The Lisa Marie Zane Hypothesis: Conscious Product Development is Building a Better Future For Tech
In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we cover Lisa’s philosophy of Conscious Product Development, and how her personal life helped guide towards wanting to solve problems in a more compassionate way.
Holly Hester-Reilly
Lisa is the Founder of Conscious Product Development. Her purpose is to help product teams solve the right problems for the right reasons and develop products (and careers) more consciously - in ways that are inclusive, holistic, ethical, accessible, and sustainable - and that makes people's lives measurably better. She previously worked at Google, several wearable tech startups, and with Bauer Hockey's stick development team. She is also a three time national hockey champion.
In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we cover Lisa’s philosophy of Conscious Product Development, and how her personal life helped guide towards wanting to solve problems in a more compassionate way.
Subscribe for the full episode on Apple, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube and more. Love what you hear? Leave us a review, it means a lot.
Resource Links
Read Stitch: The Best Resources for Product Managers
Read The Product Manager’s Career Guide
Questions we explore in this episode
What are the parallels between training as a hockey player and being a product manager?
- You make mistakes in public and have to learn how to be ok with failing in front of others.
- You get lots of coaching and learn how to work well with coaches and mentors.
How did Lisa decide to start conscious product development?
- Lisa found out about a startup that was doing a biomechanical suit that she wished she had herself as an athlete and cold-emailed the CEO to see if they wanted her help.
- She became their fourth full-time employee and they asked her if she wanted to be their first PM. That’s how she learned about product management.
- She believes that people are fundamentally good, but that systems around them can make it so easy to fall into autopilot.
- She thinks now about how to be a better leader and how to ask better questions early on in product development.
- She now focuses on helping people build products and careers that are more inclusive, holistic, ethical, accessible, and sustainable.
What did her experience with the Techstars accelerator look like?
- The team evolved in a very short period of time.
- She got so much exposure that she would not have had in Montreal through an amazing team of mentors.
- If you’re new and haven’t done many startups or new product development, she says an accelerator is a great way to start.
The Product Science Podcast Season 5 is brought to you by Productboard
Check out their eBook: 10 Dysfunctions of Product Management
If your product team is struggling, it could be one of the 10 dysfunctions of product management. Learn more about each dysfunction and how a product management system can help you address and avoid them.
Quotes from this episode
And to me, this is the root of what I am doing and why I am doing it now. It's because I truly believe that we need to do a better job of being more conscious about the decisions that we're making, both in terms of how we design our careers and how we make decisions about our careers when we're working on building products and then how we actually build products more consciously.
Conscious Product Development, my pillars are trying to help teams build products and individuals build careers in ways that are more inclusive, holistic, ethical, accessible, and sustainable. And I chose those five very consciously because I've seen a lot of different parties or organizations or teams foc us on little silos. And to me, this is all connected.
You can take two paths here. You can come at it in a very attacking way and say, "Hey. These are all the things that are wrong and this isn't good." I think some of that is warranted because that kind of has to happen to, I think, get people to wake up in a lot of cases. The approach that I'm trying to take right now is, "Hey. There's a lot of things that are not working right now and this is impacting a lot of people in a lot of really negative ways. That's true, but what can we actually do about it?"
Transcription
Holly Hester Reilly:
Hi and welcome to The Product Science Podcast where we're helping startup founders and product leaders build high growth products, teams, and companies through real conversations with people who have tried it and aren't afraid to share lessons learned from their failures along the way. I'm your host, Holly Hester Reilly, founder and CEO of H2R Product Science.This week on The Product Science Podcast, I'm sharing a conversation with Lisa Zane. Lisa is the founder of Conscious Product Development and her purpose is to help product teams solve the right problems for the right reasons and develop products and careers more consciously in ways that are inclusive, holistic, ethical, accessible, and sustainable and that makes people's lives measurably better. She previously worked at Google, several wearable tech startups, and with BAUER hockey's stick development team. She is also a three-time national hockey champion. Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Thanks for having me.
Holly Hester Reilly:
I'm so excited to have you. So is that the US by the way that you're a national hockey champion or are you from Canada?
Lisa Marie Zane:
Canada.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Okay. You probably don't know this about me. My listeners have probably figured it out by now, but I was a competitive figure skater.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I saw. I know and you've coached as well.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yes. Absolutely. And so I'm like, "We have this in common. We probably both spent inordinate amount of times at the ice skating rink."
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah. And I bet you don't mind the winter either.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Not at all. Nope. I don't. And I'm actually very excited that my daughter, who is almost nine and was born in the winter, is starting to express which season she loves. And while winter isn't her favorite season, it's pretty close. And so it makes me very happy that my daughter is also like, "Oh, winter is coming." And I'm like, "Yes."
Lisa Marie Zane:
I think the movie Frozen helped with that as well.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Probably. It's true. So that's really awesome that you made it all the way to being National Hockey Champion. What was that like?
