Brett Buchanan - Founder and CEO at Pathfinder Product Labs: The Product Manager Role, Creating Your Unique Position, Building a Community, and Using Metrics to Grow a Consulting Company

Brett Buchanan  00:00

I wish I would have known this earlier is, you can be much more effective as a product leader, when you're collaborating and doing things as a team, collaborating with your marketing person, collaborating with UX person, collaborating with your developers. Because one, it's way more fun. And two, it's gonna lead to better results.

Callan Harrington  00:22

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives, and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone to a another episode of That Worked. I'm excited to be joined by Brett Buchanan. Brett is the CEO of Pathfinder Product Labs, a team of experienced product leaders on a mission to develop products that create lasting customer and business value. Brett is a product expert. He has extensive experience as a chief product officer, ranging from pre-revenue startups to large enterprises, he's developed a deep understanding of the balance between products and stability, commercial expertise, and data driven insights. Brett was at the early stages of the product manager position. And it was really interesting to hear how he created his own role as a product manager within a Fortune 500 company. I also enjoyed diving into the turning points that led to rapid growth at Pathfinder. I think the insights he shared are great for all founders to hear. The part of the conversation, though, that I love the most was how he built a community without intending to. The breakdown he gave is a great roadmap for anyone looking to build a community or to start a network from scratch. So on that note, let's jump into the show. Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett Buchanan  02:08

Hey, Callan, thanks for having me. Excited to be here, excited to talk about, you know, my career, my journey for a couple reasons. Product managers are known to have kind of interesting or non conventional paths to getting into product management. And that was the case for me, but also the case for how I've started Pathfinder. So thanks for having me.

Callan Harrington  02:30

Why do you think that is? Why do you think that it's unconventional within product management? And how they kind of go about their careers?

Brett Buchanan  02:36

That's a good question. One is there's not- outside of a few schools, I think Harvard and MIT now have majors, where you can major in product management. But outside of that there's not a, there's not an educational path to getting into it like you would a an engineer or a designer even. And so a lot of people- and the role is also emerging. Like, it was previously at Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook and Google primarily. And now you see it at Walmart, and Target and, you know, really large enterprises that, you know, are more or less traditional technology companies. And so because of that, there's been this huge gap between the number of product management jobs and the number of people who have done it. And so a lot of people get kind of pulled into the role as their companies may be organized differently, or they shift BA jobs or subject matter expert jobs inside of the business into product roles.

Callan Harrington  03:42

Was that a big driver for you starting Pathfinder in general?

Brett Buchanan  03:45

I started Pathfinder, because I was genuinely interested in learning and the diversity. So Pathfinder is a consulting company that focuses on helping companies really kind of maximize the investment that they're making in technology using product management practices. And I was doing freelance work in 2016, 2017, a little bit in 2015. And doing it as a kind of a side hustle, ten to twenty hours a week. And I found that I really enjoyed seeing different industries, different business models, different stages of companies, different experiences that I'd never-  different experiences where I'd never worked in, you know, FinTech as an example, or health care. And consulting gave me the opportunity to kind of explore those things. And so I loved... love the diversity of consulting and the learning aspect of seeing different things. And so I started it for two reasons. One, learning. And two, yeah, there's just a big need in the market, especially over the last four or five years as there's been such an increased investment in technology, whether it's investment coming from venture capital, PE, into startups, or companies realizing the need to invest more money, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars, that large Fortune 500 companies into technology to grow their business. And so that's led to this, you know, massive need for strong product, strong product management. And so saw the need in the market. It was interesting to me from a learning perspective, and said, hey, why don't I start a company kind of as an experiment?

Callan Harrington  05:33

So let's pull it back. Where did your career start?

