Navigating the World of Fractional Product Leadership with Nick McEvily

Brent Peterson (00:02.319)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Mick Evilly. Mick Evilly. Nick, Nick, jeez, I knew I'd screw it up. I always screw up names. I apologize. Nick, Mick Evilly is here. Nick, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.

Nick McEvily (00:23.332)
Hey, this is Nick McEveley. You're listening to Uncharted Entrepreneurship and I'm here to talk about product market fit and testing new ideas, namely in software, but stuff that you can apply to any business model and industry. My title is Fractional Product Leader. It sounds very generic, but luckily it's self-explanatory.

And my passion is testing new ideas because ideas, if you're an entrepreneur, are in no short supply, but it's difficult to choose which one to pursue.

Brent Peterson (00:54.927)
That's awesome. And so that's your passion? Is that what you said?

Nick McEvily (01:00.42)
Unfortunately, yeah, yeah, that's my passion.

Brent Peterson (01:03.183)
No, that's not unfortunate. mean, maybe that's a fortunate thing. It's good to have a passion in what you're doing. That's the best way to look at it. Right. Yeah. being a developer. You have to go to the developer, put cocktail party, and then talk about, yeah, node, launching your node application. All right. So before we get started, I'm going to tell you a joke. All you have to do is give me a rating, one through five. I call it the free joke project.

Nick McEvily (01:07.488)
I think so, I think so. Yeah, it just doesn't play well at cocktail parties, you know?

Nick McEvily (01:17.315)
Yeah.

That's true.

Brent Peterson (01:33.607)
Just a rating of the joke 1 through 5. Here we go. It's hard to imagine some people actually like to collect old magazines. They must have a lot of issues.

Nick McEvily (01:48.004)
I'm gonna give it a four. I'm gonna give it a four.

Brent Peterson (01:50.403)
Yeah, delivery. I'm going to say I kind of screwed up the delivery on it. But thank you for the four, I appreciate it.

Nick McEvily (01:55.012)
It's okay, mean, with humor, feel like, you know, well, of course, you're hosting. Delivery is everything in humor. Timing, as they say, is also everything in humor. But I love this project. It certainly gets you a lot of repetition so you can protect that delivery.

Brent Peterson (02:11.887)
That's right. I've had 300 times to say it and I say it wrong 80 % of the time. Anyways, let's dive in. So fractional product, I love that. So tell us about that role, how that looks. How does that work with a fractional CTO, fractional CMO, all those other fractional items?

Nick McEvily (02:34.562)
Yeah, I'm not sure if I have worked with a lot of fractional talent in the same company. Like, I'm not sure a company would hire a fractional chief marketing officer, CTO and product person. Usually I joined a full-time person or a full-time team and compliment them. I would say that it's way more common to have a fractional chief marketing officer or a fractional chief financial officer or a fractional

you know, CTO, but the need for fractional product is definitive and I think is popularizing. I would say the reason why fractional product leadership is so important early on is because it helps you avoid a lot of mistakes and saves you money. Product is a delicate process. Finding product market fit early on in a company is really difficult and most early stage companies can't afford full time senior leadership.

mid six-figure salary. And so what I've done is created a practice that allows early stage companies with limited budgets to get access to senior level experience and build processes that are really healthy into their company's culture early on.

Brent Peterson (03:50.649)
Yeah, you think that that's one of the biggest problems with a new product business is the process that needs to happen to make sure all the check boxes are checked to get your product to market.

Nick McEvily (04:04.248)
Yeah, developers have created a really beautiful process over the years, evolving from the more simple manufacturing process from the industrial revolution changed in publishing, as your joke alluded to, and was now kind of more of a just in time delivery. now software, which is soft, iterates quite frequently. so developers and engineering teams have built project management software and processes, namely Scrum and Agile.

to handle that workload, but product has not followed suit. so I'll notice a lot that technology companies have a really solid engineering process from ticket creation through QA and implementation. But everything before that is a little bit messy and folks have a difficult time of gathering product requirements, testing them on users to validate that there's a need, designing prototypes and proofs of concept to validate something a lot of times.

engineering effort costs a lot, but it's not de-risked. So if you're going to spend $50,000 on a feature or a million dollars on a new product line, it really behooves the team to de-risk that execution. And that's a lot of what I spend my time on.

