Nate Buch - Product Manager at Dell - Good Fit Careers

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Good Fit Careers podcast where we explore perspectives on work that fits. I'm

(00:08):
Ryan Dickerson, your host. Today's guest is Nate Buch. Nate is a product manager at Dell,
where he's currently responsible for feature definition of Dell's commercial laptops. This
is a product line that generates $25 billion in annual revenue. Dell is ranked number 34 on the
Fortune 500 list and is a publicly traded technology company that generated over $100 billion in revenue

(00:32):
in 2023 with 133,000 employees. Nate studied mechanical engineering at Princeton, then earned
a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Cornell. He started his career in consulting,
working with large utilities to increase adoption of renewable energy solutions, then moved to a
startup developing Internet of Things solutions for the energy sector. Nate joined Dell in 2018

(00:57):
after finishing an MBA at Northwestern University. Nate, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So, Nate, your background's pretty incredible. Your education is, I would say, kind of top of
the world here. You have a very cool job. I would love to first by walking through
what you currently do today. Would you tell us a little bit about it, please?

(01:17):
Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. So, I'm currently a product manager at Dell Technologies, as you
mentioned. I own the definition of our mainstream commercial notebooks. What that basically involves
is balancing a lot of competing interests, to put it succinctly. There are the business

(01:38):
requirements, there's our customer requirements, and there are also our end user requirements.
It's kind of unique as a product goes because in commercial notebooks, our customers are often
very different from our users. We might be selling to someone who is an IT manager at a
Fortune 50 company, and they're buying 20,000 laptops from us every year and handing them out

(02:01):
to their end users who are not themselves. They're different employees and different
functions in the business in different places. They're often international.
Just to put a scale on it, we maintain something like 35 different languages for different keyboards
for devices that we ship worldwide. It's a multinational endeavor. Everybody's got

(02:26):
different ideas about what's the most important thing. There's different ideas about what things
are cost justified or not. My role basically sits in the middle of all of that. It involves
thinking about what do customers really value, what are the end users really value, what's the
best way to maintain the best P&L that we can for our business, and somehow finding the right balance

(02:50):
between all of that. Oh, man. That's incredibly complicated. We're going to dig into all the
details here in a minute, but would you start back at the beginning and perhaps tell us a little bit
about what you were like as a kid and what you wanted to be when you grew up? Sure. I think I
would describe myself as perpetually curious. That is the first and foremost thing. I was never

(03:12):
satisfied with the answers I got. I always wanted to know more. There's the cliché of kids asking
why, why, why. I think a lot of times kids ask that just to pester their parents, but I was
generally trying to figure out the underpinnings of how everything worked. That's something that's
carried forward for me today. I'm always trying to dig a little bit deeper into things. The other

(03:34):
piece of it is I just recall being persistent in things from a young age that I would lock on to
something and not give up pursuing it until I figured it out. Those two things, you put it
together and it's like I need to get to some point where I'm satisfied with the answer. I don't really

(03:54):
accept just somebody saying something doesn't carry a lot of weight with me. I need to understand
where that comes from. Yeah, yeah. It makes a lot of sense. You have what I would consider
a world-class educational pedigree and one that might make people uncomfortable here. Can you
tell us a little bit about what it was like to go to Princeton and then Cornell and then Northwestern

(04:15):
and how that came to be in reality? Sure. I was always a good student. I kind of took it as a
challenge to get good grades and things like that. I particularly focused on math and science, but the
applied version of it. It wasn't math for math's sake or science for science's sake. It was a means

(04:36):
to an end. That led me to engineering. When I was applying to schools, I was basically applying to
engineering schools within these universities. Princeton, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, these kind of
places that have a really strong engineering department. Princeton, there's a couple things
that were unique about it. One is I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, born and raised. That was a

(04:59):
nice two hour door-to-door commute, which was cool, being able to be closer to home. As far as
the school itself goes, it is great in a lot of different realms. It almost doesn't come through
as strongly in engineering as a perception that people have, but there's all these top tier

