Amin Haidar: Managing Product Managers

Amin Haidar, Director of Product Management at Asurion, talks about how he mentors and manages product managers, how Asurion decides what software development to prioritize, and how to hold teams accountable. This one may be our best yet for practical advice about how to be and lead great product managers.

[00:00:00] Tom: How do you manage and measure your product managers? What is the shape of methodology? Why should you care about it? How do you build a process that creates great products? These are some of the questions I asked product management veteran Amin Haidar, a six year veteran of Asurion, one of the largest and most profitable private tech companies in America. 

I first met Amin while he was still in college, working full time with us at Healthstream while getting his B.A., His intelligence, ambition and work ethic made a great impression on every one of us in leadership. 

After earning his degree and leaving Healthstream, Amin went on to become director of Sales Enablement at Airstrip Technologies, an early mobile first platform for placing patient information in the hands of clinicians. Amin then co-founded a venture backed startup in vendor sourcing for health care. In 2017, Amin joined Asurion as a senior product manager and was promoted to his current position as director in 2020. 

Learn how Amin manages and empowers his team of product managers and what he works on to become a better leader. On this episode of the Fortune’s Path Podcast.  

Tom [00:01:23] I'm really interested in your experience managing product managers. How many product managers do you manage right now? 

Amin [00:01:31] Currently six. 

Tom [00:01:32] How long have you been managing product managers? 

Amin [00:01:35] A little over three years now. 

Tom [00:01:38] How do you know when they're doing a good job? 

Amin [00:01:41] It's a good question. It depends on how you define a good job. There's multiple ways I look at it. The most important one is: Are they driving an impact to the business? As a product manager, your role is to really drive impact to the business. 

Tom [00:02:06] When you say impact of the business, is that revenue? How do you define that? 

Amin [00:02:10] It's whatever they're tasked to do. Whatever the strategy calls for. Sometimes it's driving efficiency gains. Are they doing that? Sometimes it's customer satisfaction, NPS scores. Everything they do should be measurable. At the end of the day, that's really what matters because product management is to drive and grow the business. But there's other layers underneath that, which is how you get there, because sometimes you can't drive the outcome you want for various reasons outside of your control. But the most important is how did they get there? What are the activities and the things they've done to drive that particular outcome? So one is outcome. Can you drive great outcome? Because you're supposed to. Otherwise the whole unit or department won’t exist. You're just a cost center at that point. Two; sometimes you can't. But did you do it the right way? Did you do the right discovery? Are you focusing on the right problems? Are you influencing the right people? Have you done all the things you can do in your power to drive that? And if you didn't drive that particular outcome as a product manager, what did you learn? That is an outcome that can help the business grow. Because everything is built on assumptions. Did you all do all the right things to validate the assumptions? Sometimes they work. That’s great and if they didn't work, what did you learn from it and how do you apply that to adjust the course and where you're headed? 

Tom [00:03:43] Do you, when you assign a product manager, say you're hiring somebody new or you're taking somebody and you're putting them, giving them a new portfolio, do you ask them to write down their assumptions? 

Amin [00:03:55] Well, maybe take a couple of steps back. It's not always on the product manager. A manager can set someone up to either succeed or fail. The first step is as a leader. Does the team have clear objectives and do they know what it is they are supposed to be focusing on? If that's clear, then it's up to the team to figure out during discovery and customer interviews and all the traditional product management principles, to understand what are the underlying problems that you're trying to solve. Based on that, essentially it's an assumption. That gives you confidence that their assumptions are right. If they've done the homework and the right processes and then they can share that, yes, we have a process to review before we bet. So essentially we adopted the Shape Up model and maybe changed it slightly differently.

Tom [00:04:54] Can you talk a little bit about what that is? 

Amin [00:04:56] The Shape Up model was developed by Basecamp and it's a mythology to which they build products. It's a six week cycle where before they start a six week cycle, they have what they call a betting table -  essentially it’s a bunch of ideas and hypotheses and assumptions that they vet over time. They do that concurrently whenever they're inside of a cycle. Before they start the next cycle, there's a form to which they decide what to bet on. They bet on assumptions that research validated and gives you the biggest return for your buck. Then you decide, okay, these are the things we're going to work on for the next six weeks. Each bet is boxed in terms of work you can complete fully in six weeks. We do review those assumptions and I call them bets before we start to work. Not just me, but across stakeholders, cross-functional groups, as a great way to make sure you have alignment before you start any work on the assumptions. 

Tom [00:06:02] So that limit of six weeks, are you talking more about like product functions? Are you guys able to create full products? 