Brent Peterson (05:20.143)
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a big gap between product management and project management. And I think that, you know, I was in the software space for a long time and project management always made sense to me. And I didn't think about product management until I started losing project managers going to product managers. Tell us, are there similarities in both?

are there huge gaping differences in both?

Nick McEvily (05:51.362)
Yeah, there's a little bit more ownership over the product and product management.

Project management has a lot of the same qualities in gathering stakeholders, understanding deadlines, responsibility and delegation, laddering up a tactical effort to a strategic effort. But product management differs in the sense of its specificity, I think. Most product managers are in software. It's where the role really originated or found its footing.

project management spans a bunch of different industries. And so as we, as project managers kind of evolved or became product managers, they realized that there was a gap in the, in the process, namely gathering requirements. Project managers are not responsible for the origin of an idea. They're responsible for the execution of it. And product managers should be

responsible for the origin of an idea? Where is it coming from? Is it just the CEO or head of product passing down an order for it to be executed? Is there a process for validating those instinctual, oftentimes gut focused origins? Or is there a process? Have you ignored that process and you're simply kind of implementing things quickly and

What I found over time is unhealthy product organizations are full of project managers and not product managers. Product managers have that sense of responsibility to make sure that an order or an idea given from a CEO or a CTO goes through a process of validation before it gets put into production. I think that's one of the main differences between the two.

Brent Peterson (07:43.451)
Yeah, I think in the green room, we talked a little bit about the difference between a visionary and integrator and getting those ideas down. And I hadn't actually thought about that concept that in project management, you're just there to do tasks. You don't care where the tasks come from necessarily. And it makes sense that a product manager would be responsible for the idea. They wouldn't always be maybe as a senior level, you'd be the gatekeeper on those ideas and you'd work with the like

the visionary team or the CEO of how to, you're the gatekeeper at that point in which we can get and what can we do.

Nick McEvily (08:20.94)
Yeah, I say the product manager is definitely the integrator. The person that grounds the visionary in the how and the why. Visionaries show what and really beautifully with a lot of energy and inspiration. But a lot of times in order to get that thing done over the finish line and coordinate all the people you need a product manager and sometimes project managers as well. But product managers are holding a project management hat in addition to an advocacy hat.

They're making sure that the voice of the customer is being represented. And they're making sure that business needs and engineering and kind of user needs are being recognized and weighted and prioritized in the right way. Cause this one feature lives in an entire roadmap of features that will go on and on hopefully. And it is the product manager's role to make sure that those features are being rolled out in the right sequence.

we're allocating resources in the right way. And I've heard them often be described as kind of small CEOs of their product line. And I really believe that there's truth to that.

Brent Peterson (09:34.235)
Do you think that there's a gap when it comes to a founder startup looking at a service that's a software service that turns into a SaaS service, which really is a product, that they look at it as just another software product that were there, but they're continuing, they make it into a release and it goes out as an app or something like that? Because there is a correlation to having a physical product to having an online product, right?

Nick McEvily (10:03.916)
Do you ask the question a little differently? I'm not sure I understood.

Brent Peterson (10:06.971)
The difference between a software project that maybe has an endpoint, like a website, to a SaaS product that you're delivering online to somebody. I think maybe founders see that as a software when it's actually a product.

Nick McEvily (10:19.437)
Yes.