(05:21):
engineers and scientists that have come out of there. I think it is more traditionally thought
of for other fields, but their engineering department is extremely strong. I was attracted
to that. The campus is great. I met some people at the welcome weekend that I thought were great.
Yeah, that's where I ended up. Nice. From there, you studied aerospace engineering. What was that

(05:45):
career or degree path like for you? It was mechanical in aerospace. I was more interested
in the mechanical part, in that I viewed mechanical engineering as kind of a jack-of-all-trades
engineering degree, where you can get very specialized in things like chemical engineering,
electrical engineering, even computer science. It felt like I might be pigeonholing myself into

(06:07):
closing doors or focusing on others. I wasn't ready to make a decision yet. I like the idea
of just having a good engineering sense of how to solve problems. That was what attracted me
to mechanical engineering, which was inside the MAE department, mechanical and aerospace.
Right on. Did you have in mind that you might be working on consumer laptops from a product

(06:30):
management standpoint back when you were in school?
Zero percent chance, but I did see myself working on hardware. I know a lot of people
like lean towards software. It felt a little esoteric to me that it exists in the device,
but it's not something you can hold with your hands. I was interested in robotics,
interested in devices themselves, how do things get made and what the trade-offs are.

(06:55):
While I wasn't envisioning laptops in particular, I was definitely picturing something that you
might interact with on a day-to-day basis. Bring us along then to your first proper
full-time job. If you could bring us along in terms of not just what the job was, but
how you were hired and what it was like to go from academia to working.

(07:17):
So this was a bit of a unique situation. I graduated in the year 2010,
which as anyone will tell you was kind of a rougher year for making the transition.
Strong job, my head.
And what I quickly realized at the time was due to all the layoffs of the previous 18 or 24 months,
there were an enormous number of people competing for jobs up and down the stack.

(07:41):
And so experienced hires are going to those second year roles or three to five year experience.
And the three to five year experience people are applying to entry roles. Everything got compressed.
And so I was up against all these people that kind of didn't have a prayer of out-competing,
coming out fresh. And so I did have a couple offers from places after hundreds of interviews

(08:05):
and applications. I wasn't super enthused by them, but I had also applied to get my
master's at a couple of different universities, one of which was Cornell.
And when I was weighing my options, it felt like that was the right move at the time.
I think that has paid off, but it was definitely like, let's punt this for a year.

(08:25):
So I guess the more interesting question is coming out of Cornell 2011, what that was like.
So I come from a family of lawyers, not really strong on the math and science department.
So I didn't really have a lot of family connections or anything. Nobody's making a call for me to
somebody at some department somewhere. So I was applying pretty much cold to as many different

(08:53):
things in the vein that I thought I'd be interested in working in as possible.
And as I mentioned, or you brought up early on this renewable energy space, at the time,
I was really interested in using my background to go help solve climate change.
This was definitely early on, it's like what, 15 years ago now. But I felt like if I can make a

(09:15):
difference in that, I feel like passionate about getting up and going to work and feeling like I'm
making a difference and all of that. And the energy space is tangible. It's real physical
stuff that needs to be turned over, has long life cycles that everything that you do to make a change
carries forward and propagates for decades. So I applied to a boutique consulting firm in Boston

(09:42):
that was specializing in renewable energy, working with electric utilities to figure out
how to take these hundred year old systems and modernize them to basically have more
renewables on them. So that was my first job. I was deciding between that Lawrence Berkeley
National Labs. So I was doing some more kind of academic side renewable energy research.

(10:06):
I liked the idea of being in the private sector. So I ended up doing that.
And when you were in that proper full-time job after grad school, after all your academic
experience, what did you learn about yourself at that phase in life?
That I hated consulting. I knew two weeks into that job that that was not the right place for

(10:29):
me. I could not see myself doing consulting long-term. It was too far divorced from the actual
physical workings of what we were working on. We were working with another company and then they
would be implementing the actual things we said. And I felt like we were at arm's length all the

(10:49):
time. They would selectively share information. We'd have to ask for new information. We'd have
to maintain this relationship to dress up and pretend like you're a business casual,
new grad, but you're bringing all this expertise to the table somehow. It was form over function.
It was writing about stuff instead of doing stuff. And I felt like I needed to be closer