Lisa Marie Zane:
Wild ride. I was never on the Olympic team or anything, but I was super lucky in that when I was coming into playing university hockey, I was actually just coming off of two ACL reconstructions. So I actually didn't even know if I would be able to play again. Came back for part of my last year of junior and ended up being able to join the team at McGill University. And one of the reasons why I wanted to join that team was because the coach Peter Smith was the assistant coach of the Olympic team at the time and I'm a huge proponent of following people that you align with and that you think can help you grow in specific areas that you want to grow and jumped in and was a very small fish in a big pond.My first year was super challenging because I was on the ice with all these women that I grew up watching on TV. Charline Labonté was our goalie my whole time there and she was on the Olympic team. She had already won the Olympics several times with the national team and I had grown up watching her on TV and all the sudden I'm in my first year at McGill playing with her and shooting on her. I was like, "What is happening?"
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
But it was both challenging and really rewarding experience because the things that I went through going through that and being with those kinds of people, I learned a hell of a lot more I think than I would have had I not gone through that and I feel really grateful for that.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I still have some of my best friends, that's how I made them.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Absolutely. I trained just as hard as the people around me who did and I also trained with Olympians as well and shared the ice with them sometimes and just is incredibly inspiring and I think that it really shaped the way I approach life.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Oh, 100%. And my hat goes off to you because I know what it's like to be part of that on a team sport and I think on an individual level it's even harder. My mom was a competitive figure skater and I didn't go that road, but I understand. So hat goes off to you for doing that. That's amazing.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Awe. Thank you. I was one of the people who would often get the reward for being the hardest worker and people would be like, "Holly's so dedicated," and obviously I was talented enough, I made it to the regional training center and my coaches have been to the Olympics with skaters. It's a great honor for them to take you as a student, but I was a small fish. So I get that.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Just being in that environment though I think says a lot and changes you in so many different ways.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. And one of the things that for me, and I'm sure this is the same in hockey, is the fundamental understanding of you fall down and you get up and you fall down and you get up and you're just like, "Keep going."
Lisa Marie Zane:
Oh yeah. There's a lot of parallels to working in product I think as well and in hockey, one of the things that you work in shifts. So you're on the ice for a period of time, then you're off. It can be very mentally challenging when you make a biggest mistake and everyone sees it. For instance, if I tried to make a pass up the ice and it was a total giveaway and then the other team scored, everyone would know it would be my fault. We used to play at Cornell University a lot. Every year we'd play in the preseason and they have this chant. If the goalie makes a mistake, the whole arena will yell, "It's all your fault." That feels terrible.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh my God. That's awful.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I know. But I think very different for women's hockey when I was playing, but still, it's like we had this thing where I don't even know if it was a coach or one of my teammates kind of taught me this, but it's like you make a mistake on the ice, you come off, you bang your stick, and you let your mistake go with that bang of the stick on the board. It's like done, starting from fresh. And I think translating that into working in product, there are so many parallels because you're always experimenting, you're always making guesses and trying to test your inputs versus outputs, and you're going to make mistakes and a lot of those mistakes happen in public. So in a lot of ways I think it's been a really good learning ground to figure out how to navigate those types of situations, which can be incredibly stressful to go through.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Absolutely. I think that's totally true and one of the other areas where I most often think about my skating career and how it helps me in product is just going into really high profile meetings. If I'm going to go in and meet with the CEO of public company, it can be kind of nerve-wracking and I just think, "Well, I went out and skated in front of thousands of people, so I think I can do this."
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah.
Holly Hester Reilly:
I'm just like, "I'm ready for my performance."
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah. You come up with ways to mentally prime yourself before some of the situations that you get thrown into.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Or that you go into willingly.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to dive right into your conscious product development. I'm super intrigued. I've always been interested in ethics and I think we need to talk more about ethics and tech than we do and product managers in particular bear a lot of responsibility and I would really love to hear more about why Conscious Product Development.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Sure. I think I'd like to start a little bit earlier to give some context to the people listening to just explain all of the factors that went into my decision to start Conscious Product Development.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. We can start wherever you want.