Nick McEvily (10:24.78)
I agree. I agree. SaaS tools are constantly being worked on, as they should. Websites could fit that description, but certainly get put on the shelf and have a little bit longer of a shelf life before they're revised, I've noticed. Whereas SaaS tools are being revised constantly. And so that's the reason why you need a product manager, actually, is because that cyclicality and that iteration

You need to have foresight into what this thing that you're developing now will become and how that will evolve and join other product lines, how you'll upsell, how you're merchandising and commercializing these things. So the product manager's role is far more complicated and nuanced and is, it has, it has more responsibility for the delivery and success of that product. So once a product gets put into market, it is then that product manager's responsibility to make sure it's being used properly.

that the analytics are showing, you know, positive impact and folks, product managers that aren't taking responsibility for where that feature came from, the idea, the early stage of it, validating it before it gets put into code and product managers who are avoiding the analytics are not doing their job fully. And I see this either on one side or the other side of the token. There, there are more project managers.

taking in requests over here and pushing out quality assurance and tickets over there and don't have a certain sense of responsibility that they deserve. And a lot of that time, a lot of the times I've noticed that it's because of a culture, organizational culture where responsibility is centralized to an executive and not given and allocated appropriately to product managers and people.

who are closer to the customer. And I think that's a really big change that has ripple effects throughout the organization. So empowering CEOs out there, CTOs out there who are just delegating and giving orders down to their product managers instead of asking them for guidance or asking them what they think, what direction should this product go, I think are making a big mistake on an organizational level and they'll see improved morale.

Nick McEvily (12:49.604)
through productivity results and insights that are more in touch with their customer when they empower their product manager.

Brent Peterson (12:58.901)
A multi-part question, but at some point everybody knows they need a product manager and maybe they're a single person startup who's just developed a product. They need to hire somebody. At what stages do you go through to say, okay, you need a product manager. You need to hire me as a fractional product owner. And then at some point you need to hire a chief product officer. How do you navigate, how do you, guess, help the founder?

understand those different hiring needs.

Nick McEvily (13:31.268)
Absolutely. I think this is going to change. So I hope our listeners keep that in mind. Right now, product managers scale and hire based on developer account. So if you have one developer, you probably don't need a product manager. If you have two or three, that's when I would consider bringing in a product manager because those developers are now pushing out code at a rate where they're unable to talk to the customer or unable to question.

the origin of the future. So at that point, would say maybe three developers definitely get a product manager for five developers. Definitely get a product manager. If you go to 10, 12 developers, you need two product managers, right? So keeping that ratio roughly the same, I think is really smart. And the same would go with designers for every five developers. need one designer. And as the, as the team scales, might be able to gain some efficiencies, but

I've noticed that that trend is stay the same, but this is bound to change as AI and new tools are coming out that make development more efficient, that make product management more efficient, that make design more efficient. And so I think that ratio is going to change. I'm excited to see how it goes. But in the past, that's the pattern I've

Brent Peterson (14:51.199)
I've spoken at many events about just customer experience in the frame of project management. And the one thing that I learned is that developers are terrible at talking to clients, but they are great at promising something to the client and promising in a timeframe that is no way achievable.

is, I mean, if we make a distinction for project manager, I would argue that you need a project manager when you have one developer. mean, any client would say, any agency would say, can't hire a project manager and only one developer. But I think that that project management, portion of it, at least interface with the client or having somebody being that interface is so important. How do you navigate those waters of project managers versus product management?

than having that layer between a developer and a client.

Nick McEvily (15:51.98)
Yeah, if you're doing an agency, think the team composition changes quite a bit, but we can apply it right in the agency world. The client is the customer. We could make an argument that they need to be talking to their customer as well. if we remove the agency dynamic and replace it with a SAS tool, the project manager, instead of talking to the client should be talking to the customer. And so

once you start talking to the customer, it doesn't become a project as much as it becomes a product. And so I think project management is so much more useful and necessary in agency work. And you'll, you know, you'll notice that trend, of course. But once you start representing someone else's needs in a really personal level, emotional level, I think it's important for us to, to, to transition that project manager into a product management role.

Brent Peterson (16:49.123)
Yeah, and as I asked the question, I realized that oftentimes the client to the product manager could also be the CEO, right? They could be the one representing the product and the CEO would go to them and their clients to get feedback.

Nick McEvily (16:59.032)
Yeah, exactly.

