Hitesh Chudasama 0:00

Hello everyone. Today on Career Journeys Revealed, we're joined by Kelly Vincent, a product executive with more than 25 years of experience across Cisco, Juniper, NetApp, eBay, and now Chief Product Officer at Auctane. She's launched hundreds of products, led global teams, and built frameworks that help complex organizations move faster. At Auctane, she's focused on unlocking AI as a true competitive advantage in e-commerce, not just adding AI, but using it to fundamentally transform how products are built. But Kelly's journey didn't start in Silicon Valley. She grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, worked all kinds of jobs, including being a rock picker, which she talks about in the episode. After graduating from MIT, she tried out roles in consulting, finance, and coding before finding her true calling in product management. A role she describes as wearing every hat in the company. Today, she's not only operating at the executive level, she's actively mentoring women in technology and helping define what great product leadership looks like in practice. As you will learn from this episode, Kelly's story extends well beyond the executive role. She's been married for 29 years and is a proud mother of two daughters. One at USC and one finishing up high school. Supporting their passions in sport, art, and theater has been one of the most meaningful parts of her journey. In fact, she recently served as team manager for her daughter's championship flag football team. An experience she'll tell you required just as much strategy, resilience, and composure as any executive role. Kelly brings a rare mix of operational rigor, intellectual horsepower, and genuine warmth. She talks about taking big swings, learning from failure, building influence, and why AI is actually empowering product leaders, not replacing them. If you ever wondered how to navigate multiple seasons of a career, how to transition from do anything mode to executive leadership or how to stay happy while doing it. This conversation is for you. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

Kelly Vincent 2:44

Thank you so much, Hitesh, for having me.

Hitesh Chudasama 2:47

Yeah, it's great to have you with uh joining us. So before we dive into your career journey, Kelly, um I know you've been in the product role for the past 25 years with companies like Cisco, eBay, and now with Auctane. Would love to find out uh in regards to your upbringing initially, and then we could go into the different kind of career roles that you had.

Kelly Vincent 3:08

Yeah, happy to. I grew up in a very small town called Pulaski, Wisconsin. And um I was raised by two absolutely brilliant, amazing parents who uh really taught me that I could do anything. And they encouraged me to try new things, they encouraged me to follow my passion, to work hard. Um, and the sky was the limit. And so I did everything in my early years from coding to singing in musicals. Uh, by the way, I am not that good of a singer, but getting up on stage was certainly a great lesson learned in life in terms of being able to get in front of audiences. And by the way, when you're making a fool of yourself on stage, it really sets you up for when you're prepared to be on stage as a leader. Um, but I tried, you know, I played sports, I played musical instruments, I just tried everything looking for my passions. And my parents were super supportive of that. And then when I I'm the uh eldest of three sisters, so I uh I'm the oldest, and then I have two younger sisters, five and ten years younger than me. And um, unfortunately, I wasn't able to grow up with them as much as I would have loved to, because at 17, I left to go to school at MIT. And I didn't, I wasn't necessarily able to come to fly back very often. So I really missed out on seeing my sisters grow up. And that's why uh in my later life, when my husband and I moved to California, I bribed my sisters to move out to be near me so that now all of us uh live together. My parents still have a home in Wisconsin, but they just bought a home here in California. And uh we're all of us, including my my brothers-in-law and my nieces and nephews, we're all living in the same area and able to enjoy each other's company. So it's been quite the journey from the small town of Wisconsin to Boston to California and really settling into my family life.

Hitesh Chudasama 5:23

That's wonderful. It seems like you've been around quite a bit of places.

Kelly Vincent 5:28

I have. I feel like I've been around the block, Tesh.

Hitesh Chudasama 5:32

Wonderful. It seems like, and and also one of the things that you had mentioned uh earlier was in regards to the different types of jobs that you took as you um when you were a teenager.

Kelly Vincent 5:41

Oh, yes.

Hitesh Chudasama 5:42

What did that season? I know you kind of carve your career into three different seasons. Do do anything, product management, leadership. So, in that particular season of your uh career, like what did that teach you in regards to work and grid?