Amin [00:06:09] [We} Create full products, end to end. Whatever it is we bet on a six week is something you can literally tangibly see, feel, and it's a real product that's out there. If it's bigger than that, they probably need to rethink it. Unless there's some cases where you have high confidence is something that you just have to do right at that point, it's not an assumption or a hypothesis, more like a project management. Just get it done. So the idea is that in six weeks, it's enough time is what we figured out when I said we had adjusted that Basecamp model. It doesn't work for every team, right? We actually did four weeks because I wanted us to learn faster and fail faster and validate the assumptions faster. What we realized is that wasn't enough. We ended up always spilling over by a week. So now we're doing five weeks. The idea is validate fast, but give teams enough time so we don't add any distractions in those five weeks. 

Tom [00:07:05] All they're working on is that one thing. 

Amin [00:07:06] All they're working on is that one thing, unless there's something disastrous that happens or we need to recalibrate. But for the most part, they're committed to that. So there's no distraction. That's downtime. You work on that. 

Tom [00:07:17] How big are the teams? 

Amin [00:07:20] They're pretty agile and small. We try to keep teams less than seven people. You get any bigger than that gets pretty hard. 

Tom [00:07:27] So what percentage of that seven would you say are developers? 

Amin [00:07:30] So you have, let's say 1 PM (product manager),  2 to 3 engineers. Some of the teams have data science folks embedded, so one or two, a designer and that's it. That's a team and you have a tech lead that supports. 

Tom [00:07:47] And they do their own QA. 

Amin [00:07:48] They do their own QA. The idea is that engineers are responsible for both building and queuing the product. Product plays a role in that too, but we used to have a centralized QA team or different resource. We got rid of that. Just redundant. I think you give that responsibility back to the engineers. Helped a lot with code quality. But it's also a byproduct. Like if you have a dedicated QA in my opinion, it's a byproduct of bad engineering discipline. 

Tom [00:08:19] Yeah.

Amin [00:08:21] So it's…

Tom [00:08:22] Kind of giving your problem to somebody else to fix.

Amin [00:08:23] That's exactly right. You're less inclined to create good code. It's more about speed, at least in my experience. So when we changed it, there was a big effort to change it. It turned out to be a great thing because now engineers are much more mindful of how they design solutions and build them, make sure they're part of the understanding what the problem is and versus just being code monkeys. It's a little bit more responsibility. But it turned out to be a great move. 

Tom [00:08:56] So that that six week timeframe to to build a product from start to finish. Have you found that time limitation has been helpful because it helps you focus on what's critical or is it more constraining? 

Amin [00:09:14] It's a good question. It's both. I think it is helpful. But then also, not all product work is created equal. So you have some teams that are working on features. They're just building new features and there's a lot of assumptions behind that. There are teams that are doing more product/market fit type of work. There are teams purely focused on growth. So that same model doesn't apply to all of them. But the general rule, it does like 80/20. Some teams feel a little bit constrained and we're working to adjust that because you can't treat them all the same. 

But for the most part, that has worked because, One, it makes sure that we do our homework upfront before we start any work. There's a little bit more confidence that we have identified the highest opportunity we should be working on. Two, to help make sure we don't get scope creep. Change of focus across other functional groups that tend to do that. So they all understand what we're doing now, all understand the process. Then we have weekly check ins to understand how it's going. We are not naive to say, hey, if we can learn something faster, great, let's do it. It doesn't mean we deploy everything at the end of the six weeks. Teams can deploy anytime they want. So we have weekly check ins to make sure we're on track. And if something gives us an early indicator that our assumption is wrong, we kill it right there. Then a team focuses on the next priority. 

Whenever we start the cycle, we start with a list of priorities one through N that have been prioritized. They start with the top one first for the six weeks, and then let's say they're four things on a list. They might be able to get three because of the bandwidth. If, let's say, one or two turns out that they're not valid assumptions or we learn something quickly, they just move on to the next priority that's down the list. So we find that to be really helpful. 

Tom [00:11:20] It sounds sort of like product management/dev nirvana. I'm actually working on a product. I have a defined mission going in that's been vetted. We're not just guessing. We've done some research to figure out what we ought to be doing. The success has been defined because we've decided that the ROI for this six week project is X, It's the expected outcome. 

Amin [00:11:48] Which is what we use to prioritize, to work to. What's the estimated impact of this particular ideal bet that you have. 

Tom [00:11:55] And that vetting process of defining and then placing those bets, who's involved in that? 

Amin [00:12:03] We call it, I guess the book is called Shape Up or the Model. So it's really about shaping the work and so the PMs, the designers for the most part do a lot of the discovery and the shaping of the work in parallel to the cycle. If you've done your work and you've prepped it, ideally you don't do a lot of work in the development phase as a PM and a designer. They're working ahead, they're doing more discovery, identifying the next opportunity, taking data from the previous release and incorporating that and getting ready. So that's how we get started. 

Then there is an initial layer of review of backlog, whatever you want to call it, that we do with me, the design director, that's my equivalent partner, as well as the tech lead. And the teams together. So we all get together. Each team goes through their list of bets and ideas. We poke holes, make sure we are all aligned in understanding what the assumptions are and there are no missing data points or things that we haven't done.Then we have a final kind of betting table discussion with some of our senior leaders. Our VP's across different functional groups and stakeholders. Then the discussion is mostly about tradeoffs. 

