Welcome to the EVP Talent blog! This blog series exists to demystify common startup roles, create clearer pathways and tell the stories of exceptional operators within the EVP Portfolio.
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Jay White is the Head of Product at Hnry, a tax and accounting platform for self-employed contractors and freelancers across Australia and New Zealand.
We had the pleasure of (virtually) sitting down with Jay to learn more about his experience and what he does as Head of Product.
How do you explain what you do?
The crux of Product is identifying people's problems, even one’s they don't know they have yet and finding ways to make it better. With Hnry in particular, people don't really want to think about tax until it's too late. So how can we make it easier for them?
Then the other side of my role is rallying everyone in the same direction. Potentially telling the same story, multiple ways to get people to understand what we're trying to do when they have different needs and requirements
Broadly speaking, can you give us a sense of what activities you are accountable or responsible for?
I’m responsible for ensuring that we build the right things (products, features), and find the right market fit opportunities. For the business I ensure we hit our business goals and metrics. Spending $20k to prove we shouldn't spend $2m, rather than finding out after we have spent $2m that it was the wrong thing to build.
What could a day, week or month look like for you as Head of Product?
I start my day by making sure the team has what they need from me. As a team we then religiously look at our metrics dashboards to see if things are moving in the right direction. We also look at customer engagement chats that have come through overnight, which is usually our biggest indicator if something's broken. I then try to set aside some time for things like competitive research and market analysis.
The Product team works on a weekly sprint cadence. So every Monday, we update our exec team on the sprint goals of the week before. It’s a great opportunity for the product team to get wider business context and not double down on something that’s not working.
In that context I translate the business and commercial needs down to the team and distill why things change due to unforeseen circumstances.
How do you create a Product environment where it’s okay to experiment and potentially fail?
My whole purpose is to give the team the opportunity to experiment. We're quite lucky that our client base is scrappy and we’ve got a tight knit relationship with them, so they’re usually understanding.
I always look at the intent of why we did something and not necessarily the result of it, because you can learn that it wasn't the right thing to do and that's equally as valuable. With my team, subtlety in language is important. Rather than saying “it didn't work out” frame it as “we learned this”. In a startup perfection is the enemy of success. Our executive team at Hnry encourages us to do small iterations and experiments. There’s not this need to constantly come up with the next big thing. The question instead is “how can we make the four or five features that our customers want better?”
What advice would you give yourself or a friend starting as Head of Product?
The biggest thing I've learned in this role in particular is as soon as you think you figured it out, that's when you’re at your most dangerous. My big piece of advice for anyone moving into one of these roles would be that you need to learn how to listen properly. Ensuring that you're not listening to talk. Trying to be aware of situations where everyone is waiting for you to make a decision. The last thing you want as a Head of Product or CPO is to say we need this new feature, spend $2m and it doesn’t work. And then you realise that everyone knew it wasn’t a good idea, but no one could approach you and talk as a team. You need to constantly seek feedback.
The best advice I got from James Fuller (Co-Founder & CEO) when I joined Hnry was to learn why things are the way they are before you make changes. It’s easy to come in and say “that signup flow is broken, we should fix it”. And then upset everyone or not realise why it is the way it is, or that it is actually working for our customers. For anyone coming in new, fight the urge to make a change to prove why they hired you. That's the biggest mistake. You lose all credibility straight away.
Tell us about your past experience and journey to Hnry
I started my life as a high voltage electrician. I would go into power stations and do conversions, usually from gas and coal to more renewable energy. If a substation went down, we'd reroute power. I then went to a health and safety company. Pretty quickly I realised that we could be doing things a lot better than we were. So I took a lot of our manual processes and put them online. We created dynamic web forms and built our first app that went out to customers. We grew that team and I kind of just fell into product management.
Following that, I was the first product person at my level in the next four or five software companies I worked at. I was the first PM at flux, the first NZ based Director of Product at Sailthru and the first PM that managed the team in New York and in Wellington simultaneously. I seem to be drawn to the chaos of being the first.
What prior experience set you up to succeed at Hnry as Head of Product?
Working in power stations, if lightning struck and power was down in an area, you had to react quickly, and four or five of you rally together to work through the process. That mindset fits really well in a startup environment, you band together when things are going well or not. It also made me very pragmatic and helped me prioritise what was the most important thing to be done.
With my team now we focus on the need to haves, and then earn the right to build the nice to haves.
Was there anything that you needed to upskill in or unlearn from your prior experience that was no longer serving you?
I think the project management skills were something I needed to unlearn in a weird way. In project management you do this, then this, then this. Whereas in product you are probably maintaining five or six streams at the same time. You have to be really comfortable shifting between everything, and you learn quickly that getting 80% of everything done is more important than getting 100% of one thing done.