Kelly Vincent 5:55

Yeah, uh, that is a great question. I actually think it's very fundamental to who I am. So the first season of my career was the do anything phase. It was called Do Anything for Money. Uh, take whatever job you can get. I, because I was paying my way through school, and um, MIT is not the cheapest school in the world. And so it was it, you know, you just did what it took. And I held two jobs while I was at MIT. But even before that in high school, I had some very interesting jobs. Um, some of the more career-focused ones were coding. So I I my mom actually taught me how to code and got me helped get me gigs doing coding. But I was the brilliant person you see when you drive through at Arby's. So I could take a main order and make your change for you, which by the by at that point they didn't have the automatic calculator. So I actually had methods of figuring out the correct change very quickly. Uh, I was a janitor at my high school, which was a very eye-opening job. I was a softball umpire, and believe it or not, the weirdest job I ever had was I was a rock picker. So you would jump off the back of a flatbed truck, you would pick up large rocks, you would throw them on the truck, and then you would get back on the truck. So it was very uh intellectually challenging. So let's just say that all of my uh the cornucopia of interesting jobs that I had as a teenager uh taught me one very important lesson, which was I was gonna work really hard in school to make sure that I had access to the jobs that I wanted to have access to. Uh, and let me just say I was not very good at rock picking. So that was not my path.

Han Yuan 7:55

But I bet you got a good workout.

Kelly Vincent 7:58

I I did indeed. I was in good shape uh despite having fallen off the truck a few times and and getting some bumps and bruises. But uh, but yeah, definitely hard labor.

Hitesh Chudasama 8:12

So, Kelly, um, I know as you worked uh while you were even going to college at MIT, and once you even finished, it seems like you were exploring different kinds of opportunities. You were doing consulting, coding, and finance, then you discovered product management. Tell us about that journey, how you kind of came uh along in regards to understanding product management and how you fell in love with it.

Kelly Vincent 8:35

Yeah, I I similar to uh you know early stage career, you know, the phase one of do anything, graduating college doesn't mean all of a sudden like there's a clear path of this is exactly the career I want, and people are going to give you opportunities in that career. You just don't have the experience yet. And even though I tried in, you know, I did internships, et cetera, at MIT, uh, you know, you just don't have that depth where you're getting the callbacks, if you will, into the interviews. And so it was a do anything moment. The other piece is that I feel like I have I have two daughters, one in college, one about to go to college. And, you know, they already have to declare their majors, they have to define their paths. And that's, I feel like that is very difficult. I don't, you know, I I'm I'm still figuring out my career journey, even to this day. So um exploring different opportunities, taking advantage of the different opportunities that people offer you and a little bit of that do anything attitude as you're getting out of college just to explore what's out there, I that's what I walked my way into. And so when I got asked to do join a consulting firm, I tried that. And um when I asked to code a new financial system for a tech company, I did that. And then when I was asked to be in finance, so I was asked to join a corporate finance group. And I was like, absolutely, let me try that and see what that uh feels like. And I loved math, and and so I just found these things fun and it was a new challenge. You and you were learning something new. Um, but what was interesting to me, is I love learning, I love learning new things, I love understanding all of the functions of a company. That just happened to be something that really interested me. What I found fascinating about product management was it allowed you to wear all of those hats. So no two days are the same in product management. And one day you can be working on a vision document, the next day you can be visiting a customer, the next day you can be building a financial model, the next day you can be sitting, running your scrum team to and digging into the architecture of the product. Uh, the next day you could be designing the user experience. No two days are the same, and there's always something new to learn. And that to me, when I when I was introduced to the to the the people that were doing product management and talking to them about their jobs, I just thought, wow, this craft is pretty cool because I can do all these different things and play to that, I think, strength that I have of that learning new things and and um pulling pulling it all together into a into the vision of driving a product to market.

Hitesh Chudasama 11:41

Oh, that's great. I mean, I know that I across my career, I worked with a lot of product managers, and even with my current company taking on both engineering and product, and product uh management is such a complex kind of role. As you described, there's so many different pieces to it. And I understand that you actually have created a product, like a playbook that helps you guide you guide you as you're going through the different kind of areas. Maybe if you could walk us through, you know, what is that playbook and how do you leverage it on an ongoing basis?