Tom [00:13:27] If we do this, we won't do that. 

Amin [00:13:29] Here a list of six things per team. They’re prioritized one through N. We can get three of these things done. We can either do this item that has this assumption, the impact, or we can work on this other thing that either someone has suggested or sent to us or whatever, and we just get alignment there like, Hey, let's make that decision now or we lock it in for the next six weeks. That has been extremely helpful. 

Tom [00:13:58] Because you're not - no team’s getting their priority interrupted during that six weeks. 

Amin [00:14:02] That's exactly right. And it's been aligned with cross-functional stakeholders. So everyone knows why we decided on these things. 

Tom [00:14:10] Right.

Amin [00:14:10] Then we review those on a weekly basis together, like what's the progress, what's the status? Have we learned anything? That's good to check. 

Tom [00:14:19] Have you ever had a situation where you've set you or all the team first, all these all these teams aligned? Are they all starting it on the same dates? 

Amin [00:14:27] Yes.

Tom [00:14:28] Have you ever had a situation where, big customer, big name in the organization goes: How could this be? This is such a disaster. You've just started your sprints and they're unhappy about this. How do you handle interruptions like that? 

Amin [00:14:49] Luckily for my team, we don't get as many of those. And if we do, it depends on what it is. We don't work a lot with client commitments anymore. Those are distracting and not helpful. Luckily for my team now, after 6 years at Asurion working on the clients, we have less client commitment and restrictions. Mostly we manage our own timeline. I personally have a vested interest in making the business succeed, so we're more aggressive with ourselves on that timeline. Nonetheless, sometimes we do get urgent requests. The thing that we do there is talk about tradeoffs. We have that forum/weekly basis where we bring it up so we don't start any work unless something is on fire. Unless we have regrouped with stakeholders and made that decision together, which is, hey, this client wants this thing we're working on that we've aligned on. We need to make a decision. Something is going to have to give. As long as everyone has alignment and decision. But not bringing it up, not having visibility, not coordinating with stakeholders. Then you're setting two expectations that we're going to work on this. [Do you have] some other commitments you are trying to tackle at the same time? It's just not helpful. 

Tom [00:16:16] Have you ever had that kind of a credibility issue where leadership, for whatever reason says, well, you guys are just going to have to work late? We have to hit your six week goal. And this thing that came up out of nowhere, we're going to have to get that done, too. So I guess you guys are just working late. 

Amin [00:16:33] No, but funny enough, we actually did that to ourselves. It was due to an internal role change that had a specific timing that we needed to support. And the work took a little longer than we anticipated to get to that area. But the good news is when you have teams that are aligned and understand what the objective is, they tend to rally and work weekends. So we've had a couple of engineers and this is not a standard. They don't want anyone to work more hours than they should, and that's because of failure of planning. People roll up their sleeves and make sure we get to the finish line because they understood what it is we were trying to do and why it mattered. So I think the key there is not just because a client said so. The ‘so what’ behind it - and if so what is incentivizing enough and aligned with the team's incentives. They tend to do it. But when we do these things, we're much more mindful of it. We acknowledge it, and we try to review hard not to get back in the same spot. 

Tom [00:17:51] Are you kind of a business owner within Asurion and using investment from Asurion to grow your business?

Amin [00:18:01] I guess in any way, any product team is like that. 

Tom [00:18:04] Not all of them have reached quite that level of maturity. 

Amin [00:18:08] Yeah, but even that concept itself. I think companies should be a little bit more ruthless about it as an investment. An investment always expects returns. If the team is not providing return or there's nothing there to be returned, you should pull the plug or make changes fast. Within Asurion, yes, I have enough autonomy. I am given a specific objective to tackle. With the autonomy, I also get the support that I need to do that. It's up to us to figure out the best path to achieving whatever objective we set out to do.That means pivoting, cutting things early when we know it's not working. Making sure we're hyper focused on what really matters. That takes dedication and process. 

Tom [00:19:03] I want to go back actually, the question earlier about measuring the success of a product manager. It sounds like in this situation, when that six week kick off happens. Give me an example of a metric you would have picked to say this is the definition of success at the end of the six weeks. 

Amin [00:19:25] That's a good question, because it's not so straightforward. 

Tom [00:19:32] Okay.

Amin [00:19:33] You can’t evaluate a PM just on a six week cycle. There's a lot of things that you can pick up as you go through this process. One is, did this PM do the homework that they needed to do that? They talked to the right stakeholders? Did they talk to the end user? Did they do observational studies, interviews? They know a lot of stuff becomes really clear when we have the discussions about what we prioritize. That's a good forum to help the PM also understand the areas where they're lacking. We can't work on this because we don't have enough insights or data. This is just your assumption, and that's not good enough, right? 