Brett Buchanan  05:37

I went to University of Dayton, and was a finance major there. Not sure why I chose that as my major, but I was always drawn to business even as a, you know, throughout my entire life, even as a kid, I had stupid small businesses, you know, buy something for $1, sell it for $5, or sell it for $2. Whatever. Enjoy that hustle. In college, I started a book, small side, hustle where I would buy back books, the bookstore wouldn't buy back. So this is prior to Amazon, you know, you'd go to the bookstore at the beginning of the semester, pay 150 bucks for a book. At the end of the semester, you'd hope that the professor was going to use that same book so that you could sell it back. And if you didn't, you would walk to a parking lot, and meet a guy who literally had a van, and he might offer you ten bucks for the book. Well, I set up a sheet, I hung a sheet on the front of my house and spray painted, "will buy back books the bookstore won't buy back," and had a laptop on my front porch and would sit out there. And I would give a better deal than the guy who was in a van in the parking lot. I would offer people more money. And in some cases, I would offer them cases of Milwaukee Best. And so I always enjoyed kind of more entrepreneurial things. After school, I went to work for Abercrombie & Fitch in their e-commerce department. I was an analyst. I worked there for five and a half years, about two years in, we were launching PayPal, and this is in 2007. PayPal was still fairly early. We were one of the earlier merchants. And they connected us with somebody at Nike. And they were a product manager. And I got to learn a little bit more about what a product management role at Nike looked like. It was really interesting to me, and went and talked to our head of digital and I said, hey, I'm a BA, there's this thing at Nike called product manager. It's kind of like what I'm doing but more strategic, and convinced them to change my role to be a product manager. So I was one of the first product managers at Abercrombie.

Callan Harrington  07:56

Why was that interesting to you? When you saw what Nike was doing? What was it that was kind of that spark of like, oh, I want to do this?

Brett Buchanan  08:03

Yeah, well, I like to build things. And I was always drawn to technology. And so my role as a business analyst was delivery focused, you know, was working with developers, writing requirements, to build different functionality for our website, to try to add features and capabilities that had a business case associated to them. But it wasn't responsible for actually developing the business case, or developing the strategy, or understanding why we were working on the things we were doing. It was more of execute and implement this capability, because someone else had thought it was a good idea. And the product managers at Nike there was definitely a component of that. But they were also responsible for the why. So they were looking at things strategically around okay, what metrics are we trying to move the needle on, and responsible for developing the strategy to do that, and the roadmap to drive those metrics. And so I wanted to come more upstream into the strategy and work. What's really powerful about product management is your scope is from strategy to delivery. So you're hoping to find the vision, define the focus, set the direction, and also work with engineering teams, or product teams to build and execute against that strategy.

Callan Harrington  09:27

How did you make that case?

Brett Buchanan  09:28

That's interesting. I I'm trying to remember, you know, it just it makes a lot of sense. I mean...

Callan Harrington  09:32

To you it does, but how did you convince a company to say, okay, yeah, we'll create this role we've never created for you based on what you just told us.

Brett Buchanan  09:42

Well, so keep in mind, Abercrombie was kind of in an interesting place back then. I mean, the focus of the CEO was all about this store experience. You can probably remember walking through a mall when you're in junior high or high school, smelling the cologne, hearing the music, right? And so we had a lot more flexibility as an e-commerce organization, because there just wasn't as many eyes on it. We were a very, very young organization, very young team. And the leader on the team was open minded enough to kind of hear me out and give it a shot. And so, when I converted to a product manager, there were two other people who also converted to product managers. And, you know, in some ways, it was a test, but a test that went well, because over the next three years, we grew the team. I think the team grew to about fifteen to twenty people, and became a pretty integral part of the e-commerce business.

Callan Harrington  10:40

What was that like? What was that like scaling that? So you're in this new position? And now you got this opportunity to- fifteen people, that's a good sized product team. What was that transition like?

Brett Buchanan  10:51

I mean, we took a really practical approach towards that change. And we kind of had to, because there wasn't as much... there's a lot of content, and books, and YouTube videos, and podcasts around product management today. In 2006, 2007, like, there was none of that, really. And so we had to figure that out on our own, we had some pretty core principles around being super disciplined in where we were asking our people to focus, like our developers' time, needs to be spent on the most important things. And so for us, that meant building a lot of business cases, back then, as product managers, we were looking a lot of data, talking to our call center, talking to customers, and trying to really synthesize all of those different inputs to figure out the most important things to work on. I'm sure the way product management looks there now is probably much, much different, probably much more improved, in a lot of ways. Just because we had- we didn't bring in product managers from the outside, we were trying to figure it out as a team. For me personally, one of the challenges was growing a team, I had never managed people before. And so this was my first experience, you know, having direct reports, or people reporting to me. And so that was probably the biggest challenge was how do I shift from an individual contributor into more of a leader and coaching, supporting, and driving, and helping set direction for those folks?