Kelly Vincent 12:11

Yeah, I the so when I was invited to take a product management role, I was super excited. And then when I got into the product management role, I feel like chaos ensued. And what I mean by that is it was like, hey, you're product manager of X. You know, your job is product management, but actually you need to drive revenue. Also, 17 other people think that their job is to drive revenue as well. Uh, so good luck, you know, figuring it out amongst yourselves. Oh, and by the way, also you really have no authority. You're gonna have to do all of this through the influence model. I felt sort of lost. Like for a minute, I just was like, oh my goodness, I'm not sure how to absorb this because of the fact that I'm such a quantitative person. Like coding is so quantitative, math is so quantitative, finance is very quantitative, and and there are in many respects like right and wrong answers. And it's very structured. And I just felt like I was thrown into chaos. So I sort of took a step back and I sat in my discomfort, if you will. And I started to, being the logical person that I am, I started to deconstruct my discomfort. And that helped me understand okay, here's what I'm being told. I went on, um, you know, I went and talked to different product managers, I talked to my stakeholders, I talked to customers, and I started to deconstruct my discomfort by structuring it. And so the playbook that I built was pretty simple and nothing epiphanous, but it just helped me put structure to things. And I'll and I'll walk you through it. One was the vision document. It was really documenting what you knew about your customer, what you knew about what problems your customer was having, what the options were for helping customers solve problems, how you could make money in solving those problems, and then constructing that vision of this is what we will therefore build to solve the problem, or this is what product will deliver to solve that problem. The second part of it was, okay, so if this is what we need to deliver, so what exactly will product have to do? And so I call it a product functional map. I would build a product functional map of these are the things the product will have to do to deliver on solving those customer problems. The next piece was, okay, if this is what the product has to do, then how will we deliver it? i.e., will we build, will we buy, will we partner? And it's that build-by-partner strategy matrix of, okay, great, this is how we're gonna deliver to get to get fast time to market, to beat the competition, to make sure we know how we're gonna position a comp against the competition. Here's that strategy matrix. And then, as we all know, data makes the world go round. So it was really setting up the goals, the metrics, and then the reporting of the data. And even to this day, I have three primary vectors of product metrics that I consistently use. One is called product market fit, where I look at uh the market, I look at the customer need, and I look at the competitors, and you build on a matrix that says, these are all the capabilities of all the competition, this is how important each of those things are to the customer. And then I use math to basically rate, like, okay, and how good are we at those things? Therefore, where are we in the product market fit uh for this for this product? The second set of data that I use for products is engagement and or adoption. So if you're if you built an awesome feature but nobody's using it, what was the point of building the feature? So you're building the product, you're tracking who is engaging with it, how are they engaging with it, how often are they engaging with it, so that you really understand your customer's journey through the product. And then finally, I call it funnel metrics. It's you you take a workflow and you understand how many people are entering the top of that funnel, how many people are successfully completing that top of the funnel. I'll give you two examples. When I was running consumer selling at eBay, uh, we had the the new, we launched the new mobile app for consumer selling. So it was literally how many people tried to list something on eBay, how many people successfully got through to listing that thing on eBay. And today at Auctane, we'll look at across the products, we'll like stamps.com and ShipStation, we'll look at registration, how many people were able to successfully register for the product. We'll look at sign-in, how many people are signing in successfully to the product and using the product. And then for us, print printing labels and making sure people are able to fulfill their order is super important. So we look at that workflow funnel. So it's really those three consistent product metrics that I've used in a playbook at all the software companies that I've been on to drive to successful product market fit, user adoption, and making sure users are getting the work done that they need to get done in our products.

Han Yuan 17:57

Hey Kelly, I'm wondering your playbook is quite sophisticated. And I'm wondering in in the process of sort of leading teams, um, how much effort do you put into helping the teams understand your playbook? And then the next level is just because you know the playbook doesn't mean you can execute the playbook. So I suspect you must have you know some type of ramp up time in order to get teams to be able to execute the playbook. And am I right?