(11:17):
to the action, so to speak. Got it. Got it. Right on. That makes a lot of sense.
Outside of knowing that consulting wasn't the right fit, did you carry anything with you from
that first job and what you do now? Yes. I mean, there's two kinds of things you can learn. Things
you love and then things you hate to stay away from them. And so one of the things I learned was

(11:39):
that you can't run from the truth. And I saw it a lot in that role and I see it less now is people
just trying to sweep things under the rug or they get bad news or results and they try to put it in
a prettier light or kick the can down the road, pick your idiom about it. I didn't like that

(12:00):
approach. I didn't like the, let's just polish this up and pretend it's okay and maybe it'll go away.
I like to actually solve the problem. And what I felt like through the three roles that I've had in
consulting and then in the IOT startup and now at Dell is each step has been more toward an
organization that's more inclined to just roll up our sleeves and figure out the problem and

(12:23):
solve it, then try to paint it in a better light where function matters more than form.
Was there an inflection point? Was there a moment when you knew that you had found
the work that you really wanted to be doing? Yes, I would really point to it at that job at the
IOT startup I had. It was basically in client delivery. So it's a Bay Area startup developing

(12:47):
this IOT tech. I'm on site in Chicago. And IOT for the folks out there who might not be fluent
in an acronym? Internet of things. So it's everything that gets connected to the internet,
which over time ends up being a lot more things than you could ever imagine. So you start with
laptops and then now there's phones. And now John Deere has an internet connected

(13:12):
combine harvester that is monitoring a thousand data points to check for various sensors that
will look for anomalies or maintenance upgrades and things like that. And so this thing is
spitting off probably megabytes of data per second while it's harvesting corn. So it's really...
Sometimes it goes a little too far. This company was very strong in basically building out IOT,

(13:40):
Internet of Things solutions for electric utilities. So previous to this, going back decades,
really a century, you'd have a meter on the side of your house that would be read by a person who
comes by once a month and reads off the amount of kilowatt hours that you've consumed. And that's
how they got the bill. But there's no reason you couldn't connect that to the internet and monitor

(14:02):
that multiple times a day and get real time information about how much power people are
consuming on an even hourly basis. And for an electric utility trying to more carefully manage
its operations so that you could bring things on board like distributed solar, wind power that's
intermittent, you need to have real time information. And so this company was basically rolling out

(14:27):
IOT meters so that they could pull all this information in and make smarter decisions about
load balancing and what power sources to draw on and what time of day that these sources would
probably come online and things like that. And so I was there on site extending this product into new
kinds of devices that you'd never think to connect to the internet like smart parking meters that

(14:53):
could detect if somebody's actually at the parking meter or not and send an alert so you can see on
your map in real time which parking spaces are available. You could do smart traffic sensing.
So if the light detects that there's nobody waiting at this red light, turn it green so people can get
on their way. The big one that I was working on was smart street lights where we're upgrading

(15:14):
to LED street lights from these old halogen or sodium pressure. Old, old, inefficient technology
that's going to LED. They wanted to do this upgrade once because City of Chicago has 330,000
street lights across it. So they didn't want to revisit these things more than once every 30 years.

(15:36):
So this is the moment they're going to upgrade them to LEDs. Why not network them too?
And you could do things like detect when the street lights out and automatically send someone to go
fix it. The previous method of detecting whether they're out was to wait for angry customers to
call in screaming at the city that this light's been out for a month and you haven't done anything
about it. And the city would be like, "That's great. Thanks for letting me know. We had no idea

(15:59):
that this light was out." So it was a customer satisfaction thing too. So in that role,
it was hands-on. We did a thousand endpoint pilot. I was out there in the field troubleshooting
issues, collecting data, defining dimming schedules. So with LEDs, it's not just on and off.
You can have them ramp up as the sun goes down and ramp down and as the sun comes up,

(16:23):
all these kind of more elegant things. When you're thinking about emergency response,
you could have these lights flashing when somebody calls 911 for an accident. So somebody
sees that out of the corner of the ride. They're like, "Something is weird on this block and slows
down ahead of time." Or you can indicate a detour or something like that using the street lights.