That's an error then that gives you an opportunity to figure out what a coach that person was like. This person needs a little bit more help and discovery than understanding how to prioritize the work. Then you get into the execution phase. This is what we have, the weekly syncs and check ins. You can easily pick up if this person is great at prioritizing the work for the week. Are they making enough progress to answer the question of is this assumption right or wrong? Can you get early indicators? Are they struggling because they're not getting enough buy-in and they're not able to influence others in the organization? Are they just working in isolation? And they've never really engaged cross-functional leaders? A lot of that stuff becomes clear because if you're in a meeting and one of your cross-functional stakeholders asks a question of something that they should have been aligned on, that's a gap. 

The process itself helps to identify different areas where the PM may be lacking, and it gives them real-time opportunity to coach because you can't wait till you have one-on-ones. The ideal part is after you do your prioritization and calibration, identify gaps, talk to the person right away offline: Hey, here's some areas where you could have done more. The reason to not make much progress is because, you haven't coordinated and worked with these  stakeholders getting there in this way, you get all this pushback in this meeting. In the game, feedback really helps. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad PM. It depends on the maturity of the PM. The areas that need to improve on. To me that is the other part outside of driving the metric. As a metric, you can drive it if you're working on the right things and the assumptions happen to be true because sometimes they're not. So I can’t punish you for that. But as long as you have a good process for prioritizing properly, having the right homework, and then answering the question fast and learning from it, that to me is success. But ideally, if you do your job right and you do discovery really right, you should also be driving output right for the business. 

Tom [00:22:22] That's the best of all possible results. 

Amin [00:22:25] That's exactly right. And sometimes you will, sometimes you won't. Just like sports, sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. But you can't always lose. There's something wrong there. 

Tom [00:22:38] Part of what you're trying to understand is the quality of their process. 

Amin [00:22:43] And isn't that what product management is? At least in my opinion. I said product managers are… We create a process that creates great products. To me, if you don't have a right process, then, one, you're not creating a great product because you're missing - whether it's real pain points or you're not brainstorming enough - you're missing out great solutions that you've never thought about because you didn't bring other people in. So all of that is because you don't have a great process for how you manage and build products. 

Tom [00:23:22] So you've been at Asurion for six years. 

Amin [00:23:24] Six years. 

Tom [00:23:24] And how would you see the maturity of their product management function has changed over those six years?

Amin [00:23:31] Quite a bit. When I first joined Asurion it was actually really mature and I'd learned quite a bit coming from having my own startup. Which is where I made most of my mistakes and learned a lot. But you come to a mature organization that operates at scale. You learn a lot of things But Asurion from the get go. Was very mature. But what you learn over time, is how even a mature organization needs to change based on the objectives of the business. Whether you're focusing on driving customer engagement and retention to launching new product lines or driving efficiency, that type of product work is not the same. You need an organization that can adapt and change. Asurion is really good at that. 

Tom [00:24:24] What in all of those six years, have you had any major threat? Has there been anything that sort of popped up? For Google, it's like ChatGPT, a significant threat for the banking industry right now. People like to move their money really quickly. Is there anything like that comes up for you guys where you'd say, oh, that's something we really had to adjust to. 

Amin [00:24:50] You know, insurance business, Asurion, we’re pretty resilient to the changes in the market and that type of change. However, we are very passionate about the growth of our company. That causes us to make our own changes, to make sure we are on track with our aggressive growth targets. That's exciting. 

Tom [00:25:18] When you're not waiting for bad things to happen. 

Amin [00:25:20] We're not waiting for bad things to happen. We're proactive about it. And that's a testament to our senior leadership team. They have great foresight and an understanding of how to grow the business really well.  I appreciate that. So as a byproduct of that, that also changes the type of product work we do to drive different objectives of the business. Those are the types of changes we react to sometimes as opportunistic, based on things we see in the market or things we do really well that we want to scale to other areas. No real threats in the industry. 

Tom [00:26:00] Do you see a major opportunity? 

Amin [00:26:02] I do. I do. I see a huge opportunity in this space. 

Tom [00:26:11] You mean insurance and maintenance of appliances and phones and etc.? 

Amin [00:26:17] Yeah. I'm working on the appliance line of business now, which is really exciting, it is an antiquated business. There's not that many mom and pop shops, where it's no national player, really, that's doing a great job and the customer experience is horrible. It's exciting to tackle big problems that impact people at scale. It's meaningful. When your appliance breaks, it's a pain, it's a big pain. There's nothing more rewarding as a product manager to work on problems that really mean something to people. 

Tom [00:26:46] You have to explain to everybody. What do your services, what do you do for a living? I make it easier to get your fridge fixed? 