Kelly Vincent 18:28

Oh, absolutely. And and by the way, uh that playbook is a straw man. So every every company, every team is different, and you have to be able to adapt. So it isn't only about executing on the playbook. Like you don't bring in a set in stone, you know, here are the tablets from the mountain, thou shalt. It is, hey, this is a framework. This is a straw man of how this has successfully driven growth for a company. So how are we as a team going to adapt? Like, what what's what do we want to put in place in terms of these best practices to drive growth for our company? And it's a team effort to figure out what that looks like and then implement it. I do believe strongly, and again, I've implemented this at three different companies now, where you have a what we call a product operations team. So uh they actually implement the operations around this where they help make sure every team feels empowered that they have the data that they need to drive the product. There is a process by which a cross-functional team reviews vision documents. We update our product functional map and our product market fit matrix every month. And we look at that because part of it is if you think about it, it's building in these great muscles and product management. Like in your product market fit metric uh matrix, you look at your competition. Did your competition change? Is there some new features that they launch that we need to be looking at? Um it's it's it makes for great conversation. And every team adapts and adapts to the playbook in a in a different way to make it work for them. Uh, but time and time again, by implementing this type of playbook with operational rigor behind it, I've seen success. And um, and it's just, you know, building the right team with the right attitude to set that up for success.

Han Yuan 20:38

You know, some of our listeners might not be familiar with um, you know, the term product operations. And and I suspect some of them might even confuse it with say project management or program management. So um, you know, maybe you could walk us through um how you think about uh product operations.

Kelly Vincent 20:56

Yeah, for sure. I I'll give you an example of something that we have implemented uh at Auctane for ShipStation, for stamps, for ShipStation API, for MetaPack, for Packlink, all of our products. And what we do is there are three things that for every product or feature release or what have you, three things that we do. And it's just a pretty simple one, two, three step. Um, besides everything, you know, the best practices of product market fit matrices, tracking user engagement, tracking our funnel success. It's one, if somebody has a new idea, and I great ideas come from everywhere. So anybody can have a new idea. They we call it, they bring it through the product operations process, and it's three steps. The first step is a concept review. So we have a two pager template that is sort of just guidelines of hey, these are questions people are gonna ask as you're discussing your concept. So it's It's a two-pager that outlines what the idea is, the customer we're going after, the problem it's solving, et cetera. And it outlines, okay, and how what what are we going to build to solve that problem? And a cross-functional team reviews it, asks questions, fleshes it out, offers help for sizing, opportunity, et cetera. And we consider that great, this concept absolutely worth going after, or maybe it's not the right time to go after it. So we consider uh all the team's feedback and then we decide: are we moving forward with building this or are we not? If we're gonna move forward with building it, we move to what we call the design phase. So we have a design review where it's literally this is what the customer will experience, be it, you know, the UI for the new feature. Even if it's not UI, what will they experience even as a back-end feature? Uh so it's really talking about the customer's experience based on the concept that was reviewed. So then we say, great, that design is good. We're ready to move to the next phase. That's execution phase. So that's coding it, that's QAing it, et cetera. And we get to execution review. So we have a checklist of the gates of what it takes to launch a new product or feature. We review where we are with all of those gates. You know, some of that is tracking data, as I mentioned. And then it's a go. We launch, and then we follow the metrics and we iterate. One of the most important, um, I think one of the most underrated aspects of successful product management to drive growth is actually watching the funnel metrics after you launch and being agile and adapting to what customers are telling you. Because you're watching the launch, you're saying, okay, oh no, customers are not engaging with this feature. What's happening? Do they not like the feature? Did that do they not know about the feature? Or it's, hey, the customer is engaging with the feature, but they got, but they stopped right here. Why did they stop? And you go and you use that data to iterate on the product, and it's basically iterating to success. That is hard work. It is paying attention to the data, but it is wildly successful. Um, and that's really where the magic lies in driving driving growth.