(16:44):
So there's a lot of opportunities to unlock there. This was just get V1 up and running
so that we could get a contract with the city for the 329,000 other street lights. And it worked.
It took a year, but it felt like I was very hands-on. It was block and tackling through

(17:04):
engineering issues, RF issues, partnerships with utilities, the light manufacturers, everybody.
And it felt like I was in the thick of it trying to manage all of this. That was where I felt like I
really liked being involved to that level of degree. So long story short, that was the moment
when I felt like I had a job that really fit well. It makes a lot of sense. And so you had the

(17:30):
engineering background. You understood at a rocket science level how to deal with parking
lights and street lights and all these different things that connect to technology. Was there
anything that you had to learn to become good at hardware specific product management or anything
that, I don't know, took some effort to really get proficient at? Yeah. I'd say this too. I decouple

(17:52):
it to product management in general and then hardware specifically. So product management
in general, understanding things like what's truly urgent and what's not, and what's somebody
who's just screaming loudly about something versus not. How much do people really care about something?
People are very different. If you ask somebody, "How much does this hurt on a scale from one to

(18:16):
10?" and they tell you eight. Sounds important. But then you fix it. They're like, "Fine." It's
like, "Was that an eight? Was it a three?" And you're just saying eight to get it to happen faster.
So a lot of that, it's diving into what is allegedly a fire drill in product management.

(18:37):
It's like, "Is this really or will people live with this?" And then the hardware sign of it,
there's a big distinction that I think most people would be familiar with between hardware and
software. Software, you ship it. It's buggy. Ship a patch. People upgrade. You can ship a feature at
a time. Hardware, it goes out in the field and you can't touch it. And that mistake is baked in there

(19:01):
for as long as the device is out there, which for commercial notebooks is three, four, or five years.
So it's super important. The expression measure twice, cut once. We measure probably 16 times
before we cut. And that's my job is to really double check that we have everything lined up.
And there's a level of rigor and detail around that. So that's hardware product management.

(19:25):
That's what you need to really understand to be proficient in it.
Can we dig a little bit deeper on the my 10 might not be your 10, that the sense of urgency
and figuring out how to prioritize or even just to get a gauge on how big of a deal something is.
Do you have a way to think about that? Or if anybody out there is excited about product

(19:45):
management and trying to think about like, "Oh, every issue is important. Everything is a 10."
How would you advise them to prioritize?
Yeah. We use whatever data signals we can. Luckily, within the age of the internet,
we can go read people's reviews of our products online. We run worldwide surveys

(20:06):
around the clock to get customer feedback and verbatims. And we look for trends where
something's spiking or something that we thought was sufficient two years ago is suddenly considered
substandard. And so we need to upgrade that. So it's a bit of a lagging indicator when we do that.
We also try to do leading indicators by conducting focus groups and user testing.

(20:28):
And we'll put concept devices in front of people and say, "Hey, suppose we
tweaked this or made this trade off. Would that meaningfully improve something for you?"
And through all of that, it's really know your customers, maybe the biggest piece of all.
You get a sense of being the voice of the customer internally. You can say, "My buyers

(20:50):
will or will not appreciate this thing." Or they'll like it, but they won't pay for it.
Or they won't care at all.
Yeah. There's a lot of things you could do. There's the difference of what you should do.
And I think of it as two sides of the same coin, understanding both. It's often what you should do

(21:11):
is maybe one to 5% of all the things you could do. A lot of people bring a lot of great ideas
and you go, "It's going to cost some amount. And it's going to maybe help a few people.
And most people won't even care."
It sounds like you're using every data point you possibly can. And then over time,
the data begins to inform something like an intuition, where you can say, "Okay, I see it.