Callan Harrington  12:31

How did you go about doing that? And then what specific challenges- like what were some of the things that you remember, like, this was hard?

Brett Buchanan  12:37

Mm hmm. About the same time I went back and got my MBA, and a lot of the, where I've tried to focus my interests and, and kind of studies I guess, were around how to be an effective leader. So the MBA program, I think that's one of the biggest things I took away from it was, how to be a better leader. And so that's where I got a lot of my- that's where I learned a lot. Also, just talk to other people, trying to get support and help for them, and how to effectively manage a team.

Callan Harrington  13:13

That's- so, one of the interesting things is we talk to a good amount of people that have their MBA. And it always comes down to- or I should say, I don't want to say it always comes down. But it's usually two things. It's either somebody went because it was a logical next step, and they wanted to grow their network. The network's always something that gets brought up. Or somebody had something really intentional, a reason for going. If I'm hearing you correctly, you went because you wanted to be a better leader, is that accurate? Or am I off on that?

Brett Buchanan  13:40

That's part of it. This is also around 2010. So we're kind of in the midst or coming out of the Great Recession. And, you know, it was really looking for ways to grow. And there weren't as many job opportunities out there, honestly, for me to shift to and grow into. And so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't- that I was continuing to develop my career and looking for growth opportunities. And, you know, at the time, I think an MBA was one way for me to do that.

Callan Harrington  14:11

Absolutely. Where did you go after you got your MBA?

Brett Buchanan  14:12

After Abercrombie & Fitch, I went to Gap. Gap's such an interesting company. When I started there, I was one of probably like, thirteen or fourteen product managers, and the company is based out of San Francisco, been there forever, amazing building and campus. And I think partially because of where they're headquartered. They have a super mature software and product management organization, and they're very inclined to build technology. And so when I started the chief product officer that was there was a guy by the name of Toby Link. Toby IPO'd. He founded etoys.com, took that company public. And then during the dotcom bubble, after they closed their doors, he came over to Gap as the chief product officer. And when he came over, he brought some amazing people, amazing product leaders from Netscape and some of those Bay Area internet companies to come and join his team. And so for me, it was, I was probably one of the most inexperienced people, and loved that, loved being surrounded by people who had helped build Netscape, and had founded companies, and engineer leaders-  Why leave that?

Callan Harrington  15:37

Why did you love that?

Brett Buchanan  15:38

Because I could- I learned a ton. I mean, I learned a lot about how to do product management at a really high level and how to build software. Gap is more inclined to build their own software solutions versus buying things. We built a payment gateway from scratch. Tesla ended up hiring our product manager and half of our developers to go build their payment gateway. We built- our entire point of sale system was a cloud based suite of apps that we built from scratch internally. Like, you look across the tech stack, and it's pretty remarkable how much custom software is there. There's pros and cons to that, obviously, but part of their culture is winning through technology. So I was actually there for- I worked there for five and a half years. I loved the culture, loved the work, loved the people I was working with, and was learning throughout the entire experience. Well, when I left, a lot of the the original team had left. They left to go on to some pretty amazing companies, Apple, Google, chief product officers at a ton of startups. And so a lot of the people, my original team had left, we had grown to from thirteen product managers to over 200 during those five years. So, I got to see a lot of change and how to integrate product management into a multibillion dollar company. And, you know, I was ready for my next thing, you know, wanted to- the learning started to diminish. I had been there for five and a half years and understood the business model of the industry, the tech stack. And I wanted to try something different.

Callan Harrington  17:27

What came next?