Hitesh Chudasama 24:29

Oh, that's that's really great. Uh, thanks for the overview, Kelly. I think um, as as you go through, have gone through your product management journey like over the years, what has been some of your pivotal moments, things that you've had to pivot on, and especially hard choices that you've had to make?

Kelly Vincent 24:47

That is a great question. I I think that if I look at the three seasons of my career, the transition from do anything to product management was relatively simple. Uh in the sense of, yeah, I'd live in my discomfort for a while and deconstructed into a an operational playbook, but it it it that felt like more of a natural transition, a natural transition into um into product management. I think a bigger leap for me was moving from product management into my most recent phase of career, which is leadership. Because the big from to is that it's whatever your role is in leadership, like obviously I'm a product leader, but it doesn't matter that I'm a product leader, all the leaders of the company, it's really all about delivering business results regardless of function. And it's hard. Driving business results, which are are more ambiguous than just driving a successful product, is difficult. And you cannot do it alone. It takes a village to drive business results, and you need everyone in leadership to be in lockstep on where you're going and how you're gonna do it, and it takes that coordination. And that is tricky. That's a lot trickier than, you know, equations in math. Um, and so I think that piece was a more difficult transition where I had to build a new playbook. And that playbook was more about the EQ than the IQ, um, where I had to build an influence map, where I had to learn from my stakeholders were what they cared about, understand how to help them achieve what they care about so that I can achieve what I care about. I had to do a lot more listening uh than talking. Unlike this podcast, I had to do a lot more listening than talking. Um I had to over-communicate. And it's over-communicate, like I feel like I'm a good communicator, but it's really over-communicating up, down, and across to make sure you're not surprising people, to make sure you're on the same page with others. Um, there's a lot of time I spent on communication as opposed to like doing the work. Uh, so it was really a big front to in terms of how I got my how I got my job done, how we drove success of the product, how we drive success of a company.

Hitesh Chudasama 27:38

Yeah, this is great. Uh so Kelly, for somebody who's going into management leadership uh role, what are some of the things like uh that you have done that you found it to be helpful as you know get to know the people, but also helping empower them and being able to help lead them as well?

Kelly Vincent 27:57

Yeah, that is a great question. I mean, everybody is different and are and everyone is comfortable with different things. But here would be some pushes for people. One is um go big. There is nothing wrong with taking big swings. And if you don't fail, or if you're too afraid to fail, or if you're if you're surrounding yourself with people who won't allow you to fail, then you might not be sitting in the right spot. Because driving big results often requires taking big risks and taking big swings. And it is okay to fail. It just is. The best things you will ever learn in your life, as I have experienced many, many times, is I have learned the most from making mistakes. So I used to beat myself up over mistakes, and I had to shift my mindset to it is okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from those mistakes. This mistake is not going to define me because I am going to recover and learn and not make that mistake again. I'll make new mistakes, but I've learned something and I'm going to take that forward. So I think sort of giving yourself that grace to take those big swings, I think is one thing that I wish I had even done earlier in my career. Um, I think the other piece is it's pretty simple. It's like, what's that saying of I everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten? I feel like there's a little bit of make people feel good about themselves. You want to listen to them, you want to make them feel important, you want to make sure that they feel like they are part of the journey, that they have a valuable contribution. The, you know, the how is just as important as the what, particularly as a leader. And I can tell you, this is not my superpower, is not in the EQ of a situation. It that I didn't grow up with like some people just are incredibly charismatic and you're drawn to them and you you'll follow them anywhere. That's not necessarily me. I was very, you know, math nerdy. And um, and so uh this was something I had to build. Uh, but I built it out of the fact that my team needed it, the company needed it. And if you're gonna have a big impact on a company, it's the how is just as important as the what. Um the other thing, uh the third one that I would say is be happy. Um people, did you ever hear, did you ever see somebody on stage that is super uncomfortable and it makes you super uncomfortable in the audience, you're just like, oh, please, uh, please get off the stage for your own sake. That's life. You know, like if you are unhappy and what you're doing, it everybody sees it and you don't want to be unhappy. So find the things that make you happy. It's like this overlapping Venn diagram of uh, you know, what you're what you're passionate about doing and how that overlaps with happiness. I actually think there's a very big overlap there. And find that that happy, happy place and invest in that. And if what you're doing isn't making you happy, I'm not saying, I'm not saying everybody can afford to quit their job because I mean, there are good days and bad days in every job. And, you know, you can't you don't just necessarily quit your job because you're unhappy. Like obviously we all need to make a living. But move in a direction. Move in a direction that makes you happy. Find people at work that make you happy, find projects at work, maybe not even in your own domain, but something you're passionate about that you can move to. Recently, um, I've become extremely passionate about girls' flag football. Uh, because my my daughter got introduced to the sport, absolutely fell in love with it. And it it really has changed her life in terms of her confidence. And I've seen, I've seen these young women become incredible teammates. I've seen them rise to glory together and then have horrible losses together, but they did it together as a team. It's been incredibly inspiring for me to watch these young women just really come into their own through flag football. And I want to be a part of helping young women everywhere do this. And so I've started expanding into helping operate uh flag football clubs and flag football teams. And do I know how to do that? No. But am I willing to learn and will I do what it takes and will I do whatever the club needs? Yes. And so I've been learning. But I mean, that's that's part of life, like finding those pockets of happiness and doing the things that make you happy. Um and I think that's really the goal, isn't it? Isn't the goal to be happy, Hitash?