(21:36):
I bet if we test it, this is what the outcome will be." Your hypothesis development becomes
more and more precise. Is that a fair way to describe it?
You basically start to become mind-milled. You become one with the millions of people using Dell
commercial notebooks in their day-to-day lives all at once. You say, "On net, this will matter to

(21:57):
enough people. And it's a big enough pain point that we should go make this investment." And
their expectations change over time, but you get into the mind-milled and then year-to-year,
you sense what is mattering to people more and what do we have to make sure that we're investing in.
Interesting. I have so many more questions on that, but we'll move on for the time being.

(22:20):
The hardware side of things and the other piece that you had to learn, the measure
16 times and cut once approach here. When you're thinking about putting hardware out into the world
and if anybody out there is interested in product management on the hardware side,
how did you begin to develop your intuition on when a physical device was ready for production

(22:41):
or ready to ship? Well, I wish we had the luxury of making that call whenever we pleased. In fact,
our business is very set on an annual cadence. So I go back to the IT manager at some large Fortune
50 company buying 20,000 devices a year. He or she probably has 60,000 to 80,000 employees that

(23:04):
they're managing IT for, which is the equivalent of being the IT manager of a small town.
Everybody's tech issues, right? They're buying on certain dimensions and they are buying with an
expectation that each year the product will rev and they're going to give the third of their end
users who need an upgrade the next version of it. So we're meeting their expectation on this.

(23:30):
We can't ship mid-year, one year, the beginning of the year, the next. It's like new product at the
start of the year. We debut it at CES every year. It's on a schedule, much like the iPhone, honestly.
The things we need to consider are this two-tier thing, one of which is the end users that you

(23:51):
really have to understand in terms of the types of day-to-day usage of the device. Then there's
the customers themselves who are the people buying thousands into the tens of thousands at once.
They don't care about device look and feel and weight and things. They care about manageability,
serviceability, durability. Basically, how many trouble tickets is this going to generate for

(24:16):
them when they give these devices out to their end users? So all that measurement comes down to
making sure we're meeting the needs of both groups.
To give us some context and to make sure that everybody here is on the same page,
would you bring us along a little bit on where you currently fit in the company and
exactly what your role is? As you mentioned at the top, Dell is a ginormous company. Fortune,

(24:41):
top 50, 100 billion in revenue a year and growing. It's basically the company's two big pieces.
There's the client product groups, which is what I'm in, laptops, desktops, all the displays and
peripherals. Then there's the infrastructure solutions group, which servers, storage,

(25:02):
things like that, which is having a heyday right now in the AI boom. Everybody's trying to get
their hands on all the inferencing and model training chips that they can. So both pieces
go in tandem. What is the rationale for Dell? It's like the single throat to choke for a big
company to get everything from Dell. So I'm in CPG, client product group. Within that, we make

(25:27):
commercial notebooks. We make the Insepron's and XPS's like consumer devices. We make displays and
peripherals. I'm in the commercial notebooks group, which represents about 25 billion of the
100 billion top line for Dell. So it's about a quarter of the company. It is the kind of devices
that you would, when you start a new job, they hand you this new device and they choose from our

(25:51):
product line and how much they want to spend on these employees. We hope that they choose up to
the fancy ones, but we have mainstream ones. I do the mainstream ones. We also have value,
which you can tell their value. We have to make cuts on that one. It's kind of rough.
Mainstream is the all purpose, most jack of all trades product that you can imagine.

(26:13):
And so I am in the product management group responsible for the mainstream devices,
along with another guy. We basically tag team it since it's such a large product line by itself.
So the mainstream laptops are 18 out of the 25 billion. So you figure we're selling devices at

(26:34):
rough rule of thumb, 1000 each 18 million devices a year. So measure 16 times because you put the
wrong thing out there. It is 18 million devices have that issue for the next four years.
And 18 million people, their primary way of interacting with their company,
their connection to the internet and their work in the world. I mean, that can, that's a,

(26:57):
you have a real impact on people's lives there.
Yeah. It's like if they are frustrated by something, the audio is underpowered,
the display is too dark, the camera is low quality, like they're living with that. And they're going
to tell their friends and family about either they don't like Dell or they don't like the company
because they gave them the Dell. They called this stuff.

