on this episode. We appreciate you sharing your insights and perspective into the product world and your journey at Top Hat. I’m sure the audience will definitely find some golden nuggets of knowledge in this episode, but once again, we want to give a big shout-out to Taplytics for letting us host this segment.

If you have any questions for Zhi, feel free to reach out to her on her LinkedIn, as she’d be happy to connect with some fellow product folks, but until next time we hope you guys enjoy listening to this episode and stay tuned for more.