Amin [00:26:53] Yeah, it's not sexy, But everybody relates to it, but everyone relates to it. You can't live without a fridge for too long and people, unless it happens to them, they don't know that. That's exciting to me -  the fact that we're tackling businesses like this in areas where this big pain point for customers. We can create a great customer experience there in our ability to dispatch people in the field. We have a really great operational company. That's what I like most about Asurion is the culture as operational culture, about when we set a goal. Everyone rallies around it. Product operations, finance, and we find a way to get there. And that's rare. 

Tom [00:27:40] It is rare. 

Amin [00:27:41] Iit is. 

Tom [00:27:43] What do you think creates that secret sauce? How did they get there? 

Amin [00:27:48] It's culture, but culture starts from the top. I would say our senior leadership team has always encouraged that. Demonstrated that and doubled down on it. The way they create alignment across different functional groups, it's exciting the way they give people autonomy and space to do it and resources to do it. You can't just expect things to happen without putting your money where your mouth is. Asurion does invest in that and it's evident. We also hire people that have similar qualities, and don't think similarly. We definitely value and drive a lot of diversity and inclusion in the organization about the people we're bringing in. It's important to us that they share the same values, and culture of inclusiveness. No ego. Everybody's opinions are heard and matter. We have great leadership principles that kind of double down on this. And then we don't just write it and put it on a wall. We have continuous training on it. We have pop-ups, people that advocate for it. So that's the way you infuse it, infuse a culture and keep it going. 

Tom [00:29:09] I want to come back again to this idea of measurement. 

Amin [00:29:12] Yes. 

Tom [00:29:14] It sounds like when you've got a product manager, they get their six week marching orders. There's an outcome that they're supposed to achieve. But you're interested in observing them and their process to understand if their decision making is good, their ability to collect input is good, their ability to communicate to other stakeholders is good. Is that reasonable? 

Amin [00:29:41] Yeah. There's actually a matrix that I use, almost like a web diagram that has these core qualities all around. Customer first, ability, managing up, influencing others, saying we're doing customer research. So there's eight different categories to which I evaluate each PM on a quarterly basis. But what's important is that you do it in the game.You do it as a byproduct of just a function of doing product management. If you create the right processes in place, it makes it easier to spot, identify, coach as you go. So it's not a surprise. And you don't wait for one-on-ones to say, hey, here's some areas where you're doing good.  

Tom [00:30:27] You're doing it, as you say, in game. 

Amin [00:30:29] Yeah. It's not black and white because some PMs are great in certain areas and have weaknesses in others. And so it's more of a product management coaching opportunity. I'll tell the other ones. How receptive is someone to that and are they growing in that particular area? Because you want it to be well-rounded as a PM. The other part is deciding how much time you spend with a PM. I'm a very supportive leader. I am more like a servant leader for the most part. 

Tom [00:31:02] Takes up a lot of time. 

Amin [00:31:03] Takes up a lot of time. But that's my job is to help. Sometimes you need to be a little bit more direct and it makes it a lot easier when you have to do that in the process. Right. So you want to step in, spend more time with one PM than you do others. I join their calibration, I join their design sessions. That's good because you can coach as you go in real time and then over time you just step away and they get going. But in terms of how you measure a PM, obviously the ultimate goal is that this PM is performing and driving an outcome for the business. The other one is, are they doing it the right way and helping the business learn if they can drive outcomes? Are they pointing us in the right direction, doing things the right way? Then - are they becoming more full rounded at all the areas of PM? 

Tom [00:31:53] So what qualities do you look for when you're hiring PMs? 

Amin [00:31:56] It's a good question because I've hired a lot of PMs that don't have traditional PM backgrounds. The quality is someone who is always learning. That's important. That doesn't have a big ego. Is okay with saying, I don't know. Someone who's passionate about asking questions. Why? Like, just curious. Someone who understands business. It's important as we're again, we're all building products, But products exist because they're built as a business for the most part. So those are the most important traits. And then obviously, it depends on the level you go down to the other areas like product sense, grow Spotify user group or, tell me some of your favorite products. Just the way they answer a question and think about it makes sure they are always user-centric and try to understand a problem. If they just say that I don't understand it. I'd rather have someone like that than someone who fakes it. 

Tom [00:33:10] Yeah.

Amin [00:33:10] Who has gone to business school and is really good at answering these questions. I've noticed that they don't tend to be great product managers. 

Tom [00:33:17] The MBAs. 

Amin [00:33:19] Straight business school, you know, running product. I guess they're more like program managers. 

Tom [00:33:28] Yeah.

Amin [00:33:29] But not when it comes to real product management. 

Tom [00:33:32] I like to ask somebody if they've either started a business or thought about starting a business. 

Amin [00:33:37] There's that scrappiness that comes up whenever you have to do that and work in a startup environment. Mm hmm. I'll tell you what I don't like. Or red flags. There are people that. One can't take ownership of things. Always blame something on somebody else. In product management, 90% of the time, the work you're doing and their success depend on others. So being okay with taking that as your responsibility and ownership I think is a huge quality. So there's automatic red flags when I see someone like that. A lot of it comes down to gut feeling, too. Unfortunately, it does. Mm hmm. You just get a feel. You can’t be biased. Obviously, you have to have the right qualities and traits. Mm hmm. And then cultural fit, right one to when I mean no ego. Someone who come in is not saying, hey, I'm the best and everything because they the way I think a PM is successful and ultimately successful is the collective output they can generate from the other people. 