Lisa Marie Zane:
So how I got into product was my whole life I think I spent following my gut and trying to learn as much as I can following the things I was excited about. And I think that was good in a lot of ways, but it was also very overwhelming and I felt very scattered. So my school was in kinesiology, I did a master's in biomechanics, and then I did a degree in journalism. I had done pieces of product development along the way, never really officially calling it product development. When I was doing my master's degree, my research question, we partnered with BAUER hockey's innovation labs. It was a really cool experience to go through a super small lab and it was eight of us at the time and I got to work with BAUER's stick development team and my research question, I didn't realize I was super naive.We didn't actually have the technology to answer it, so I had to develop it and I didn't have a background in electrical engineering or anything like this. I had to do a lot of scrappy things and learn on the fly. I had a lot of help from the people that I was around, which is amazing and I'm very grateful for. And that kind of segued into being the first member of a development department at a production company. Actually I wanted to work as part of BAUER's stick development team, but a little bit before I submitted my thesis, they had a huge budget cut and it was terrible time for hiring. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I had done some media related stuff my whole life on the side for fun as like my side jobs. I did color commentary for hockey and soccer at McGill and things like that and-
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I thought, "Why don't I just see if I like this?" I used to work at a magazine also as a summer job. So I did an eight month grad diploma in journalism, got this job at a production company, spent a little over a year there working on factual series and beneries for Discovery Channel and National Geographic. I was freelance writing also at the time and I call them now, I got hit with a whole bunch of life slapping me in the face moments. I think up until that time I was super privileged. I think I was really lucky up until that point in my life for a lot of reasons.And then starting in around 2012, I was involved in a shooting at the Incentre in Toronto and my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I was in a bus accident. I was going to get off the bus from the middle of the bus and we t-boned a car and all the sudden I was like at the windshield. My aunt who I was very close to and we have very similar personalities and she was an athlete as well and she was on a training ride cycling and she was hit by a car and killed in Toronto.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Whoa.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And my partner at the time, we had been together for I think seven or eight years, we went camping and she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease and then that turned into bilateral facial paralysis.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh my goodness.
Lisa Marie Zane:
More rare than one in five million kind of thing. And so I just went through this kind of crazy period of my life where felt like I was almost in a horror movie that I did not want to be part of or I didn't ask for.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Was that all in one year?
Lisa Marie Zane:
No. This was over a two and a half.
Holly Hester Reilly:
A couple years. It doesn't matter. It could be five years. That'd still be a lot.
Lisa Marie Zane:
It felt like it was out of body kind of experience. I don't know. Now looking back, it feels like a huge blur.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
But going through all of that, one of the things that I realized was it sounds really dorky, but I wrote down on a napkin all of the different ways that my life felt misaligned. And I think for the first time I had to step outside myself and be like, "Wait. I feel like I almost died several times. I don't want to take anything for granted going forward. I don't know how much time I have left. What do I want to spend my time doing and why is that important to me and why are those things important to me?" So I wrote down on a napkin the ways that I was feeling misaligned and the things that I thought were important to me. And honestly I wish I did this a lot sooner.These are hard questions to answer, but I felt like I was kind of back against the wall situation. So I did the hard work to actually lighten these things within myself and essentially came to the conclusion I felt like I was on the outside of life looking in very much. I was interviewing people, I was telling their stories. So I had been part of sports teams my whole life too. So what I realized was that I wanted to be part of a team that was building something. I wanted to be a builder and I wanted to be with people that wanted the same thing. I wanted to have a meaningful, positive impact on people's lives, especially going through that and seeing how quickly it can be over and how quickly things can go downhill. On the flip side of that, we can have a major positive impact if that's what we want to do.So I cold emailed the CEO of this startup that I randomly saw in a Facebook group I was a part of. I said, "Here's my background. No idea if you're looking to grow. I wish I had this product when I was young." It was a wearable motion capture suit that could be used to measure your movement in 3D and I just actually got diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome in 2021, which is a genetic connective tissue disorder-
Holly Hester Reilly:
Okay.
Lisa Marie Zane:
That impacts how your collagen is produced and metabolized. So in me, it explains my whole life story in so many different ways and it basically meant that I've had so many injuries. I've been in physio like 99% of what feels like my life, even from being a kid.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Wow.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Just a lot of weird health issues that no one really connected. And so I saw this product and I was like, "Man, I wish I had this. When I tore my ACL and was coming back to play, I wish I could have had someone measuring my gate to see, "Is this the same as it was before?" Or my skating stride or things like that." So I cold emailed the CEO. I sent this message. I get called in for an interview. There's a full film crew there.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Wow.
Lisa Marie Zane:
They were filming a documentary, but I didn't know until I showed up. It was very stressful. I ended up getting the job. I became their fourth full-time employee at the time. So now I joined this startup very early stage. I'm their biomechanics lead to start and I did a little bit of marketing. That evolved into me becoming a product manager. We lived Product Life 101. We went through the Techstars Accelerator programs. I was in Montreal at the time. I moved to Boston, living in a one bedroom apartment with the founders, sleeping in the kitchen.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Oh, tell me more about that because I sometimes have people ask me about accelerators and I haven't interviewed anyone on the podcast who's talked about their experiences with one. So what did that experience look like?