Brett Buchanan  17:28

Pathfinder. So, I did a few years of consulting, of freelance consulting. So, I worked for a startup called We Vote, whose mission was to really change the way that legislation was made. So the the founder that was a former advocate who understood the ins and outs of legislation, this was around the time of Russian influence in our 2016 election. And so I connected with a mission there, I joined fairly late in that startup but worked with their CEO for about eight or nine months part time, and then went on to another startup called Tribevest, that's here in Columbus, and helped their CEO at a super early stage. Helped hire, helped build the first iteration of their products, hire an engineering leader, pitch decks, you name it- like, everything that you'd expect at an early stage startup as kind of employee number one. And through those two experiences is really where I fell in love with consulting. And that led me to starting Pathfinder, and going full time after I left Gap to start the consulting company that I'm at now. Why do this at all? I'll explain a little bit more of what I'm saying in, or I'm asking. You were at two companies. I'm just looking at the resume. You're at two large companies where you are- it was a very small team that grew into a very large team, right? From the list, you look at Abercrombie, you are the first, grew that to fifteen people, got your MBA, solved the leadership gap that you felt that you had, went to Gap, started with twelve to fifteen product managers, grew that organization 200. I have to assume that there probably weren't too many companies that you weren't qualified to go work for to get a good executive position at a large company.  Yeah.

Callan Harrington  19:23

And you probably had the pick of the litter, especially for e-commerce, to be a chief product officer at a smaller company. Why give that up in order to start a business? Is this something you always like you just knew in your bones from day one, like I have to start a business? Or what was that that drove you towards that?

Brett Buchanan  19:42

It's a great question, because I had actually interviewed at- I had mentioned that a lot of the people that had initially, that I was initially working with Gap had left to go to other companies, and I had interviewed at Google and Apple because I knew some folks that were working there and said you should come work here. And I think this is around 2015 or 2016. We have family here in town. We love Columbus. We didn't want to move to California for personal reasons. And so, I went to look for a job here and couldn't find one. And couldn't figure that out. Like, why can't I find it? I've got offers from these great companies, why can't I get a job in town here, and I realized a couple things. One, like product management just wasn't as prevalent here, or understood here. And two, I just, I didn't have a network. You know, I'd been working for a company out of California for five and a half years, and really wasn't focusing on meeting people here. And so, the other thing is, you know, I mentioned in high school in college, I had, you know, weird side businesses, weird hustles. I missed that hustle, I missed the entrepreneurial aspects of building a business or working for a smaller company. And so Pathfinder was a way for me to start a business in doing something that I really enjoy. In a market that has a need that's kind of unmet, or unrealized. Like we always when we started Pathfinder, in 2017 or 2018, we said, we're skating to where the puck's headed, not where it's at. Like, I can't get a job in Columbus, any of these businesses, but eventually, they're going to kind of not catch up, but in some ways, catch up to the coasts. And so we saw that we could kind of be a first mover and provide a service that other consulting companies weren't providing at the time, and still are trying to figure out.

Callan Harrington  21:36

So to break that down a little bit, you had- So on one hand, the job didn't exist. So you created the job out of your own. You had a problem in that you didn't want to move to either the coasts, you wanted to be here, what you were looking for wasn't here. So to solve that challenge you took on consulting, then eventually started Pathfinder, in hopes that this would catch up. How did you solve the network problem?

Brett Buchanan  21:59

I started a Meetup group in 2015. And I started it not with the goal of starting a consulting company, it was two things. One, we wanted to develop more of a product community in Columbus, more of a product understanding. I felt like if businesses are going to continue to be successful, most of them are going to need great product management. And I still firmly believe that it's kind of table stakes. So I started a club to help bring people together to share ideas and learn from each other on how to be better at product management, that helps with the network. And also felt like it was something to just get back into the community and do something interesting. So that started with a Meetup a had a friend of mine who knew how to run Meetups. So I said, hey, how do you post a Meetup? He helped me put up Meetup out there. Sixty people showed up. And at the end of it, we spent the last fifteen minutes talking about what do we want to get out of this group if we keep having these Meetups and so every month, we continued to have a Meetup that grew into a conference after a year. Someone said, hey, we should do a full day Meetup. I'm like, oh, that sounds like a conference. So, not having ever run a conference before, or any event really. We put on a conference and flew in speakers from all over the United States to talk about things related to product management, and then started having monthly happy hours, and monthly coffees, and monthly coffee meetups, and happy hour meetups, and an unconference, and built just an amazing community of like people that, a lot of people that I've become friends with over the years through a shared interest in product management.