Tom [00:34:48] You have to, as you said, get that work done through other people. 

Amin [00:34:53] You have to. And yeah, just been great at empathizing with people like. Mm hmm. I guess ultimately to me, what I'm really passionate about is empathy. Mm hmm. So you have to be able to empathize with people to be a great product manager. You have to empathize to influence others, meaning you have to understand where they're coming from, what their points are. Right. And then how do you help them out? Because at the end of day, we're in this is where it's important to have the right incentives in the organization. You're all going after the same goal. So if I can empathize with her, I can help you. Mm hmm. You're much likely to work with me and go after the same goal. Mm hmm. And if I'm don't have that big of an ego, I can listen to ideas you have that I might have missed out on. That is really important to me. The other part of it, if you don't empathize, you can't really understand your customer base. Not all customers are created equal. You know, people have different backgrounds and just the pure Concept of being able to empathize helps you to identify, like, pain points they maybe wouldn't have otherwise. 

Tom [00:35:59] So I ask a tougher question. Asurion is known for laying people off. 

Amin [00:36:09] Yeah.

Tom [00:36:09] And that's a difficult thing to do empathetically. Have you been involved in any of that or how do you manage a process like that empathetically? 

Amin [00:36:19] I personally have not been part of that. Businesses have to make tough decisions to continue to either grow the business or make sure the business does not fail. These are tough decisions you have to make. And I would say the way I should and actually execute on it is really empathetically. These are tough decisions to make, but they are calculated. It takes a lot of research and a lot of effort, as far as I know, to make sure this is the last resort. When you do it, it’is tough, but you've got to do it the right way. And I think Asurion does that really well. 

Tom [00:37:11] I've been shown the door a couple of times in my career. I always say that i's always worked out for the best. It's a terrible emotional process when it happens. Even when I knew this was the best thing, you know, I would be better off doing something else. But it's still very difficult emotionally. My Dad ran a business with a partner for about 40 years. And one thing he told me about this subject that was really helpful is, is that you're not just employing that person. You're also supporting their family. When you have one person who isn't doing what needs to be done, it puts everybody else's family at risk. 

Amin [00:38:07] It does. I'll answer that question maybe from my experience running a startup. Nothing is more stressful than knowing you only have money that lasts you  last six months or a year, let's say, and you have 13, 14 people on payroll, people that have kids, people that you know are busting their asses for your company. They're doing whatever they can to drive the objective. Ultimately, you're responsible for it. You have to make a tough, decision. Do you lay off a few people right, and make sure the company succeeds so the others can continue to work with you?  And hopefully at some point, those people that you let go maybe come and join you again because a company successful? Do you just  ride and die? n and just say, no, It's a it's a tough decision and nothing is more stressful than that, too. And. The same applies, I think, to a big company, you know, is just. The other thing is maybe a less empathetic way to think about it is that. A business is a business. Even if you remove all the leadership team or whatever. A business is a business, and it has certain objectives, and they need to grow. And people that work there to help grow the business. So the business itself does not care. People that work for the business do. So in my startup, right, it's it's a business. It was a business decision that needed to happen regardless of my feelings about it. So it's important for people to understand me included as an employee that anyone is dispensable in a business. Yeah, and that is helpful for people that realize because then you have a different attitude for how you work, right? And where you set your values. So just kind of taking the other side of it, because I've been there and I'm an employee, right? So it's important to understand that. 

Tom [00:40:07] What loyalty to we owe the people who work for us. What loyalty do we have? The people we work for? 

Amin [00:40:16] Yeah. And that's different than the then loyalty. owed to the business itself. Even though you work for people that work in that business. 

Tom [00:40:25] Yes, that's true. I think you're saying that a business is like an animal that follows its own rules.

Amin [00:40:34] It’s its own entity. 

Tom [00:40:35] Its its own entity, and it's going to survive or die in a market that doesn't give a crap. An idea. I've been thinking a lot I haven't thought about recently, but thought a lot about in the past is that the morality of leadership is different than the morality of personal relationships. 

Amin [00:40:56] Yes. it can be the same. 

Tom [00:40:59] Yeah. How has that played out in your experience as somebody growing businesses and leading a team? 

Amin [00:41:09] That's a good question. So the morality of a leader versus a friendship is that. That's what you were. Saying, right?

Tom [00:41:15] Yeah, exactly. 