Lisa Marie Zane:
So personally, I thought it was fantastic. It was so challenging in a lot of ways. We had a very complex product. That's the one thing I would do differently next time around, but the team that was there and the things that we got hammered in and how we evolved in a very short period of time was so cool, but my biggest takeaway was I got so much exposure that I would not have had, had just stayed in Montreal. And that's actually how I became a product manager because we had this amazing team of mentors there. I think if you're looking to learn quickly, an accelerator is a great place to be. If you've already got a lot of your learnings under your belt, you've been able to get products into market and gotten feedback from customers or things like that or you've already had startups and stuff before, I think different experience.But as a first time, I had no idea what I was doing. I did on the biomechanic side, but our CEO came up to me one day and he is like, "Hey, you're doing a lot of these kind of product related things anyway. Do you want to be our first PM?" And I said, "Sure." And then I went over to my laptop and I was like, "What is a product manager?" After I already said yes and I was like, "Oh no. This is actually great." Don't do that. If you're listening, make sure you know what you're in for before you say yes.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yes.
Lisa Marie Zane:
So I got connected to some pretty amazing mentors being there and that changed my life. So tying this back to why Conscious, I ended up being parts of different startups after this.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I was part of one that got acquired by Google at the beginning of the pandemic. So I joined the Google team and basically went through a second round of life slapping me in the face moments where I herniated three discs in my back, I got the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome diagnosis. The tech landscape I thought was changing a lot and a lot of the reasons that I signed up for certain things I felt changed. I think when you're younger, and I'm speaking about myself, I was younger and more naive and I think my basic life hypothesis is that people are good and people want to be good and do good in the world and they think that the systems that we have set up sometimes make that go askew a little bit.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh, say more about that 'cause I have some similar feelings.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I started pretty much in all cases with I bought into I'm personally type of person like I'm an all-in type of person. I can't turn my soul off and work on something that I don't care about. I've tried to do that and I cannot. It's not in my cells to be able to do this. Some people can. And when I think you involve a lot of different factors like the economy, investors, where the money's coming from, so many other constraints that you have to deal with when you're starting these companies, it can change things. It can change the environment, it can change the culture, it can change the vision. And I think I've seen that in a lot of cases firsthand and I've heard a lot about this with friends and other people that I know working in tech and now we're seeing I think another major round of that with everything that's been going on.
Holly Hester Reilly:
I was just going to ask if you could tell us a story about one of the times when you were actually inside a company and you saw these changes happening around you.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah. So I guess one of the experiences I had, we had a very complicated wearable product. And Techstars actually, it was really interesting because I was actually part of a lot of the mentorship meetings with the founders. And then I had some on my own, which was awesome. Who gets that kind of experience when they're first put in the door? And basically we had a lot of thoughts about the kind of problems that we were solving with the product. And when you match that with the practicality of actually building a company around that or building a feasible product around that with limited funds and limited resources, that obviously changes things or can change things. And when we were looking at how we were organizing our development, a lot of the discussions we were having with mentors and the people that were investing in us made things change very quickly and we had to change our vision and change the problem that we were solving halfway through after we already had invested in suppliers and hardware is a whole different beast.And doing that kind of pivot when something's already half-baked is extremely challenging. So I think it was a really good lesson for me. I think a lot of the experiences I've had, I've made these lists in the moment, but also after the fact of if I have my own company one day or if I'm working on this kind of product again or if I'm doing something along these lines, what are the things that I would do differently? And I think to be honest, most of my learning has come from those types of things where I've been thrown into the fire, gone through a lot of crazy stuff, and then come out, "Whoa. I have to do a debrief with myself 'cause what the hell just happened?"And so going through that, I think looking at how could I do pre-mortems differently to avoid some of these issues from happening? How could I structure things differently on the product side of things? How could I be a better leader if I'm working as a product manager or senior PM or whatever that looks like at a company? How could I be a better leader based on everything that I've learned and things to do differently? How could I set up things in a better way from the get-go? How can I be asking better questions in the earlier stages after going through a lot of interesting pivots and changes of direction in my experiences?
Holly Hester Reilly:
Wow. I'm really struck by the idea that it sounds like you are a very good coach to yourself.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I've been coached a lot. I'm very fortunate because I've been coached my whole life. Since the time I was four I've had some type of coach with sports and then this kind of happened on the career front going through some of these incubator and accelerator programs and then when I didn't have that, I was like, "Oh my gosh. I feel like I have a huge gap." So I actually kind of tried to create my own board of directors and my own, I call them my VIPs. But I'd make a list. I'd figure out, "Okay. Where do I want to grow? What are the areas I want to focus on? And who is great in these areas plus whose values kind of align with mine?" That's something that's a huge driver for me and actually one of the main reasons why I segued into leaving my job at Google and starting Conscious Product Development.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. So how long ago did you create this personal board of directors?
