Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here from Philly Tech Entrepreneurs with another episode and community feature. Today, we are speaking with Scott, the truck. Scott is your friendly product aficionado, web wizard, coach, and devoted dad who has cultivated a reputation as a thought leader in the space. He’s recently launched his company, Head for Product, where he is transforming his passion for products into a consulting and blog development venture. He has over 12 years of experience and has done things from payment APIs, white-labeled app platforms, and just generally brought products to life. When he’s not doing product-related stuff, he is, man, I believe he has a young daughter and a dog as well to take care of. Scott, how are you doing today?
Scott: Hey, I’m doing well, you know, middle of a heatwave in Philly here, so just trying to stay cool.
Dave: Yeah, the camera quality, we’re not at the level yet where we can see beads of sweat on your face, so it’s good that product has not advanced too far here. Tell us about your relationship with Philadelphia. Are you originally from the area, and what part of Philly are you living in now?
Scott: Yeah, so I’m probably a little bit newer to Philly, but I mean, about five years now. So, I live up in Northern Liberties with my spouse, pup, and daughter that you had mentioned. We came down here; I was in New York for about five years prior to this but originally from Minnesota. And landed in Philly after being in New York for a bit and just wanting something a little bit closer to family. And like, Philly’s been a pretty nice kind of home for us lately. It’s very approachable, and like I think the tech scene is a lot of fun. There are some good communities that are building here in Philly, and it’s nice to see post-pandemic, a lot of those kind of coming a little bit more back to life in the last, I feel like, six months to a year or so. It’s been really nice to see.
Dave: Yeah, I agree completely. I also moved here about five years or so ago, and it was just enough time to make a few friends, and then, you know, the pandemic came, and I lost all of them one or two years, and then it’s like, okay, now we’re not allowed to leave the house. But it’s, you know, but I hear you on the tech scene and just general events, communities starting to perk back up again. PTE was something that, you know, existed before and then kind of became defuncting out. So, here we are. You’re up in Northern Liberties, you know, and you’re working out of Indie Hall. I think we have talked about some of the community specifically that you’ve been following and working out of.
Scott: Yeah, so I mean, I’ve really kind of loved the Indie Hall community. They’ve been a co-working space since like 2006 or so. I think they’re celebrating their 17th birthday, which is really cool, but they moved in basically across the street from where I live, which was really wonderful because I knew about them quite a bit. And they’re really connected with a lot of different Philly kind of tech and independent creators, which has been really nice to be able to come in and work with a bunch of other people doing kind of similar stuff to what I’m doing. And through there, they host a lot of different events, which has been really nice. The Philly JS Club has been one that I’ve also been pretty active in. The founder, Joe Woods, has been, or well, he kind of took it over, and he’s been really helping coordinate along with a few other people to bring some good programming, some tech-focused programming. And they host them out of Indie Hall here, which has been really nice, as well. Plus, they do some virtual events, some hack nights too. A lot of fun to be a part of.
Dave: That’s cool, definitely something we can learn from. I’ve been emailing a little bit with Alex, who I believe runs Indie Hall, just about potentially maybe using their event space for some stuff that we’re looking to do. And I definitely need to connect with Joe as well. I know he’s a member of our Slack workspace, and you learn more about what they’re doing at the JS Club. Speaking about individuals creating businesses or projects, things like that, you recently started Head for Product. So, I would love to learn a little bit more about where you’re thinking of kind of going with that, where the name came from, and just sort of generally, you know, what you’re working on.
Scott: Yeah, so I’ve been helping companies, mostly in-house, build products. I love building products, you know, software products more specifically. And I’ve been doing that for a while and just decided to venture out on my own to both help individuals and companies kind of up their product management games. So, the idea is that like if you’re looking to make your first product hire, maybe you’re a company of like a dozen or so engineers and things are going well, but maybe things are a little less organized than you would like, and you’re thinking about bringing in a product manager to help kind of help translate that vision into the execution side of it. Like, that’s where I can kind of come out, come in and help part-time, which is a little bit more cost-effective, and like one, get you going right away, but then also help you strategize for the future and like, this isn’t necessarily like, oh, bring me in full time. It’s, I’m here to help you figure out what your next steps are, of like, maybe you do need a full-time hire. This is the seniority level that you should be looking at, and like here’s how you grow that team.
Dave: So, yes, this sort of made functions. Go ahead.
Scott: I was gonna say too, you asked about the name too. It was just kind of a quick thing of just like, hey, what domain is free? And it was like, oh, Head for Product. It’s kind of like, you know, I’ve got a head for product, but also as a company, you should head for product, like be a little bit more product-led in that sense.
Dave: Nice. Okay, so there’s a little bit of a play there, which I like. And you’ve got the brain as a logo, so everything makes sense. You know, with respect to product management, I’m curious because you had mentioned maybe you have a team of 12 engineers, and you’re thinking about, you know, bringing on a product manager and stuff, and, you know, I’ve done some bootstraps, you know, software products on a smaller scale, never had a team of 12 engineers, never had more than probably four or so. And that’s kind of the owner. I usually sort of function as the product manager. And so is that kind of the transition that you see where maybe like the owner, the founder, tends to kind of be the one leading the product, and then at some point, they sort of realize that, hey, this is a big enough role that we need someone else? I mean, what do these 12 engineers doing without, you know, a product manager to kind of guide them along the way?