(27:18):
Wow. That's an enormous amount of responsibility. Thinking about meaning here, what does your work
actually mean to you? And going a little bit further down that road, what does it,
what does a good fit mean to you? I don't know if you're familiar with the Japanese
term ikigai. I think I'm saying it right. It's basically this Venn diagram with four overlapping

(27:39):
circles. And at the center is what I think of as like, this is the ideal purpose for somebody in
terms of their job. And so these circles are, it's things you're good at, things the world will pay
for, things you enjoy doing and blanking on the last one.

(27:59):
I think it's like something like things that the world needs.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there's plenty of jobs that hit two out of four, or three out of four,
it's rare to find something that's four out of four. I do think that my current role,
I do get four out of four, maybe not max on each one of them to the extreme, but I absolutely
checks the box on all four. The overall ikigai is, I think, such a beautiful concept of being

(28:24):
able to have that balance between those four quadrants. And then, I don't know, finding that
fit, finding something that just feels right, the world needs, you can get paid for, right?
Like you're good at, I think there's just something really lovely in finding that. And
I'm sure that that kind of shows in your work and the longevity you've had at Dell.
Yeah, I just hit my five year anniversary. And I actually am the least tenured person on my team

(28:49):
in the commercial notebooks group. There's a couple of folks that just hit their 25th anniversary
there. And another one with the 20, another with 15. So I'm obviously not alone. There's something
about working on physical hardware in a good culture, interesting problems every day, good people,

(29:10):
like people end up finding a good fit about it.
Awesome. So you're five years in, would you tell us a little bit about when you joined and then how
your roles evolved over the last few years?
I mean, typically, it is rare to have somebody come into the product group with relatively as
little experiences I had directly with the products. I had interned at Dell when they were

(29:32):
trying to get into IoT, Internet of Things, they could deploy these little devices that
connect to other things and connect them to the internet, which shouldn't go anywhere.
But at the time, I was coming straight out of an IoT startup. So I did my internship at Dell
in their IoT group, told them basically pretty bluntly all the things that they would need to do

(29:55):
to do that well. And compared to getting our foot in the door in the startup, and they
recognize that there was a lot more lifting for them to do than what they're typically used to,
which is build a product, ship it, make it available. Somebody goes to the website, buys it,
done IoT, it's all integration system architects, you're testing end-to-end solutions. They didn't

(30:18):
want to get into that. But I guess me telling them that everything they were doing wrong was
enough for them to want to bring me back full-time. So when I came back, they were starting up a new
team called Advanced Experience Planning, which was supposed to sit a little upstream of these
product teams and go evaluate new technologies to assess them for whether they're ready for

(30:39):
commercialization. So give an example of OLED displays, we're hitting TVs, we are looking at
whether a manufacturer would build a 14-inch OLED display and maybe we put it in a laptop.
Could be cool. Who's the user? What's the use case? What are the consequences of doing that?
What are the weight trade-offs, power trade-offs? All these nuts and bolts issues. It turned out

(31:00):
those issues are pretty severe. Oh, really?
It's fair. Yeah. Those OLED displays will hose your battery life.
Interesting. They're so beautiful.
They're gorgeous. And if you are sitting on your work laptop watching Netflix,
I'm sure you would appreciate it. But the reality is, PowerPoint and Excel don't look that much

(31:20):
better on an OLED. And that's one of those examples of, is this worth making an investment?
Who's going to care? And do they accept the trade-offs if you get, what, 30% less battery life,
but you have this nice display? Mostly you're like, "I would rather have the battery life."
So it's making those kind of recommendations, which is where I started. And then I moved into

(31:43):
the product group about three years ago to take on owning and managing our products more directly.
I imagine that there are people out there who are dying to be in product management, who
see it as this amazing job that is just like the dream for so many people. What was it actually
like to become a proper product manager in a Fortune 50 company managing a multi-billion

(32:07):
dollar piece of hardware? What was that actually like?
So one is the way you framed it, this responsibility to it, that these decisions have
consequences. So it's not just for fun. I mean, I guess if you were doing it at a small company,
it could be more, "Let's play around." Here, I mean, imagine being the product manager for the