Lisa Marie Zane:
Probably about five or six years ago. I started thinking about it I think in maybe seven years ago, 2015-ish. And most of the time it came out a lot of struggle like I was feeling really lost or stressed or overwhelmed and trying to figure out how do I anchor myself? And I would say I've always felt like I was a square peg in a round hole kind of person. I didn't really ever know why. I recently found out I have brain damage and maybe that's part of the reason.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh my.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Most people are born with, they're called two PICAs, your posterior inferior cerebellar artery. And I only have one of them. And my thing now is maybe that kind of changed the way I'm wired slightly. Maybe that's part of the reason why I have a really hard time. I do it innately and I don't even think about it and then sometimes I'm really off base and sometimes I discover things that other people wouldn't have thought of so it works both ways, but I've always had to learn in different ways than I think a typical person. There's no normal, there's no average.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Right. You've had to learn differently from the neurotypicals.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah and I think that's been the case my whole life and when I started looking at, "Okay. Where do I want to be later? What do I want my life to look like?" And after going through some of these pretty significant life experiences that were very traumatic, starting to seek help on my own and then seeing how that could actually really benefit me exponentially, going to therapy and trying to figure out how I work could actually benefit me a lot in my career or in my relationships. And that kind of snowballed into, "Hey. Why don't I actually just start reaching it?" And tools like Twitter and LinkedIn and tools that came about around the same or before this I think helped me to figure out how to do this in ways that I feel like there was a huge barrier before, especially in academia. They was like, "Oh. That person's so much more senior. I can't talk to them. They have so much more experience, they'll never respond to me."And I think working as a journalist also helped break down some of those barriers because I had to ask people questions all the time and I didn't really talk that much in school. I was in I think grade two and my teachers called my parents in for an interview and they're like, "Lisa doesn't communicate." And I was so shy and now if you've met any of my friends or anybody that knows me, they would say that's crazy 'cause I talk a lot. And I would say now a lot of what I do is based on communication. So that kind of forced me to break down some of the barriers that I think I had in myself that were my own limiting beliefs and being able to be like, "Oh, I can just ask someone this question and they'll answer and then I can write an article about it."
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
That kind of really helped me to see things more holistically to be like, "Oh, this person, I've been following them for a long time. They are massively successful. Instead of thinking they'll never respond to me, I think maybe they will."
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Absolutely. I actually coached somebody that just recently. They're thinking of starting a startup in a particular space and I said, "Well see if anyone else has tried that already," because it sounded to me like something that would've been tried by now. So they looked it up and then I told them, "Go reach out to those people and ask them, "Will you talk to me?" 'Cause it had failed already. So it's like you never know. In the startup world, people are really willing to help each other and it's eyeopening to realize that you can just reach out to someone that you think is untouchable and ask them a question. And sure, they're not all going to answer. You're going to have some silence, but if you ask 10 people a question, you'll get a response from somebody.
Lisa Marie Zane:
It's really an amazing community and especially seeing what's been happening just in the last couple of weeks with what's happening in tech, I always think back to, I watched Mr. Rogers growing up and there's this quote where whenever something really scary would happen, my mom would always tell me, "Look for the helpers." And I think with what's happening in tech right now, I've seen so many really amazing helpers kind of sharing things. Shreyas Doshi just put this amazing crowdsource list on his Twitter and LinkedIn and it was, "If your company's hiring for product engineering or design roles, put the role here in this spreadsheet," and it's massive, hundreds of roles are there now.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And people are like, "Hey, if you need help, here are resources that I'm offering at a discounted rate if you've been impacted by layoffs."
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Obviously a really challenging situation in a lot of ways, but a lot of really awesome things have happened as a result of it and I want to focus on the helpers.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Absolutely. And that makes me think back to 2008. I didn't catch the when in your story. When was that first startup that you got involved in? Were you in tech in 2008?
Lisa Marie Zane:
In 2008, I was in university still.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. That was my guess. I was like, "I feel like you're a little bit younger than me maybe," but not by a lot 'cause I wasn't very far out of university. But for me, one of the biggest shifts in terms of how has tech changed over time is the pre 2008 tech world and the post 2008 tech world and just one of the great outcomes of it, despite how difficult the recession was, was how many new innovative startups there were because the big companies had shed people and those people often got great severance packages and they had been saving for their long healthy career that they'd been in tech or in finance in most cases.And so they had the space to explore and stop and ask themselves these questions and say, "What am I doing with my time and where do I want to be and what do I want to do?" And I feel like post 2008, there was an influx of people into tech that were mission driven. And I hope that we see that again this time and I'm pretty confident that we will.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I feel the exact same way and I think in a way I've talked about my life slapping me in the face moments. I think we're going through a collective one right now and now it's all of these people that have been impacted. I think a lot of people that are in leadership positions in tech are seriously questioning, "Why am I doing this again? What am I in this for? What do I want my legacy to be?" And to me, this is the root of what I am doing and why I am doing it now. It's because I truly believe that we need to do a better job of being more conscious about the decisions that we're making, both in terms of how we design our careers and how we make decisions about our careers when we're working on building products and then how we actually build products more consciously.So I feel like we've been in this weird autopilot mode in a lot of ways where big tech changed that and then we got used to that new way of working and it's so easy to fall into autopilot and not even realizing the biases that you're bringing in or the constraints that you're working within. So I think of this image a lot and was like, "This is my space," but I didn't even know that I was constrained by these walls until I had kind of sequence events that happened to me. Whoa. Okay. Actually, there's a lot more out there that I wasn't even aware of. So I think a lot about how can I increase my own awareness about current situation in the world and product and collective intelligence and consciousness and then also how can I help other people do the same thing?Think about it and I think you can take two paths here. You can come at it in a very attacking way and say, "Hey. These are all the things that are wrong and this isn't good." I think some of that is warranted because that kind of has to happen to, I think, get people to wake up in a lot of cases. The approach that I'm trying to take right now is, "Hey. There's a lot of things that are not working right now and this is impacting a lot of people in a lot of really negative ways. That's true, but what can we actually do about it?"