Hitesh Chudasama 33:30

Yes, it is. It is. I it's awesome the fact that you're coaching, you know, your daughter's a football team. I've been coaching for my um my kids, their basketball team, and I could totally agree with you. There's a sense of happiness that you get, especially as they're learning and growing, even through the failures and uh how them through that. So I totally guess.

Kelly Vincent 33:53

Yes, it's isn't it absolutely the best feeling in the world? Even when my daughter's team lost the CCS championship game by one point, which I still have I still have dreams about that one point. But I will tell you, I have never seen a team. You could think that everybody was mad or whatever. No, there was crying, but most of the crying was about it was the last game of the season, and I can't believe our awesome season is over. It's just it just gives me chills. Uh, and that's and that is such an experience that I think will not only stay with those players for the rest of their lives, I think that those types of experiences shape people's lives. And the more young people that can have that experience, if I can do anything to help them, I would consider it a privilege.

Hitesh Chudasama 34:52

Agreed, agreed. Thanks for being open and transparent. I mean, I know that um we started off talking in regards to curr um career journey. And also, you know, you're you're talking about there's so many different overlaps between the two. And a lot of different learning lessons across both. And, you know, I'm glad the fact that you're you're setting a good example for your for your daughter and other young women because I know that you're participating a lot of other groups where you're helping young women in regards to technology as well as product sense. Are you able to maybe talk us through what are some of the other efforts that you're working on?

Kelly Vincent 35:29

Uh I am every company that I have been part of, um, I look for two things. One is I definitely look for the women in product. Um, I think, you know, I think still to this day, unfortunately, women are underrepresented in technology. And it is up to me. It is up to uh all leaders, but particularly I feel accountable as a woman leader to help coach and guide and support women and technology and empower them to achieve what they want to achieve uh in their career. So I consistently look for women in product and women in technology to support those organizations. And one thing that I also love is um when I was at Intuit, I was the product management community leader across all of Intuit, even though I worked in a specific business unit. And the craft of product management is really interesting because I can't go to school. Like if I were going to college right now, I I couldn't go to school for product management. So it's it's interesting because I have seen so many different people come into product management from different careers, from different uh backgrounds. Um and there's no clear path. And so part of what I've tried to do even within product management, uh across product management in different, in different even industries, is create some best practices, some core competencies, some crafts. Like here's the craft of product management. Um, and it's some of it's science and some of it's art. And this is this is how you hone the craft of product management. So I consistently look for those two opportunities at every company that I'm at. And um I'm super passionate about uh pushing both of those forward. That's wonderful.

Han Yuan 37:48

Kelly, do you think there's um certain qualities that might make one a better product manager than another? And I'm I'm just thinking out loud here. Um, you know, you you mentioned you um got a degree from MIT, and I just like Google stock to you and noticed you had a management science degree. Um you know, I happen to have a degree that's kind of similar in in opera on in the on the operations research side.