(32:28):
Ford F-150 and making wild proposals like, "Let's add six headlights." There's all sorts of things
you could do. Having the sense of understanding what is really going to be useful and then also
how does it align to the product as people's expectations have formed around it, that's all
really important. Balancing all those different trade-offs matters. And so you're operating in

(32:52):
two different tiers at the same time. There's the nuts and bolts talking about millimeter trade-offs
and a slightly larger battery and this new material will make it 20 grams lighter. And each
of these decisions in and of themselves don't amount to much, but all told, you can really
make the device feel meaningfully lighter if you make a series of trade-offs or measurably longer

(33:17):
battery life if you make a series of trade-offs. And then understanding, up-leveling from that
engineering discussion to understand the users and whether they will care. And then care is,
will somebody pay for it? And all of that needs to be kind of, you're weighing that in your mind
simultaneously. To be a little bit more precise than in the questioning here, becoming a product

(33:41):
manager and getting this job, it doesn't sound like just anybody can get a product management job.
And within Dell, you had to join the company first and then kind of transition into that role.
For anybody out there who's just dying to be in product management, can you give them a more of a
tactical preview of what the steps were or what it was actually like to go through the interview
and hiring process to become kind of this product management leader?

(34:02):
So the biggest thing you really need to demonstrate to anybody is you have a keen sense of
the end user, their expectations, what they define as meaningful or valuable. That is,
in interview after interview, even internally, this came up of, "We want to put you in the mainstream

(34:24):
notebook division and product management. Tell me about mainstream users. Tell me what they do
day-to-day. Tell me what they complain about. And how well do you understand that?"
The team said they tapped you to do this. This wasn't something that you applied to. There was
no online job portal, "I want to be in this job. I'm going to submit my resume."
I had to apply along with a lot of other people.

(34:46):
These people with these tenures hanging out there, these roles don't open up that often.
Everybody jumps on them. And that was a big part of making the transition from the team that I was
previously on, which was understanding the technologies for commercialization, and then

(35:07):
moving into product management, which is good. You know what we could do. Tell me what we should do
and demonstrating that you can make that distinction.
How many rounds of interviews? What was the actual process like?
I think it was a little different because it was an internal move. I met with every person on the
team. We did an initial screen with the director of the team. Met with every person. Met with some

(35:33):
of the adjacent stakeholders, if you will. So, as the person who runs our CTO office,
and they want to know if they're investing in some new vendor, that when they bring it to me
in my new seat in product management, can they work with me? Can we talk about what is needed,
and what are the required trade-offs, or what the deal breakers are? All very useful to know.

(35:55):
I talked to the sales folks. They want to know that the person sitting upstream of them,
designing these products, has a good head on their shoulders because they're going to need to go out
and sell 15 million of these or whatever. The target is every year. So, if I make the wrong
trade-off and they go, "Hey, everybody, all the customers are asking for X, and you added Y,

(36:22):
I can't sell that. I don't hit my numbers," or "I lose margin." That's straight out of his pocket.
So, the sales teams matter. I met with the quality folks, and they're asking me, "What do you know
about the issues that we're currently dealing with in the current products, and how much
do you understand needs to change to make sure that we improve our quality going forward?"

(36:45):
Because no hardware product is going to be perfect out the door.
There's always going to be some issue. The question is, "Can you keep that to a dull roar,
and how expensive is it when it becomes an issue?" And so, we try to iterate as best we can year to
year and not make the same mistake twice. So, they were asking me, "Hey, you're going to be
in the hot seat. Do you understand all the issues that have been present over the last few

(37:09):
generations? Can we fix them so that we can get things under control?" So, all of these people,
you realize, have a really big vested interest in who is the product manager for this product that
they are very much evaluated on how well they move. Wow. So, you joined Dell in one department.