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I think that's what I've seen as a big gap in a lot of the conversations so far. It's, "Yeah. This is bad. There's a lot of these situations happening. This is really tough, but what are some of the things that we can actually do about it and do working together, moving forward to improve the situation, both on a local kind of smaller level or micro level and then working towards bigger changes on a macro level?" That was a bit of a tangent.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. So what are some of the ways that you try to make a difference?
Lisa Marie Zane:
So Conscious Product Development, my pillars are trying to help teams build products and individuals build careers in ways that are more inclusive, holistic, ethical, accessible, and sustainable. And I chose those five very consciously because I've seen a lot of different parties or organizations or teams focus on little silos. And to me, this is all connected. So I split things right now in terms of coaching, writing, and building tools. That's right now. I have some items on my roadmap that I'm working towards so that's going to change in the future, but where I'm at right now is using these three things as my vehicles. And so on the coaching side, I work with product leaders and I help them with career coaching to walk them through a lot of the things that I think we take for granted and that we do on autopilot in terms of how we walk through our careers, looking at, "What do I want my ultimate legacy to be?" And focusing your energy and efforts in problem areas that you really care about and that you're personally tied to.I think that's a missing piece in a lot of people's overall wellness right now. It's like because of the systems we have, they make choices based on, "Okay. I need this salary to survive," or, "To pay my medical bills," or, "To make sure I'm in a safe neighborhood for my family," or things like that. And I think there are ways we can kind of outline what most of the boxes are that we're looking for in our lives, whether it's wanting work-life balance fits, wanting to feel more personally connected to the mission and values of what we're actually putting our time and energy into every day. I want to leave a legacy of this. I think asking yourself those tough questions to even outline what those boxes are, increases the chance that you can move towards ticking more of them. So that's on the kind of coaching side.On the writing side, I've been trying to build, I have a newsletter called Stream of Consciousness. I write on Medium as well. And what I've been trying to do there is share stories of how can we actually connect the dots in a lot of these ways. I wrote one recently, How to build Mobile Apps More Consciously and broke down some actual examples of here are some changes we can make. So comment what apps that we use to build them in more conscious ways or make them more accessible or intentional to respect our attention and privacy and things like that. And then building tools. So I just released something called the Product Manager's Career Guide and my goal there was what I was seeing a lot of is you can do individual courses on interviewing or you can read a lot about how to format your resume or things like that.And what I was not seeing was holistically, if you walk through your whole journey of trying to transition or get your foot in the door or land a new job when you're in the kind of first five years of your career as a product manager, number one, how can you design that more consciously and holistically and think about all the pieces, but number two, how can you actually connect all of those things and practice and what's the right sequence of events to go through? And maybe not the right, but maybe a better sequence of events to go through so that you're putting your energy in the right places and you're getting the biggest return for the investment that you're putting in to yourself and trying to get to the next stage. And so in a big nutshell, that's where I'm at right now. I would like to focus more on developing more larger kind of courses and resources to help larger teams. My thinking though is that it kind of has to start on the individual level and I'm running smaller iterative experiments to find better fits on that plane first.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. That's awesome. I like how you're running experiments for what you're doing now, even for your own coaching content, et cetera. What do some of those experiments look like?