Scott: Yeah, you really kind of nailed it right there. Product management as a practice exists in any organization, whether or not you have a product manager there. It’s all the stuff that kind of glues the team together, and at a smaller company, like you said, it typically falls on the founder. But, you know, the once you start growing a little bit bigger, that role of the founder can change quite a bit. They might be focused more on partnerships, some of those early sales, and those sorts of things. And like, a great example of a company that I’ve been working with, one of their engineers was like, oh yeah, our founder, he basically tells us what to do in Slack threads every once in a while, kind of sporadically. Like, we know he’s got the vision of where we need to go, but like, that’s just how it gets communicated. And it’s like, he’s like, it kind of works, but like, if we add like another couple of engineers, this is going to get messy really quick. So, it’s really like me coming in and working with that founder to understand the vision and then help really translate and do the product work that’s required to move teams forward, like writing out clear product requirement docs, like maybe coming up with a list of like the 20 features and then helping the team prioritize what should we actually do first and like kind of helping really kind of clarify and communicate that vision across the teams. So, yeah, it’s kind of a nice sweet spot, and it’s a fun place to be. I love kind of zero to one and like building stuff from scratch, which is a lot of fun.
Dave: It is. It is cool. I’m a big product guy myself, so I probably never wanted to give up the reins to anybody.
Scott: It’s hard to let go of the baby, right?
Dave: But, you know, at the stage where you’re kind of coming in, as you mentioned, you know, the wheels have been in motion. I imagine that the software development team may have already been, for lack of a better word, making some mistakes or just, you know, running into some sort of challenges. Sounds like organization is kind of one of them. What are some of the typical things that maybe you know, we don’t know that they’re a problem until, you know, someone with experience comes in, maybe is able to kind of point them out, or, you know, that you often see when you, at the time you enter?
Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think a lot of what happens is again, once you start hiring, you know, your first couple of engineers are probably going to be pretty built in on the mission, you know, hopefully, they’ll kind of have a pretty good idea of what you’re building. But then, you know, once your team starts specializing, and you’re like, oh, hey, I really need that really good React front-end person because we need this website to be slick, and we’ve got some cool animations, and like, they’re not necessarily hiring for the mission. And like, to be able to help communicate that becomes really kind of important. So, like, one of the big issues that I see is that somewhere along the lines, the who we’re building for gets lost. Like, the user of your human building software for other humans, but a lot of times, you know, when you talk to the engineering teams, they’ll talk about the feature, like, I gotta put this button here, but they’re not really connected to what the problem is, and like, that can cause you some really bad problems down the future. Like, it might create unengaged engineers because they’re just pulling tickets off the backlog. Like, if the most successful teams that I’ve seen are engineers who are engaged with the problem because they’re gonna come up with the cool creative solutions. So, like, you don’t necessarily, as a product manager, my role isn’t to come in and say, put this button there. It’s to come in and say, hey, here’s the problem that we have. Maybe here’s a suggested solution, but like, here’s the problem. Focus on that. Like, if you come up with something better, like, that’s what we’ll work on. And, you know, that gets really lost when you’ve just got a founder who’s like, I need this, this, and this done, you know, to move forward. So, because that takes time to communicate. Beyond just the thing that we need to do. So, that’s the real value add that I can do, and I help people step into it by offering that part-time service.
Dave: Yeah, that disconnect is a big thing, and it happens, I think, relatively quickly, where, you know, maybe the engineers become yet disconnected from the end user. I’ve heard of things, you know, and I could be totally wrong with the company I’m about to name here, but I think it was like Doordash that has their engineers do like a day a month of actually Doordashing or something, using the app and kind of doing it. I’ve heard of other companies where they’ve had engineers, you know, do a little bit of customer service and just kind of, you know, try to bridge the gap and sort of put them in front of the customer once in a while. I know it’s not really kind of what they’re paid to do, but once in a while, to kind of give them that firsthand experience. When I was also running a software business, we would have, you know, engineers sit down with some of the people that were using the tool and just kind of see how they did it. You know, is that, are those tactics and things that you think are kind of still relevant today? And you know, other than, how are other ways that we can kind of get engineers to kind of understand more about, you know, the end user?
Scott: Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting bridge to gap. And like, I’ve, because I’ve got a bit of a technical background myself, I’ve built web apps and mobile apps and stuff in the past. I can really help kind of relate with the engineers and bridge that gap and make it, you know, put in a way that really engages the engineers and wants them to connect with the actual user problem.
Dave: So, for Scott, people that want to learn more about Head for Product, they want to learn more about, you know, your advisory services you offer, where can they get in touch?
Scott: Yeah, the best way is just headforproduct.com. You can connect with me. If you want to talk product, you know, I host some office hours. I’m always happy to jump on a phone call with somebody and kind of connect, especially if they’re in Philly, like, love connecting with other Philly-based tech people as well.
Dave: Super cool. And there’s something that, you know, I wanted to highlight on your site that I also thought was kind of unique or at least interesting. You know, you offer some coaching calls, and the first one for 30 minutes is kind of like a pay what you suggest type of thing, which I think is a really nice model. It was kind of saying, hey, like, everyone’s at different stages, you know, and appreciate obviously what a person could contribute for my time, but, you know, instead of kind of slapping just a hard price on it, you’re kind of saying, hey, you know, give what you can. So, if you’re looking for some career advice, resume advice, or just product advice, head over to Head for Product, check out Scott, or he’s also an active member of our community. Thanks so much for being here today, Scott.
Scott: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.