Callan Harrington  23:45

Such a good story to get. It's the same thing of Pathfinder, right? It says I had to fix this problem. I'm sure other people are having this problem. Let's build a community around it, and it just kind of snowballs. On the Pathfinder side. What were the challenges that you found as you were growing Pathfinder?

Brett Buchanan  24:00

I've never been a consultant or worked for a consulting company. And I started a consulting company. So I knew how to do product management well. I didn't understand the business model, how to market, a consulting company, how to develop business, sell our services, like everything that wraps around our services were new to me.

Callan Harrington  24:26

I can empathize with that to the tee. Because I came from SaaS and insuretech, my entire career, started a consulting company that was like, well, this is different. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Brett Buchanan  24:37

Yeah.

Callan Harrington  24:38

How did you go about closing that knowledge gap? And what pains were involved with closing that knowledge gap?

Brett Buchanan  24:45

I mean, we're still closing it in a lot of ways. I mean, we're still a startup. We're still trying to figure out a lot. We've grown to seventeen employees over the past four years but have a lot to figure out. A couple things, you know, either intentionally, or through luck, really worked out. The first few hires we hired, we over-indexed early on hiring just the strongest product people, product managers that I knew. And that worked out really well, because we grew our business through referrals. So we did awesome work for our clients. And they would either go to new companies, or refer us to people they knew or, or we could grow inside of those companies to do more valuable work where it made sense. So hiring great people early was key. And we still over-index on that. But we took a- we kind of took a product management approach towards building the company, like understanding what are the pains in the market? How do we align our services to those needs to create a really strong value proposition? When you've got a- the problems that we're solving are pretty prevalent, and are also very painful for businesses. And so we're really lucky in that there's just a strong product market fit for what we do. The probably the second biggest thing that really helped us mature the company is I hired some people from consulting companies. So, Kevin McCann, I think he was our fourth hire. And he led, was a leader in the product, the IoT division at Accenture. So, he was a product leader there. So, he's not only a great product manager but also had worked for a consulting company and understood the business model really well. We experienced just rapid growth after bringing him onto our team. Tammy Lawler, same thing, she ran, she was the national accounts lead for product owners and agile at Insight Global. So she had experience working in a consulting company. So they brought a lot of product management knowledge, but also a lot of business model, consulting knowledge to the company.

Callan Harrington  27:01

That's such good advice. One thing I want to dive into in particular is on, you know, you mentioned you run this like a product company. How are you figuring out what those pains are? How are you figuring out what are those pains? And why are like, how are you tailoring that to what you do in order to solve for that, if that makes sense?

Brett Buchanan  27:22

Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean, we're still figuring this out. But we're starting to get a better understanding of how we measure the different aspects of our business, and if we're doing well or not. So looking at different measures, or metrics around business development. As an example, like, how does our pipeline translate into our revenue goals, or our, you know, consulting utilization is important. So how does the pipeline align to utilization and use that as an example. That's not something that we even thought of the first two to three years, most consulting companies are hyper focused on that. And so by taking a more like metrics-led approach to the different areas of the business, we can treat it like a product, because we can measure if we think we're doing well on it. How many referrals are we getting from our current clients? That's kind of a proxy metric for if you're doing well or perceived as being valuable by your client. So looking at things like that, to measure quality of our work, commercial metrics, revenue, obviously, but also kind of more sales and pipeline focus things. And then we set strategic metrics for ourselves each quarter, to make sure that we're focused on the right things that are really going to move the needle on our business and help us be successful. So those are things that we do for our clients that we track that, you know, we need to kind of doc through and do for ourselves as well.

Callan Harrington  28:51

When you're looking at referrals specifically, do you have a process around this? Is this reactive, where you're just kind of waiting for referrals? Or what does that look like?

Brett Buchanan  29:00

It's fairly reactive, to be honest, but we put goals in place for every quarter, to try to achieve a certain amount of referrals. Now, how we get those referrals is often reactive, like we're still not mature enough where we're- we have systems in place, and that kind of guide us around when we should be asking for referrals or how we should be doing it. It's more kind of ad hoc and reactive.