What do you love about your role as Head of Product? What is hard?
I love that no day or meeting is the same. You can have great days where everyone's really happy with you. But on the flip side, some days I feel like I haven’t done anything, because I've been so much to so many different people. I think the hardest part of the role is giving everyone enough information to do their job, but not too much that they get overwhelmed by it. So it's always that balancing act when to bring people in and what to tell them.
What misconceptions do people have about your role as Head of Product?
I have found that as I get more senior, people expect that I have all the answers. Whenever you throw an idea out, people assume you've thought it through and people don't challenge you. If you're sitting in a planning meeting and everyone is just waiting for you to tell them what to do. Then people don't buy into it. They don't believe in it. And you don't have the healthy friction or discussion to make it better.
I deliberately now sit back in meetings and try not to be the first person to speak.
What does good look like as Head of Product? Who are your role models?
Good looks like being a bit of a chameleon. Each person in your team is different, and being able to adapt to be the person they need you to be is a really important trait in a Head of Product. On the flip side, bad looks like instantly jumping into solution mode when people come to you with a problem. You need to listen and help them get to the answer themselves.
The person who has had the biggest influence on me is Melissa Perri with her commentary on escaping the build trap. There were points in my career when we were in that build phase. I didn’t quite know what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t working. I’ve had different role models that I have worked with over the years. It's kind of scary to think that people now look at me like that, which is humbling and a funny thought sometimes.
Do you have a moment, day, team or piece of work that you’re immensely proud of since starting your current role as Head of Product?
It's those small, short, sharp improvements that people go from “that will be terrible” to “oh, we actually got that out”. One of the big things we're about to do is change our ‘refer a friend’ process to be ‘remind a friend’. Rather than it coming from Hnry, we're getting it to come from your friend John himself. It's one of those beautiful product things where we can actually measure it.
Another big win I’m proud of is seeing how we've built our own admin functionality. Our selfless team have often put themselves last to focus on the customer. But now we've spun up a specific team to look after our admin portal and say that our internal people's experience is as important as our users’ experience.
****
Interested in a Product role? Check out Talent_OS to see opportunities across the EVP Portfolio, or reach out to Fred or Charmaine from EVP's Talent Team!
Welcome to the EVP Talent blog! This blog series exists to demystify common startup roles, create clearer pathways and tell the stories of exceptional operators within the EVP Portfolio.
****
Jay White is the Head of Product at Hnry, a tax and accounting platform for self-employed contractors and freelancers across Australia and New Zealand.
We had the pleasure of (virtually) sitting down with Jay to learn more about his experience and what he does as Head of Product.
How do you explain what you do?
The crux of Product is identifying people's problems, even one’s they don't know they have yet and finding ways to make it better. With Hnry in particular, people don't really want to think about tax until it's too late. So how can we make it easier for them?
Then the other side of my role is rallying everyone in the same direction. Potentially telling the same story, multiple ways to get people to understand what we're trying to do when they have different needs and requirements
Broadly speaking, can you give us a sense of what activities you are accountable or responsible for?
I’m responsible for ensuring that we build the right things (products, features), and find the right market fit opportunities. For the business I ensure we hit our business goals and metrics. Spending $20k to prove we shouldn't spend $2m, rather than finding out after we have spent $2m that it was the wrong thing to build.
What could a day, week or month look like for you as Head of Product?
I start my day by making sure the team has what they need from me. As a team we then religiously look at our metrics dashboards to see if things are moving in the right direction. We also look at customer engagement chats that have come through overnight, which is usually our biggest indicator if something's broken. I then try to set aside some time for things like competitive research and market analysis.
The Product team works on a weekly sprint cadence. So every Monday, we update our exec team on the sprint goals of the week before. It’s a great opportunity for the product team to get wider business context and not double down on something that’s not working.
In that context I translate the business and commercial needs down to the team and distill why things change due to unforeseen circumstances.
How do you create a Product environment where it’s okay to experiment and potentially fail?
My whole purpose is to give the team the opportunity to experiment. We're quite lucky that our client base is scrappy and we’ve got a tight knit relationship with them, so they’re usually understanding.
I always look at the intent of why we did something and not necessarily the result of it, because you can learn that it wasn't the right thing to do and that's equally as valuable. With my team, subtlety in language is important. Rather than saying “it didn't work out” frame it as “we learned this”. In a startup perfection is the enemy of success. Our executive team at Hnry encourages us to do small iterations and experiments. There’s not this need to constantly come up with the next big thing. The question instead is “how can we make the four or five features that our customers want better?”