Kelly Vincent 38:14

Yeah.

Han Yuan 38:14

And um, you know, where where I came from, we had to do a lot of like manufacturing stuff, a lot of mathing, a lot of statistics, um, a lot of finance stuff, accounting. Yes. Um and you know, it strikes me that that degree you know might be useful for product management. And of course, you know, later on, you also did software, you did consulting. Um, you're a bit of a polymath, and I I don't know if it's because you're kind of a polymath that you ended up um you know excelling in product management or um or if there was some other quality that made you a better fit for product management. So I was just wondering if you could kind of speak to whether or not there's a certain type of person who happens to study something that might lend them to eventually end up in product management, or if it's uh like personality traits, if you will.

Kelly Vincent 39:05

Yeah, great question. That is a super interesting question. I first of all, I don't have any perfect answers, but I can just give you what I know from my own um experience of working with product managers. I have seen incredible product managers come with every type of degree under the sun. So I don't think it's a particular degree. Uh I think it is, I think success boils down to two things. One is intellect, and the second is attitude. And so being in product management, it's it's not for the faint of heart in terms of you have to learn something new every day. Like I said, there's a new thing to do every day. Like I today have built a financial model for our 2026 financial plan. I wrote a PRD. Uh, and then we set strategy for a new area of the business. That was just today. Like I had to context switch. I context switch like 20 times every day. It's it's a little cray cray. Uh so so that intellectual horsepower is pretty critical. And then the other piece is attitude. Attitude is everything. Positive attitude, positive intent. Um, I make a ton of mistakes, but but I say intent is nine-tenths of the law. Uh, and I today I apologize for something that happened in the meeting to a coworker of mine. And, you know, he was very gracious about it because he was like, I know you have good intent, so we're good. And um, that attitude of I had to work my butt off and make this successful, and we're gonna do it, we can do it. Just attitude is so important, um, you know, as a human as well as, you know, a product manager.

Hitesh Chudasama 41:08

I love that. So, Kelly, going going back to product management role, nowadays we have, you know, with this whole um evolution of AI coming on board, would love to get your thoughts in regards to, I know a lot of roles are being disrupted. Where do you see product management and um leveraging of AI going forward?

Kelly Vincent 41:31

I think AI is the best thing that ever happened to product management. Because I I got I got asked a lot when the whole like AI surge was coming out of is this gonna eliminate product managers' roles, et cetera? And I was like, absolutely not. In fact, product managers are more important than ever because now product managers have the tools to do more of all of the things that are required to get a product out the door. And it is a tremendous game changer. And even if, so if I were back in just core product management, think about all the things you have to do as a product manager. You have to do research, you have to do competitive analysis, you have to write strategy docs, you have to write vision docs, you have to write PRDs, you have to write user stories, you have to QA, you have to potentially uh even write code. Some product managers write code. I mean, think about all those things I just rattled off in two seconds, and all of them can be done by AI. Like how incredibly awesome is that? It's awesome. Uh, and it makes you, uh it makes me feel just excited and empowered as a product manager. Now, leadership. So you might say, okay, Kelly, that's if you're a product manager, but you know, womp womp, you're out of luck for AI for leadership. Not true at all. Uh I hate to give a specific AI model a plug, but Chat GPT is my BFF for thinking out loud. I literally like, hey Bob, how's it going today? Uh, you know, like, uh, you know, do you have a good night's sleep? And by the way, we got to write a vision paper. So here are my ideas. What do you think? Um, it's fantastic. I use it to to benchmark, I use it to say, I was thinking about this. Is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? Uh, I I and then, you know, you write your prompts on based on this competitor or based on your knowledge in this market specific to blah, blah, blah. Um, so you just start, you know, dorking around with different prompts and figure out what data comes back and you craft your own story. But it really has become a thought partner, which is crazy to think, but it it is.

Hitesh Chudasama 43:56

Oh, this is wonderful. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a game changer. I totally agree. I mean, I use it even from an engineering and product perspective. Like there's so many different use cases that you could leverage AI for at this point.