Nick McEvily (17:06.212)
That's right. That's right. I CEOs should spend a lot of time talking to customers early on and should delegate that over time, but have a process in place where they can very easily go in and get the sense of things, either through recorded interviews, synthesized notes, regular meetings with their product managers. But it is a core function for a CEO to stay in touch with their customer or else they'll lose their edge and advantage, which is the whole point.

point of a startup, which is to stay ahead of larger organizations who have fallen out of touch with the market.

Brent Peterson (17:43.952)
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up doing what you're doing.

Nick McEvily (17:49.54)
Sure, I love to tinker with things and build things and that led me to design and design led me to product management and company building. Over the years, I've built three or four companies myself, has helped almost 100 startups now build their companies and specifically have fallen into, fallen in love with the particular process of listening to customers, interpreting what they're saying.

and designing a solution for their needs and testing those solutions on folks to figure out where we need to go next. So I spend a lot of time talking to customers on a weekly basis, not mine, but on behalf of my clients and designing products that I think will solve genuine needs that are both severe and frequent in a customer's life.

Brent Peterson (18:40.155)
Tell us a little bit about the testing portion of it and maybe how you help the stakeholder understand where they should go in that direction and how does that test fit in.

Nick McEvily (18:59.044)
I think the biggest thing that I recommend to founders is a sense of cyclicality. A lot of founders will do maybe one research project, if that, or they'll do some customer interviews, but customer interviews won't be organized very well. They might be talking to a couple of different personas, or they'll ask each customer a different set of questions that don't lead to a statistically representative data set. So I'm giving best practice advice.

because I think all of us out here, all of us founders know that it's really important to talk to our customer, but we don't really know how the nuances can misguide us and mislead us. So I spent a lot of time coaching founders on best practices for customer discovery and sometimes doing that customer discovery myself.

Brent Peterson (19:47.208)
When you're doing customer discovery, do you have a preset of questions? You must have a boilerplate that you can use that kind of sets you off and then you tailor it to that customer need.

Nick McEvily (19:59.236)
Yeah, most of my interviews are an hour long and they fall in to two parts. The first part, I do a jobs to be done style interview where I ask them about a previous experience they've had that is relevant to the product I'm exploring. And the second part of the interview is a visual aid, a presentation of a visual aid. I'm sorry, maybe it's a prototype or a mock-up or a competitor's website. And I'll walk them through that. And the biggest question that you'll hear me ask is quite repetitive. It's what do you see here?

or what would you expect when and I listen very intently to those things and record them diligently in a note-taking software that allows me to theme those responses and find patterns afterwards.

Brent Peterson (20:45.711)
Yeah, and I can say that I've been part of those interviews by people like you and especially on software. What do you expect here? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't even see what to do. And I think that's another thing that maybe leaders don't understand about a developer is they know exactly the buttons that click over and over again. And the developer doesn't understand that the client's never going to see that button because they've never done it once. So what you're talking about is so important in that.

in that discovery process of how clients are going to use it.

Nick McEvily (21:16.972)
Yeah, we have to see a product through the customer's eyes, not our own. And the only way to do that is by genuinely asking them, watching them use the tool and the product.

Brent Peterson (21:27.483)
Talk a little bit about the go-to-market strategy then from a product standpoint. Let's say you've done your interviews, you've gone through those UX UI items with your end client, you've had a bunch of data to understand, hey, this is a good, this works well. How do you help with a strategy of going to market with that product?

Nick McEvily (21:48.164)
So when I hear go to market, I hear what marketing channels am I going to use? How am going to get people's attention on this thing? How am going to get them excited? What is the language I'm going to use in presenting this idea? And all of these elements come from the interview. I think most people confuse customer interviews and customer discovery processes with usability. Does the user know where to go next? And can they move through this workflow efficiently?

In the process of exploring that, I'm hearing users describe the product to me in their own words. And so what I do is I take that language and I mirror it and show it right back to my other customers because that language is most familiar to my customer group. So that's how I get my language. Then I'm also thinking about, where do you, in my behavioral interviewing portion of the interview, I'm asking, you know, where did you go when you wanted to buy that service that's similar to the one?