Callan Harrington  29:26

But you're proactively asking? I just want to make sure here, like or just like-

Brett Buchanan  29:29

Yeah, I mean, like, for example, like maybe every quarter, we'll ask an executive that we've got a close relationship at a current client to say, hey, do you know one or two people that you think would be good for us to meet?

Callan Harrington  29:42

Gotcha. And you're setting goals around this internally? I think that's huge. To me, that's still more pro. Yeah, it may not be a, you know, this trigger hits, I ask. This trigger hits, I ask. But so many I see, and especially in my work just in general, it's more reactive. If they come over, great, we're just gonna keep working as hard as we can. And that's great. And you will get referrals that way for sure. But that proactive makes a big difference in a service business. Even if it's not, I would say, even if people are like once a year, just asking, you're probably going to get much more business than you would if you didn't do that.

Brett Buchanan  30:16

Mm hmm.

Callan Harrington  30:16

So, when you look at kind of what's next for Pathfinder, what does that look like?

Brett Buchanan  30:20

That's a great question. You know, we're still we're kind of experimenting into that, to be honest, to some degree, still. I mean, we have grown kind of some of our core principles around how we've approached our growth of the future is, we want to make sure that we're continuing to solve the problem of- through the lens of product management, you know, we- and then growing it, you know, there's just a lot of uncertainty right now from a economic perspective. And so we don't have like specific growth goals, be honest with you, like we have forecasts out there. But being a business that's four years old, and has kind of doubled in size year over year, it's hard for us to forecast in this kind of environment. And so our goals are more centered around how do we continue to make sure that we're maximizing the investment that our clients are making in us, like maximizing the value that we can provide through product management. And when I say it's, that's still somewhat of an experiment is there's a number of different ways you can approach that. And depending on the stage of company that you're at in, or the industry that you might be in, how we engage might look different, like how we engage with a pre-seed round, early stage startup, and the budget constraints that they have, honestly, and their needs even, is different than how we work with a Fortune 10 enterprise. So what we're looking at right now is putting a little bit more structure around how we make sure that we're aligning our services, and the capabilities, and help that we offer, consulting that we offer to different sizes of companies or stages of companies in a way that's making sure that what their their needs are, and what the investment is that they're making in us and a partnership with us, is the best thing for the company. I mean, that's how we've been able to grow, is provide a tremendous amount of value to our customers, and try to stay profitable while we figure everything out. And we have come such a long way in what we've learned. But I still feel like there's so much more for us to continue to figure out. If you could have a conversation with your younger self. What would that conversation be? What advice would you give, age totally up to you? Oh, man, probably, you know, something I learned later in my career is to- you know, product management's an interesting role. Because you, in a lot of ways, you're a leader. But in a lot of ways, you're kind of a servant, like you don't have any- you can influence people, but you don't have a direct reporting relationship over most of the people that you're working with: developers, stakeholders. That role that you have, or that leadership role is so central and influential. A lot of young product managers, and this was the case for me, made the mistake of kind of viewing yourself as the leader, as the guy who's driving everything. And, you know, I guess maybe because I was ambitious, or for whatever reason, you know, I wanted to be the viewed the person that like helped us get to where we needed to go. And, you know, that has some positives to it. But it can be a lonely place. Like, when you are successful, you're celebrating a win by yourself. And when things aren't going well, which, when you're building products, that's the case a lot of the time, you're trying to figure it out by yourself. And so what I'd recommend to other younger product managers, and wish I would have known this earlier is, you can be much more effective as a product leader when you're collaborating and doing things as a team, you're collaborating with your marketing person, collaborating with your X person, collaborating with your developers, because it's one, it's way more fun. And two, it's gonna lead to better results.

Callan Harrington  34:25

Brett, thanks for coming on the show, man. This was fantastic.

Brett Buchanan  34:28

Yeah, thanks for having me, Callan.

Callan Harrington  34:34

I hope you enjoyed Brett and I's conversation. It was great hearing how Brett took massive action on the problems he was experiencing. As a result, he built a very successful business from it. If you want to learn more about Brett, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know, and if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening everybody and I'll see you next week.