Kelly Vincent 44:07

Totally, totally. And it's just getting bigger and better, which is amazing.

Hitesh Chudasama 44:13

So, Kelly, uh, there's a lot of different uh things that you know talked about, especially in regards to your upbringing, talking about your career journey, and especially some of the pivots that you made. We have a lot of people in the audience that are going through different phases in their career. Are there certain kind of uh advice or certain certain um tidbits of you know uh tips that you would provide to them that kind of helps them transition as they're going through challenging times?

Kelly Vincent 44:41

Yeah, I think I go back to two things. I I go back to early career and then I go back to where I landed sort of lessons learned. I think don't be afraid to do anything. Like, do anything. Like if your team needs help doing X, do X. Jump in. There are, you know, some of the things might not be the sexiest things in the world to do, but who cares? You're here for your team. Um going back to the analogy with regards to to flight football, there are players that did not play, but they were just as big a part of the team. And that is being part of the team. Um, and so there were players who had a very specific thing, like they were in certain plays for rushing the passer. That was all they did. Um, and they got real really good at it. But the point is, is that didn't mean that they were in a lot of the game. It just meant that they had one job and they did it extremely well. And that was a contribution to the team. So I think I think one piece is like, do anything. Just jump in. Just jump in and do it. The second thing I would always say is just try to find your happiness in it. Not every job is great. Um, not every day of it, every job is great. Try to find the happiness in it and then lean into that happiness whenever you can, like the projects that feed that happiness. And it's not a clear path, and and there's not always clear answers, but if you're open to it, I I think, you know, I think opportunities will arise. And and the the thing I'll leave you with is how my how my daughter found flag football was she was cut from the volleyball team. And so that could have gone a very different direction. She could have decided, I'm not gonna play a sport, I'm not gonna try something new. Um, but she did. And it was the best thing that could have happened to her because she was open to it. And I I look back at that and I try to take that lesson in my life every day.

Hitesh Chudasama 47:04

I love that. Thank you once again, Kelly. This has been really great.

Kelly Vincent 47:10

Thank you both so much for having me. It was my pleasure.

Han Yuan 47:13

It was so fun. I just have one last question for you, Kelly. Um, uh a lot of a lot of the things that you said really resonated with me, including um taking more risks and and trying new things. Um, and I'm wondering if, you know, for our listeners who are are taking this advice but are still afraid, and they're thinking, oh, if I if I try to do something big and I fail, will I get fired? Or if I take this new role in a in the same company and I'm not good at that, will I get fired? Like what would you tell that person to get them over the hump?

Kelly Vincent 47:50

That that is such an interesting question because I am not sure anyone is as anal retentive as I am on this, on this listening to this. So they may or may not take this, but I've had um I've had this happen to me where I write, I write it down. I sit with a piece of paper, I write pros and cons. I write, and what's the worst thing that could happen? And then I look and then I stare at it and I sit in it. And then by the way, I also talk to people like I'll call a friend or I'll gather data. I'll just gather data about it. What do you think about this? And if I did this, do you think that would be a disaster? And, you know, what's the worst thing that could happen? Um I'll just gather data and sit up, sit in it, but in a again, I'm such a structured person in a structured way of I wrote it down. I wrote down my pros and cons. I wrote down the matrix of best that could happen, worst that could happen. Um, and just look at that and uh and then sleep on it. And then when you wake up, what's the first thing you think of? Like which which quadrant do you want to be in? So I don't know if anybody everybody I don't know if everybody's as quantitatively anal retention as I am, but it works for me.

Hitesh Chudasama 49:15

Kelly, I I write down a lot of things as well, especially if I have to make a tough decision. And then uh it it helps getting things out from the head and then being able to see it makes a huge difference.

Kelly Vincent 49:27

Exactly. And Hatish, that and then don't you like at some point trust your gut. Like after you write it down, after you stare at it, after you gather data, after you stress about it, go to sleep, wake up, trust your gut.

Han Yuan 49:43

This has been so fantastic. Thank you, Kelly. Um, we we had a great time.