I'm about to present to you. What was your experience like? How did you evaluate that project, that product or that purchase? And that's where I find my marketing channels. And so I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around the utility of customer discovery, that it's just for products that are already built, or that it's mostly about usability. But in reality, the results of the work that I'm doing,

Fuel marketing, website images and copy, fuel sales, sales scripts, approaches, et cetera, fuels hiring and product. And I really implore all of my founders to get those sales and marketing teams and fundraising teams involved in the questions and the interview script development process so that you can get the most out of that hour or

six to 10 hours you're spending with your customers. They'll fuel strategy for you for months.

Brent Peterson (23:53.787)
Do you have a good way of getting people to show up for the interview? I know for myself, like they give me an Amazon gift card to do the interview. Is that a good strategy to get you, because you need a certain data set, right? Do you have any tips for product owners to get people to actually come to the interview?

Nick McEvily (24:12.342)
Absolutely, yeah. I think personal relationships and social pressure have been the most successful in the past, in my opinion. So having a friend of a friend or an introduction works the most. Incentives are helpful, but can misguide and potentially present a sense of bias. But might be necessary to get that person

involved. So for instance, if we're looking to test something for CEOs or for CTOs who have a high pay range and have very limited time, I'm probably going to need to pay them for the hour they're spending with me. But if I'm talking to someone who reads magazines regularly, or someone who is more client facing and has a service role, has a genuine interest in understanding the problem I'm solving for them.

they might be interested in doing the, doing the interview without an incentive. So I always start recruiting without incentives to see how well I can do to avoid the potential bias. and if, if recruiting is going too slowly, that's when I'll add in an incentive of some sort, but incentives can be done in so many interesting ways. You can do, donations to nonprofits so that the person isn't directly benefiting from that incentive. you can do gift cards. You can do.

Shout outs, can do early access to your product. There's so many ways of thinking about it. So I would encourage folks to think more creatively about what their incentive is outside of the Amazon gift card.

Brent Peterson (25:52.503)
yeah, that's, that's really good feedback. And I think one thing that never works that I've learned doesn't work for me is we have two $500 gift cards to give out, come in, you know, join us for this thing. You may or may not win. And, know, sometimes it's an hour long interview and it's very tedious to go through all these things. And, and I don't want to do that for the.

I guess if I, you're right, if I know the person and I know that there's gonna be a direct benefit because of me, my personal, I would join that interview. But if it's just a cold outreach for some product that maybe I'm using, but I'm not entrenched with that incentive is really important.

Nick McEvily (26:35.97)
Yeah. And I think that it's, actually an early litmus test I give to founders, not something that's super indicative, but if you have difficulty finding people to do interviews with, if you can't find your customer willing to give you an hour of their time, I think you might have, and I found you'll have more difficulty selling them stuff in the future. If you can't find the places where they are, and if you can properly understand their incentives and motivations,

then it's going to be more difficult for you to sell them a product in the future. So recruiting for interviews is one of the first litmus tests that I have in finding product market fit eventually. Again, I wouldn't say that it's super indicative, but it is something to pay attention to as you're starting your journey in customer discovery.

Brent Peterson (27:23.963)
I'm gonna ask a self-serving question. I'll be completely transparent. I have a fractional role in marketing where I'm helping to bring a product to market. I'm not at all the product manager, but I'm helping them get this product to market. And we've realized that it's a new thing that nobody really understands. And right now it's completely free, but people don't understand the problem it's solving. I guess, how do you recommend?

If I were to go out and try to recruit these interviews to show them how the product works, start with the problem that it solves before you say anything else or what I use as a go-to strategy.

Nick McEvily (28:05.474)
No, yeah, you, you, it's the exact opposite of the thing you want to do. anytime you're in an interview and you're trying to discover something, you don't want to do the discovery on behalf of the customer, right? So don't sell them anything. Don't describe the benefits or the value of the product. You want to hear them describe it to you. And that's what I was talking about before with our, our go to market strategies and language.