Lisa Marie Zane:
Okay. So I can walk you through. So I launched Conscious Product Development, it was about a year and a half ago, and part of the reason why I wanted to do this, it was mostly driven by my mission and values and to be quite honest, I wanted to try my own thing. That was the biggest experiment, this trying to see if I could make it work. But I was dealing with a lot of constraints. When I hurt my back, I herniated three discs, no surgeon would touch me because I was hyper mobile and they're like, "If we do surgery, it's not going to be a long-term thing. It's going to be a quick fix and you're going to go back to square one." So I've essentially had to spend half of my day every day since January, 2020 doing some type of rehab and that put major constraints on my time.So I needed to find a way to work that was more flexible. So that was another experiment I ran. "Okay. I'm dealing with these kind of major life constraints right now. How do I deal with that?" And I had just become a new stepmom at that point and feel like my life was very chaotic and I was trying to run experiments to make it a little bit more structured and essentially try to learn as quickly as possible to get into a better situation, while doing things in a way that I felt my soul needed to, I think traditionally has been my biggest challenge in every step I've taken in my career and in a lot of ways my life, but that's been changing a lot recently, which has been awesome. So I started doing consulting.So I knew I could only work part-time so I initially started doing these part-time PM consulting contracts and my goal was I had a year split up into quarters basically and I said, "I want to do a different experiment every quarter and then do a debrief after each one to see what I like." So I spent one quarter doing consulting at startups, spent another quarter building an app called Align that I got into the Google Play store, but I had to switch gears because I was running out of money and I couldn't monetize it fast enough. So couch that. I still want to go back to it. So then the third one was the first experiment I ran there was group coaching. So I actually ran a cohort, it was a program called zero to one, and it was targeted to the PMs that were PM number one at the respective startups because I was in that situation and I knew how hard it was and I wish that I could have had more support than I had.I was very lucky that we ended up going through Techstars and I had some support there, but it was a really scary trial by fire experience to go through my first time being a product manager, not knowing what the hell I was doing. So I did a group coaching program there. Was not perfect. I had, again, really, I don't have a background in education. I didn't fully know what I was doing, but I was able to structure it in a way to get really good feedback. And also the most important thing I learned was how I actually felt about doing something like that. "Wait. How did this make me feel and what do I want to do? What can I change going forward in my own roadmap based on that?"And so I ended up pivoting a little bit to doing one-on-one coaching with product leaders. So that's what I've been doing since and then I launched the newsletter as another experiment. I know this is so little compared to a lot of people that you have on the podcast, but I hit 1000 subscribers in 10 months and I've been doing this very part-time on top of all my rehab and a lot of the other things I've been doing. To me, it's not necessarily that much about my growth, but hitting that number was a really big deal for me and-
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Congrats on that.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Thank you. The biggest thing I learned was I feel really good when I write, so I want to do more of that. So I'm going to be investing more time in writing the newsletter and running some experiments to try to monetize it in a conscious way.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I have a million more, but I don't want to waste the whole podcast talking about all these things.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah, no, but I love it. I love how you have tried these different experiments and that it shows that conscientiousness is so important to you because you are assessing not just what works for a business, but what works for you as a person.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I think that's been the biggest learning is that I'm trying to prove to myself that it is possible. I think a lot of people have told me my whole life, "You have to make a choice. Sell your soul, make a lot of money, or go in the nonprofit route and do what you really love doing, but your life is going to be severely impacted in a lot of ways." And I think I want to challenge that and I know a lot of people have already before me. I'm not like the first trailblazer here, but I think that if we can find things that we like to do that generally align with what we want our life to look like and what we want to feel like, we will inherently be more successful at those things and I also don't think that there has to be this kind of split between non-for-profit or profit.I think if you look at the UNs, they've got a list of 17 development goals and a lot of people would say that's a, "Not in my backyard kind of problem." Dealing with preventable chronic illnesses or poverty or hunger and things like that and/or climate. That's a huge one. And I think a lot of companies are starting to challenge that and do a lot of really cool things to actually bridge those gaps where you see, "Here's a meaningful problem. We have a really great way of working in tech. Let's combine these two things and come up with some really creative, innovative, elegant solutions."Something that's been really bothering me lately is I think a lot of people that are considered massive trailblazers and leaders in tech, if you actually look under the hood, if you look at the problems that they have chosen to solve, my barometer or my sanity check is in how they solved this problem, did it solve the problem and that's it? Did it create more problems? Did it not solve the problem and create more problems? What does that actually look like? And I think there are a lot of people who have done really cool, creative things. Like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created this competition a little while ago. I don't know if you heard about. It's like toilet competition.
Holly Hester Reilly:
No. Tell me about the toilet competition.
Lisa Marie Zane:
I don't remember everything word for word, but Melinda was reading the newspaper one day and she had been reading about how many people in specific underdeveloped nations die from diarrhea. Basically disease that is caused by poor hygienic practices. And then they dug into this more 'cause they're like, "That's crazy. In a developed nation, we don't have to deal with that. Why is this still an issue?" So they launched this competition to see if people could create a net neutral toilet that didn't need energy to work and also disposed of the waste or used it in a sanitary way or could be used for other forms of energy. They had so many cool submissions and I have to go back to look at this. I believe the one that won, it was fueled by worms or-
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh wow.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Something. It was so creative. So stuff like that I'm naturally drawn to because I think that we've created a lot of unnecessary byproducts in the way that we approach solving problems in big tech or tech in general with move quickly, prioritize profits over people and then we'll figure everything else out after. I think we're coming to a really big turning point where we're realizing the limits of that and understanding not only is it not sustainable, but look at the impacts that we're having, not only on our customers, and Twitter's a great example of that, but employees, people that are working at these companies. There are so many deeply personal impacts to what has been happening.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Absolutely. And it just makes me think back. So I also studied engineering. I feel like you and I have just bizarre similarities, but I studied chemical engineering and I was part of Engineers Without Borders and we worked on a project that was about filtering arsenic out of water in rural Bangladesh and it really brings awareness to the idea that we have to create products for developing countries, but also elsewhere that don't have the negative impacts that capitalism has wrought all over the developed countries.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I agree that we have a lot in common. We were talking just before we started recording and found out we have the same color glasses and I actually was going to dye my hair that color recently too.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Oh, really? That's too funny. For listeners, my hair is blue and purple.
