Episode 142: Mastering Data-Driven Product Management with Bethany Lyons, Chief Product Officer at KAWA Analytics

In this episode of Product Thinking, Bethany Lyons, Chief Product Officer at KAWA Analytics, joins Melissa Perri to unveil the role of a data-driven product manager in early-stage startups. They explore the world of operational intelligence, the importance of identifying high-demand customers, and the balance between pioneering and optimization in startups. Bethany also touches on the crucial aspects of seamless onboarding during early-stage product development and highlights the significance of choosing the right customers when scaling.

Bethany has vast expertise in product and data analytics, having served in key roles across organizations of various scales. She formerly held the title of Director of Product Management of Analytics at Mews and was the Senior Product Manager of Data Modelling and Calculations at Salesforce. Her mastery was globally recognized in 2014 when Tableau Software honored her as the Worldwide Product Consultant of the Year.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

[24:21] - When determining KAWA Analytics' target customers, Bethany prioritizes those who show a high willingness to pay and an urgent need for their product. For instance, hedge funds value KAWA due to its capacity to improve their critical daily operations, such as risk and position analysis. KAWA aims for users who employ data in operational capacities rather than just for occasional insights, leading the team to coin the term "operational intelligence" to define its niche.
[27:38] - In startups, being data-driven might not always be viable due to the lack of data. Instead of focusing on quantitative metrics, lean into qualitative insights. Rely on vision, understanding the problem, feedback from user interviews, and product market interactions. While data can optimize, it can't tell you what to do. Therefore, startups should focus on pioneering over-optimization.
[31:18] - Seamless onboarding for their product is key to KAWA. The team prioritizes understanding user behaviors through screen shares during these early stages, ensuring users learn the product without requiring assistance. In the future, they aim to introduce event-based data collection to understand the user's journey and any deviation from the ideal onboarding course. Their primary metric for product success is user activation, indicating when a user derives value from the product. However, defining the point of value realization remains a crucial topic KAWA is still addressing, whether it's grouping a view, sharing, or building a dashboard.
[42:08] - Bethany believes that the most important product decision is choosing the first set of customers. Onboarding customers with a highly overlapping shared problem ensures easier scaling, as catering to diverse needs makes the process way harder. Moreover, recognizing that different company stages may require different leadership styles, Bethany mentions the possibility of her role evolving or even hiring her replacement in the future, something every business leader must consider at a certain scaling stage.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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