It's super important for you to leave your questions open ended so that they can fill in those responses for you. How would you describe the value of this service? I don't really know. Can you tell me more? Like, what does, what does it do? That's a great question. What do you assume it does? Try to use a Socratic method in the process, because what'll happen is you'll, you'll, you'll make the person a little bit more comfortable explaining themselves, but you'll also hear really valuable insights.

they're going to describe the value or the problem they think it's solving. And you can say it's yes or no in your head, but you're only there for curiosity. So you just want to does this help me with my hiring practices? that's interesting. Why did you make that assumption? well, I saw this image or this graphic was really interesting and it kind of led me to that decision. was like, okay.

What would it be like if it was solving other problems in your organization? Are you facing other problems that you think this might solve? well, I'm also having a problem in this area. Your product doesn't do that right now, but maybe you just expose another opportunity or product line for your company. so remaining curious, asking open-ended questions will ultimately lead to more opportunities and paths for you to go down.

Brent Peterson (29:50.511)
Yeah, that's good. Very good. Thank you. I'm going to employ that. Nick, so as you go into, as you help other founders do that, how do you introduce yourself? How do you show the need for your services? And what are the core things that you represent that helps a founder to ultimately get their product to market?

Nick McEvily (30:18.006)
I use a little bit of my own art or my own skills and user interviewing when I'm talking to founders who I think there might be some fit with. And I asked them questions about how is their product getting delivered? Like where, what is your product discovery process look like now? Do you find that when your product or features go into development that there's delay in their release or a lack of fit with the eventual users? Oftentimes they'll say yes, they'll say yes. And then I'll ask about

their team construction? Do you have a UX designer? Do you have a product manager? What does your development team look like? And oftentimes I'll expose an area where I'm a really good fit. And then I'll talk about, you know, the results of how my inclusion in the team might, might, might, might improve some of some of the outcomes. I am more willing, I think, than most fractional folks or contractors to say that it's not a good fit because I've had enough. I've had enough of those poor fits.

Yeah. Where ultimately I'm either unhappy with my day or they're unhappy with the work I'm doing. And that just in a referral based business and a service based business, that just ultimately leads to negative impacts for me. So I always want to make sure candidly that there is a good fit between me and the company I'm working with or the founder and leadership team I'm working with.

Brent Peterson (31:42.071)
What is your predictions now for these next couple of quarters? well, first I'll ask, do a lot of the product development go into a sort of stall during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or is that completely different? Like is it a different market, then nobody's really worried about it? Or maybe they're not going to launch at that time, unless it's something that is going to be relevant to that.

market is that is this a time where it's slow for you and that you may be doing more development instead of delivery?

Nick McEvily (32:17.678)
You know, seasonality is always important. It's very industry dependent. So for e-commerce folks, I can imagine their heads down and have been for the last few months and are probably in their testing cycles, hopefully before a release at the beginning or middle of November. But I would say that folks, there's a little bit, there was a depression. I work mostly with venture back companies and there was a,

decline in venture funding for last year or two and I'm noticing that there is actually a little bit of an uptick in venture funding and New companies that have their forgive my language, but have their shit together So I think that there's been a correction in the industry the venture industry where stronger founders are getting more capital and And that really helps me and folks like me and fractional leaders because we get to choose

founders that we really like and can support them in the ways that will lead to their success in the next couple of months and quarters.

Brent Peterson (33:24.473)
Nick we have a few minutes left and at the end of my podcast I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want. What would you like to plug today?

Nick McEvily (33:33.708)
I love to plug Hawaiian shirts. I'm really inspired by you today. If you're in a bad mood and you don't know why, I would recommend bright colored Hawaiian shirts. Definitely my plug for today.

Brent Peterson (33:37.806)
You

Brent Peterson (33:49.952)
Thank you. That's awesome. Thanks. Nick McEveley. I got it right. It's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much. How do people get in touch with you?

Nick McEvily (33:56.45)
Nailed it.

Nick McEvily (34:01.24)
I've got a website nickmikeveley.com and I'm on LinkedIn, nickmikeveley. Please look me up. Happy to chat.

Brent Peterson (34:06.651)
That's great. Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. I'll make sure I get those contact details on your show, on the show notes. And thank you.

Nick McEvily (34:11.736)
Likewise, Brent.