AMA: Square Product Lead, Carrie Zhang on Influencing the C-Suite
December 20 @ 10:00AM PST
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Square Product Lead, Carrie Zhang on Influencing the C-Suite
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
Can relate to this question! I definitely struggled with similar situations earlier in my career. Interestingly I got the solution from the executives I was working with at the time. He suggested “get us together, tell us the team is struggling with completely different directions, and ask us ‘wh......Read More
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
This likely depends on the size of the company and the different rituals you may have. Obviously the bigger the org, the harder it is to get direct exposure to the c-suite. If your company happens to have the following opportunities, take advantage. * Product reviews. Does your company run regu......Read More
377 Views
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
I don’t think we should try and align with certain people. Product development is about solving customer problems. So fundamentally I think we should deeply understand our customers’ struggles and figure out how we can use technology to help them. Additionally, we need to put that in the context ......Read More
394 Views
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
Not sure these can be called “best” habits. Just some principles I try to follow myself. * Take a top management perspective. This means elevating your thinking to that level, and thinking beyond the tunnel view of your product. To do that well, you have to be curious and keep tabs of wha......Read More
408 Views
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
We can be more tactful and realize we don’t need to rely on logical reasoning alone! To this date, I am still amazed at how one of my colleagues got an executive to change their opinion. We were working on a new product launch at the time and had proposed a pricing bundle that included a feature ......Read More
379 Views
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
Ultimately c-suite needs to allocate resources that generate business value. So I think the best way to influence that is to make sure what you are working on produces the desired customer/ business outcome, and/ or financial value. Based on my own experience, we can do a few things that help......Read More
411 Views
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Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead • December 20
I think first of all, we need to have our own opinions of relative priorities. There are so many frameworks out there on prioritization. For me, it always comes down to alignment with strategy, alignment with customer problems, and relative effort level. When communicating with executives, it’......Read More
367 Views
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