Lisa Marie Zane:
That's funny. But looking at, even in the products that we use today, I've been actually thinking about doing this. If you're listening and you think this is a good idea, maybe message me and let me know. I want to go through a lot of the products that we use and look at here are their core ways that they solve our problems. Here's how. Here's what they really nail. Here are the ways where they create unnecessary byproducts and here's maybe ways that we can approach some of these things differently. There's a woman I follow named Clo S and she has a blog and newsletter called This Two Shall Grow. And she had a really great example recently in what she was writing about what she said, "What if YouTube, for instance, instead of using the algorithms to show you suggested videos, what if you could just see the items that you saved in your watch later list when you open YouTube or they would show up as the ones you want to play next?"'Cause it's a much more intentional way to go about, "I'm the person that actually see these. These are things that I want to watch." And so many other little examples. Even Facebook, if you could use mobile and instead of when you put the button, open the app, and you're in the newsfeed right away-
Holly Hester Reilly:
Right.
Lisa Marie Zane:
And I know there are a lot of monetary reasons why they do this, but a more intentional way and I think this was mentioned in the Center for Humane Technologies course and Foundations of Human Tech. That's a great course to take if you're listening. I would recommend it to everyone. What if you could just click on the icon and you actually have a list of do you want to write a post?
Holly Hester Reilly:
Right.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Do you want to send a message? Asking you upfront, upstream versus you go in, you get sucked into the newsfeed, and you're like, "Wait. What was I even here for?" Center for Humane Tech talks about persuasive technology a lot and I think the way I view it is, yes, for sure, but also there's all these other parts of technology that I think deserve a lot more attention and intention in terms of how we build and design them and conceive of them in the first place.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of room there. One of the parts that's so hard about it is that in order to do those kinds of things, we also need business model innovation because that is the problem. They're monetizing attention because their business model is ads and ads come from attention, but we need to put more brain power towards how can we make a more ethical and conscious products that still make businesses run?
Lisa Marie Zane:
Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. And I think to me, it comes down to we have created all these systems that we are forced to work within now because they exist and this is the way the world is. How can we change these systems so that they work with us instead of against us?
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Exactly. It's a big meaty problem and I'm super excited that you're working on tackling it and it's something that I'm passionate about as well and so let's see where the future goes. There's lots of room.
Lisa Marie Zane:
It's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity. And I'm not just saying that because I saw it on a t-shirt.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. So where can people find you and your newsletter?
Lisa Marie Zane:
I have a website, consciousproductdevelopment.com. I know it's a mouthful. I'm looking into updating the domain. So my newsletter, you see it right on the homepage, Stream of Consciousness. I am pretty active on Twitter, but I'm reconsidering that right now and most active on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me on any of those platforms. I've got a couple things that I put up in Gumroad as well, resources for conscious PMs. Working on a couple things that I've got in the pipeline as well. My website's probably the best hub for that, but you can follow me on LinkedIn primarily and Twitter at least right now. I'm trying to make some switches on that front. Need to consider it a little bit more.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It was so much fun to talk to you today.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Oh, likewise. I hope that you have a great rest of your day and if you're listening that you have enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking the time out to listen to this and I'm the type of person, I always want to create iterative feedback loop. I would love any feedback that you have on this podcast episode. Let me know what you think. If you liked it, if you hated it, I would love to just hear your thoughts. So you can send me a message. I think LinkedIn's probably the best way to get hold of me, but I'm Lisa Zane 15 on Twitter as well.
Holly Hester Reilly:
Perfect. Awesome. Well, we'll leave it at that. Thanks so much.
Lisa Marie Zane:
Thank you.
Holly Hester Reilly:
The Product Science Podcast is brought to you by H2R Product Science. We teach startup founders and product leaders how to use the product science method to discover the strongest product opportunities and lay the foundations for high growth products, teams, and businesses. Learn more at h2rproductscience.com. Enjoying this episode? Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. I also encourage you to visit us at productsciencepodcast.com to sign up for more information and resources from me and our guests. If you like the show, a rating and review would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
