Bruner’s Professional Background
After studying engineering in college, joining the Navy, and trying his hand at financial advising, Trevor Bruner finally found his calling in the product space.
He currently works as a Product Value Stream Lead at Tasktop, a platform providing organizations with end-to-end visibility of their software delivery.
One of the competitive advantages of Bruner’s position is that it allows him to be a customer of a product that he manages – leading to quick iterations of the product based on his own use and pain points.
“It’s interesting to be able to really use your own product while you’re doing your work,” Bruner said.
Bruner’s company is building a Value Stream Management platform composed of Tasktop Viz and Tasktop Integration Hub. Tasktop Viz, which Bruner works directly with, helps users with their flow metrics including Flow Velocity, Flow Time, Flow Load, and Flow Efficiency through an easy-to-use dashboard.
Tasktop Integration Hub is software that allows for synchronization between various third-party tools that a development team would be using. This allows all of the information to flow in a systematic way in order to keep a team’s work connected. So, instead of users having to log into multiple tools they may not be familiar with, they can use their tool of choice and have all their information flow to them. By reducing the friction between teams, Tasktop Integration Hub enables faster Flow Times and greater Flow Efficiency which can be measured in Tasktop Viz.
Bruner has gone from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager and now, a Product Lead. He is continuously learning and improving his abilities to lead a team. One place he draws inspiration from is Scott Galloway’s podcast. “One of his recurring themes is that greatness is in the agency of others,” Bruner said. “The best thing I can do is to allow others to realize their greatness.” This drives Bruner to continue to lead and mentor the members of his team.
Bruner’s Responsibilities as a Product Lead
As a Product Lead, Bruner focuses less on the individual feature design and more on managerial responsibilities.
“My job is to make sure that the Product Manager has her head wrapped around the problems we’re solving, and that she has the roadmap in place to get to the solution,” Bruner said.
Bruner also oversees the engineering side of the team as well — having come from a non-technical background and never writing a line of code.
“Being able to manage people who are doing a job that I have never done before is definitely a challenge,” Bruner said. “All the HR responsibilities that are wrapped in that as well — I have to be very conscious about what I know, and very conscious about what I don’t know.”
Bruner is sometimes tasked with solving problems on the technical or engineering side of product development. He realizes that his contribution to these deeply technical problems is to ensure that the team has sufficient context (i.e., the reason why it needs to be solved) to facilitate the right conversations, and to give his team autonomy to get the issue resolved.
“If I tell an engineer ‘I need a hole there,’ they don’t know whether to get a shovel or an excavator,” Bruner said. “The context behind why we’re building what we’re building is crucially important when it comes to building out solutions, and lets the engineers decide whether they need the shovel or the excavator.”
Bruner also mentioned that solving the technical problem will also depend on the scope and impact of the issue. If it’s just team or feature specific, it can be vetted and solved within his engineering team, but if it starts to impact multiple teams they’ll need to work cross functionality to get it resolved and loop in the right people.
Providing the problem, context, and looping in the correct stakeholders are important when solving complicated issues.
Bruner’s Tips on Getting Buy-in for a New Idea
Bruner said that an important part of the process of getting buy-in is overcommunicating with all parties as early as possible.
Product may come to the table with ideas on new features and initiatives that could be built out without having a solid understanding of the technical complexity that may be involved. To be able to move forward, there need to be conversations about the technical underpinnings of the initiatives being communicated. Bruner loops in engineers to help determine the merit of the ideas that the Product team has to ensure they have a technical basis and can be built out.
Planting the idea early on and looping in key stakeholders is important for buy-in and feedback, so Bruner typically prepares a presentation to outline key facts, metrics, and the context behind why some of these initiatives may be pushed through before the work even begins.
“I learned early on that seeding the idea ahead of time gives people the chance to get their mind right or to ask questions,” Bruner said.
Once the team starts getting closer to execution on these ideas, engineers are given further details and the team stresses the importance of communicating the context and the “why” behind some of the initiatives.
Product Stack That Bruner Uses Daily
Since Tasktop has direct integrations with other tools, Bruner uses the integrations for connecting different data sources for collecting feedback from customers and prioritizing and creating tickets.
“When customers have a request, our customer reps file a request in Salesforce,” Bruner said. “The customer is associated with the request, which then gets synchronized to a tool called Target Process.”
From there, all the features are backlogged and prioritized. When a product is ready for engineering to start working on a feature, they can synchronize it to JIRA using Tasktop Integration Hub. JIRA is the tool that “Engineers get to live and work in” Bruner said.
Once the engineers finish working on a feature in JIRA and it gets deployed, the status of the workflows back to Target Process and marks the feature as complete. Customers and our customer representatives can see that requests are done and they complete the cycle by feeding information back to the customers.
Bruner also uses Tasktop Viz to monitor the overall flow of work on his team. “We’re able to see patterns and anti-patterns using Viz. I can see that when the team has too much Flow Load (i.e. work in progress), the overall velocity drops. I’m also able to ensure we’re investing enough in technical debt work and not just pumping out feature after feature.”
3 Skills of a Good Product Manager
Bruner said that a crucial part of being a good product manager is refined communication skills.
“I think a huge portion of communication is being able to know how to give and receive information and dig in and ask the right questions, Bruner said. “When a customer or stakeholder says ‘I want this’ or ‘go build that’, it’s that ability to say, ‘Okay, I hear you, tell me more.’”
“Digging in” with a customer or stakeholder to find the root cause or pain point is key for being a good PM.
The second skill Bruner mentions is having good judgment. Getting information from a variety of different sources, being able to synthesize that information, and pulling out the most important aspects to start to develop a strategy with.
Using judgment to help distill a vast amount of information, prioritize what needs to be built, and know when to execute on these findings are key aspects of a good PM.
Bruner also mentions that a good Product Manager needs to have both humility and confidence.
“If you only have one, you’re either going to be arrogant, or you’ll get run over,” Bruner said. “You have to know when to stand your ground and be confident that you’re right in the decision you’ve made, and then also realizing you can definitely be wrong.”
The combination and balance of those two traits are crucial. A good PM should find a balance depending on the situation – when to be able to have confidence in their decisions versus having humility when they were maybe wrong in a decision that was made – and learn from that experience.
If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?
Bruner said that if he was to give himself advice before his career took off, he would say that “recognizing imposter syndrome means you’re probably heading in the right direction.”
Bruner states that having imposter syndrome means you have a learning mindset and you’re embracing that there’s further to go in your journey.
“Get comfortable with that sense of uncomfortableness that comes at the beginning of every new endeavor,” Bruner said. “Just make peace with the fact that you’re going to have imposter syndrome, and you’re going to feel like you are out of your element — just push through.”
Written by: Christian Karkada
