Four Lessons from Ian Hassard, Senior Manager of Product Management at Auth0

Whether you’re new to the product management field or a seasoned professional, it’s always valuable to learn from your peers’ lived experiences. From learning more about their career path to predicted trends to general tips and advice, there’s no shortage of lessons to be learned that can ultimately help you develop and become a better product expert yourself.

We recently sat down with four product experts and asked them about their experiences in this field. While you can watch the full hour-long interview here, this post breaks down four of the key lessons we learned from Ian Hassard, senior manager of product management at Auth0.

We asked Ian to weigh in on four key questions:

1. What are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?
2. What are some trends you anticipate happening in the next several years?
3. What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?
4. What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

About Ian: Ian Hassard is the senior manager of product management at Auth0. He’s been in the product management space for 15 years now and loves that his roles always involve perpetual problem-solving, iteration, and innovation.  He follows a doctrine of pragmatism, growth hacking, full-stack marketing, and luck.

→Watch the full interview here

Lesson 1: What do you think are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?

“Managing up with data. You’re always going to have an executive with an opinion and a strong opinion at that. Probably the person who started the company, they might come in and sit on your desk or send you a Zoom or a Slack message and say, “I want to go this direction.” And the only way you can combat that is having your research lined up and being able to combat that with real-world data to support or disprove that.”

Lesson 2: What are some trends you anticipate happening in the next 3-5 years for your particular industry or the role of product management as a whole?

“What’s interesting on our side is the Auth0 thought process and philosophy is every company is a tech company or it’s fast-becoming a tech company. Every industry is starting to adopt technology in interesting ways.”

Lesson 3: What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?

“I was exposed to this concept of Metcalfe’s Law, which is the value you get out of a community is the square of the number of participants or members of that community. And it’s totally true that you just need to make sure that all your stakeholders are as close to what you’re generating as possible so that you can get the value of that large group reviewing and participating with the content generation, creation, and moderation.”

Lesson 4: What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

“I can’t underscore enough the importance of getting out of your comfort zone, out of your office, putting yourself in the chair next to your customer, which is being difficult the last year and a half, maybe with a mask on sitting and observing your customer and seeing how they work with it I’m a firm believer of getting out, meeting up with user groups, and setting up events where possible.”

Download the eBook to read the interviews here or watch the full webinar here.