Amin [00:41:21] That's a good question. That's a hard one to split, right? Because you're still the same person. But you have obligations to the business. Mm hmm. And you got to respect that. Just like in a marriage, you have an obligation to your marriage and your wife, Right? So you gotta respect that. So you have to treat them separately. And so it doesn't mean So that's why the I guess the phrase crime. This business is not personal. And that's true. But is business not personal? Like there's certain obligations you have to business, like your fiduciary duty to your stakeholders, your shareholders. That's different than you have to your friend. 

Tom [00:41:58] Yeah. One of the ironies, that phrase I always attribute to The Godfather. One of the ironies is, is that actually everything they do in The Godfather is personal. 

Amin [00:42:08] Yeah.

Tom [00:42:09] So there's a scene when I'm in Godfather II, I'll try to keep the short. Hyman rothWrath. Who is Michael Corleone? His nemesis. 

Amin [00:42:18] Mm hmm. 

Tom [00:42:19] Confesses to him that the reason he wants Michael dead is because Michael killed the one person on earth that Hyman Roth loved was Moe Green. But he ends that speech by saying it had nothing to do with business. I didn't ask because they had nothing to do with business. He's like ironically confessing that it's like I have this personal grudge against you. Yeah. And I think that that happens to us sometimes in business settings is that we believe what we're doing is just strictly business. But actually, it can be quite personal. 

Amin [00:42:53] It depends on the person. That's a dangerous line to blur. That becomes that's when you can separate yourself from the business. Mm hmm. Right. Then you think you are the business and your emotions and your personal opinions are the business itself. And that's not true. That's where I can see a lot of the leadership principles and how we operate - it’s very clear the core values that we have kind of helps prevent from this from happening. Right. So. 

Tom [00:43:35] IAll complex organizations, and they don’t even have to be that complex, benefit from having a set of principles. To your point that they're they've spoken, they've written them down, they’ve communicated it. Like the United States has a constitution. 

Amin [00:43:50] You've got to practice it, too. 

Tom [00:43:51] It's like you have a process of evaluating whether you're actually doing what you said you were going to do. 

Amin [00:43:59] The threat to that, right? 

Tom [00:44:01] Yeah. I think that one of the things that's so interesting about business is that it is an opportunity to create an institution with a set of principles that you believe in as someone who participates in that business or someone who founded that business. Yes. And then you said you said you sort of take that and then you put it into this market where nobody cares, but you try to make it work. And can you make it work in a way where you're not like, oh, that principle sucks. And so that one can get a new one and. 

Amin [00:44:32] You have to have your core principles. You have to practice them. Mm hmm. You have to have checks and balances. You have to make sure that no one person has too much power. That's where the. The vendetta or where it becomes personal versus business as when someone has too much autonomy without any oversight. Yes. And so if you create a good matrix and an organization that is relatively flat, but also encourages interactions across different levels, it really helps. It encourages diversity and inclusion and it creates other areas and forums for people to be themselves. Those things matter. It helps to dissipate that. Obviously, it exists everywhere. It depends on the organization, small organization or big. Like the bigger you are the more organized you have to be around that. 

Tom [00:45:39] So have you turned 40 recently or are you now? 

Amin [00:45:42] I'm 35. 

Tom [00:45:43] Oh, Sorry to make you older. 

Amin [00:45:45] That's okay. My kids do that every day. 

Tom [00:45:50] Do you have people who work with you who are in their twenties, 24, 25 years old? 

Amin [00:45:54] Yeah. . 

Tom [00:45:55] Do you find that they're comfortable saying. I think you're off base on it. 

Amin [00:46:00] Not right away. I think you have to earn that with anybody. 

Tom [00:46:05] Yeah. 

Amin [00:46:06] It starts with me. Being transparent about those things. Like I. I admit I'm not the smartest person in the room, and I admit that my question, you know, well, may not be right, but I feel I have a right to ask it. And I feel a. Safe space to do it. I admit if I'm wrong. Right. Like, that's the whole concept of no ego and and it eases people to be themselves and, um. I don't hold myself…. I don't know how to articulate it, but I want people to know that we're all equal. You know, I have a different job. And just because I'm their boss doesn't mean I'm more important. It just means my job is different. My job is to support them. I can't support them if I don't know who they are, what their needs are. If they know that my job is to support them and be successful. Because, again, as you continue to grow on the ladder, your success is dependent on everyone else that you manage and the collective output of everyone. So my job is to make sure everyone is as successful as possible. If they feel that and they know it makes it a lot easier to create that rapport and open communication. 

Tom [00:47:35] So then they're comfortable enough to tell you. 

Amin [00:47:38] Yeah, they're comfortable enough to tell me. But they also it's not like, what's the context? The context is driving something. It can’t be too subjective. That's where it gets difficult. Those are moments where I have to make decisions, because there's no data, it’s gut feel. Maybe I have more context. Sometimes that's okay. It's hard to debate that. But then most of our conversations are very subjective. It's not about me. It's about driving this objective. And so that makes it a lot easier. It's like, okay, well, yeah, you're right. This is not a good idea because it's not doing this or I missed something else. Then I encourage feedback. 