What advice would you give yourself or a friend starting as Head of Product?
The biggest thing I've learned in this role in particular is as soon as you think you figured it out, that's when you’re at your most dangerous. My big piece of advice for anyone moving into one of these roles would be that you need to learn how to listen properly. Ensuring that you're not listening to talk. Trying to be aware of situations where everyone is waiting for you to make a decision. The last thing you want as a Head of Product or CPO is to say we need this new feature, spend $2m and it doesn’t work. And then you realise that everyone knew it wasn’t a good idea, but no one could approach you and talk as a team. You need to constantly seek feedback.
The best advice I got from James Fuller (Co-Founder & CEO) when I joined Hnry was to learn why things are the way they are before you make changes. It’s easy to come in and say “that signup flow is broken, we should fix it”. And then upset everyone or not realise why it is the way it is, or that it is actually working for our customers. For anyone coming in new, fight the urge to make a change to prove why they hired you. That's the biggest mistake. You lose all credibility straight away.
Tell us about your past experience and journey to Hnry
I started my life as a high voltage electrician. I would go into power stations and do conversions, usually from gas and coal to more renewable energy. If a substation went down, we'd reroute power. I then went to a health and safety company. Pretty quickly I realised that we could be doing things a lot better than we were. So I took a lot of our manual processes and put them online. We created dynamic web forms and built our first app that went out to customers. We grew that team and I kind of just fell into product management.
Following that, I was the first product person at my level in the next four or five software companies I worked at. I was the first PM at flux, the first NZ based Director of Product at Sailthru and the first PM that managed the team in New York and in Wellington simultaneously. I seem to be drawn to the chaos of being the first.
What prior experience set you up to succeed at Hnry as Head of Product?
Working in power stations, if lightning struck and power was down in an area, you had to react quickly, and four or five of you rally together to work through the process. That mindset fits really well in a startup environment, you band together when things are going well or not. It also made me very pragmatic and helped me prioritise what was the most important thing to be done.
With my team now we focus on the need to haves, and then earn the right to build the nice to haves.
Was there anything that you needed to upskill in or unlearn from your prior experience that was no longer serving you?
I think the project management skills were something I needed to unlearn in a weird way. In project management you do this, then this, then this. Whereas in product you are probably maintaining five or six streams at the same time. You have to be really comfortable shifting between everything, and you learn quickly that getting 80% of everything done is more important than getting 100% of one thing done.
What do you love about your role as Head of Product? What is hard?
I love that no day or meeting is the same. You can have great days where everyone's really happy with you. But on the flip side, some days I feel like I haven’t done anything, because I've been so much to so many different people. I think the hardest part of the role is giving everyone enough information to do their job, but not too much that they get overwhelmed by it. So it's always that balancing act when to bring people in and what to tell them.
What misconceptions do people have about your role as Head of Product?
I have found that as I get more senior, people expect that I have all the answers. Whenever you throw an idea out, people assume you've thought it through and people don't challenge you. If you're sitting in a planning meeting and everyone is just waiting for you to tell them what to do. Then people don't buy into it. They don't believe in it. And you don't have the healthy friction or discussion to make it better.
I deliberately now sit back in meetings and try not to be the first person to speak.
What does good look like as Head of Product? Who are your role models?
Good looks like being a bit of a chameleon. Each person in your team is different, and being able to adapt to be the person they need you to be is a really important trait in a Head of Product. On the flip side, bad looks like instantly jumping into solution mode when people come to you with a problem. You need to listen and help them get to the answer themselves.
The person who has had the biggest influence on me is Melissa Perri with her commentary on escaping the build trap. There were points in my career when we were in that build phase. I didn’t quite know what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t working. I’ve had different role models that I have worked with over the years. It's kind of scary to think that people now look at me like that, which is humbling and a funny thought sometimes.
Do you have a moment, day, team or piece of work that you’re immensely proud of since starting your current role as Head of Product?
It's those small, short, sharp improvements that people go from “that will be terrible” to “oh, we actually got that out”. One of the big things we're about to do is change our ‘refer a friend’ process to be ‘remind a friend’. Rather than it coming from Hnry, we're getting it to come from your friend John himself. It's one of those beautiful product things where we can actually measure it.
Another big win I’m proud of is seeing how we've built our own admin functionality. Our selfless team have often put themselves last to focus on the customer. But now we've spun up a specific team to look after our admin portal and say that our internal people's experience is as important as our users’ experience.
****
Interested in a Product role? Check out Talent_OS to see opportunities across the EVP Portfolio, or reach out to Fred or Charmaine from EVP's Talent Team!