Tom [00:48:31] It's to me, some of the least helpful feedback I get is when somebody goes, Oh, I like it. 

Amin [00:48:36] You have to put the ownership back on that person, right? So that's where giving people autonomy is important. Because with autonomy comes responsibility. And if they don't have that responsibility, they don't care. Sure, they'll do whatever you tell them to. Right. But if I tell them, Hey, this is your product. This is your space. Here's my opinion. Mm hmm. And you run with it, and it ends up being bad. That's your responsibility? And so one should be responsible enough to push back or say no, because at the end of day, it's yours. I'm not dictating what you do. It's up to you. If he just pleases me…

Tom [00:49:14] Right.

Amin [00:49:15] You might just be hurting yourself because, either you don't know what you're doing, or you have an opinion and you’re Just too scared to say it. That's not good for anybody. 

Tom [00:49:26] Do you think about the product managers at the CEO of their product? Do you think that that's a legitimate metaphor and the Asurion shape-up model? 

Amin [00:49:42] While not every team at Asurion uses that. Different teams have different models and this is one we've adopted that works really well for us. I would say every PM is the owner of their product. They're ultimately responsible for that product. The good, the bad. all of it. But they don't own the product themselves. The team owns the product. I would say the PM has a responsibility for the product, but the ownership of the product is within the team. That's important because if one person owns a product, it makes it really difficult to foster that collaboration and to get others to feel ownership, like engineers and designers who bring a different perspective. And that can drastically change a product. So I think the product is owned by the team. 

The PM is primarily responsible for the product - that includes the outcome of the product, the customer experience of the product and anything else that comes up as part of the product. The PM should be responsible for that. 

Tom [00:51:00] I'll bring us home with just a couple of questions. One is what do you want to get better at? 

Amin [00:51:06] What do I want to get better at? It's a good question and maybe more philosophical for us, I guess, in life. I want to get better at continuing to be my authentic self. That it can help others grow. Be better at connecting with people. Continue to get better. Those things are important. Continue to get better at empathizing with people and really understanding where they're coming from. Be better at reserving my judgment. A lot of that comes with age and experience as well. But those are the things that I would like to get better at. Because nothing in life that you do, you do by yourself. And this applies to home life as well with the kids. The better I can empathize with a five year old.The same as empathizing with a 50 or 60 year old - different genders, different backgrounds would be great. 

Tom [00:52:27] Five year olds are definitely a lesson in humility. 

Amin [00:52:32] I start to forget how I was when I was young. I get older and I was like, I thought I would never happen. In hindsight it was like, well, maybe the only way is to really empathize and try and understand, Hey, what, what is it like to be a five year old? They may be throwing a tantrum, but instead of looking at it from my lens, how can I look at it from a five year old lens? 

Tom [00:52:53] Totally agree. Distraction was one of the more effective parenting techniques Anna and I had. When you have the tantrum, if you attack that directly and you're like “stop having that tantrum,” that doesn't do very well now. But if you can redirect them towards something else. That isn't a reward for having the tantrum, but changes your focus.

Amin [00:53:19] It's just as simple as being able to understand. They just don't know how to regulate their emotions. They don't mean that. These things are great for parenting. If you're able to empathize and understand. Great for product management, great for people, leadership. I think just a general rule applies to life and I just want to get better at it. 

Tom [00:53:39] Last question. When you think about your funeral, so you've passed on to your reward at this point, how do you want to be remembered? What do you want people to say about Amin? 

Amin [00:53:56] That's a good question. 

Tom [00:53:58] It's tough when you’re 35 to think about that. 

Amin [00:54:00] Sometimes I'm like, do I really care what anyone else thinks about me? Maybe not like, but I care about having raised really good humans and that are contributing to the world. But then the other side of me says, that would be nice for others to remember me as someone who made them feel heard and seen and understood and maybe somehow helped them. I don't know how, but that is cool because I had people in life that impacted me and I'm like, Wow, I still remember those people. They may not know it. So how do I do that? How do I leave a positive impression that they can carry on? For them to also empathize and be better to other people. Hopefully that carries on. Most importantly, it's like, am I raising good kids that are contributing well to the world and do the same thing that I try to do. 

Tom [00:55:08] Well, thank you very much. It's been a lot of fun to have you here. 

Amin [00:55:10] Thanks. This was actually really fun. I enjoyed this, which was really cool. 

Tom [00:55:26] The Fortune’s Path podcast is a production of Fortune's Path. We help technology businesses create products that generate monopoly profits, fractional product leadership, product leadership, coaching, Competitive intelligence. Find your genius with Fortune's Path. 

Special thanks to Amin Haidar for being our guest. Music and editing of the Fortune’s Path podcast are by my son Ted Noser. Look for the Fortunes Path book from the Advantage Books on https://www.fortunespath.com/. I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening and I hope we meet along Fortune's path.