(37:31):
The team said, "Okay, we think that there's a good opportunity here." You joined an interview
process to be in product management for commercial mobility. Instead of what I would imagine would
be a classic interview where you have a screening call, you talk to a hiring manager, you do a panel
interview, you talk to the hiring manager again, you negotiate, you get a job offer, you start the
job. This was like more operational. You were meeting with every team that their future,

(37:55):
their fate was going to be decided by your product management and feature definition decisions.
They all wanted to make sure that you weren't going to screw them over by making some outlandish
decision and that this large community of people, this whole ecosystem that are affected downstream
by product management had to give you the okay before you got the job. Is that about right?

(38:16):
You nailed it.
Amazing. So, I guess for the people out there who are dying to be in product management or see this
as something amazing, it sounds like one of the paths, at least in this arena, is to join a
company that does hardware, prove yourself in any division or some division that's tangential to it,
and then internally work your way in. Because it just doesn't really sound like anybody from the

(38:38):
outside would be able to build enough trust with all those different teams and understand the whole
ecosystem well enough to land that job in that complicated and in-depth of a hiring process.
I'm not aware of anyone that we've hired directly from external. It's all internal referrals to be
in the product group. There's 200 people in the Dell product group and 133,000 employees.

(39:01):
So, it's like the beating heart at the center. Everything else is the machine that builds the
devices and sells the devices and services devices and all of that. It takes a really deep,
fundamental understanding of our products to be able to do an effective job in the role.
Part of it can be taught in advance and part of it can't. You don't really understand the true

(39:29):
nature, I think, of the trade-offs involved in hardware product management until you're in the
role. But the part that you can learn in advance, which becomes key for getting the role in the
first place, is understanding the customers of that product. So, you can be in sales and crush
it in sales because you understand what customers care about and you're marketing to them well.

(39:50):
You can move directly into product management and say, "Hey, I'm going to make decisions that I know
in my previous life as the salesperson. I would have loved to have this, like make this trade."
You can work in UX design, working with end users all the time on ergonomics of the device,
the weight, the look and feel, the form factors. You get their feedback and you understand.

(40:15):
Then you can move into the product management role with that acute understanding of,
"If we make it this much heavier, people will balk." I've been in the room where they pick it up and
they say, "That feels heavy. We can't. I won't buy it." So, you know that that guardrail exists.
You're bringing the customer mindset into the role. That's the piece that I had that allowed

(40:36):
me to make the change was I was working on figuring out new technologies for commercialization,
going to research study after research study, talking to customers and saying, "What do you
care about? If we make this investment, will you pay extra for the device?" Most of the time,
that answer was no. Sometimes it was yes. When I was doing the internal hiring, they said that Nate

(40:59):
understands our customers. He knows what they look like. He knows what they care about.
He would be able to make informed decisions and he'll learn what the cost of those trade-offs
is once he's in the role. How cool. It sounds like the pattern of experience there
can be pretty broad and diverse. You can come from a whole bunch of different backgrounds as
long as there's the deep and rich understanding of the people, the consumers and what they care

(41:23):
about. It sounds like people from all sorts of different backgrounds would have hope to get into
the space. Some of it you're going to have to learn along the way, but being able to deeply
empathize and have the intuition for what's going to matter for the constituents, the people that
you're serving, that sounds like something that a lot of people might be able to springboard off of.
Yeah, I would pitch it that way. I would say everyone that we have brought onto the team

(41:48):
has brought a really good, keen knowledge of what customers care about when it comes to our products.
You can get that understanding from all these different roles. If somebody was looking to get
into product management, but there's a UX role available, take it. Go run research studies with
customers and then something opens up internally and you go, "I've been talking to our customers

(42:10):
nonstop for the last 18 months. I know exactly what they care about." Suddenly, you look like
the ideal candidate for the job. Awesome. That makes a ton of sense. You've been at the company
for several years now. Is working at Dell like what you expected before you joined?
Yes, but that's because I got a sneak preview. I did my internship at Dell in the middle of my MBA.

(42:35):
I spent not only did I spend it at Dell, it's based in Austin. I spent the summer in Austin.
I knew exactly what I'm getting into in terms of 110 degree days and all that jazz, all the things
they warned you about. Working at Dell, I had a pretty good idea of it at the end of that
internship period. I do think if a company does the internship well, it's so valuable for both sides.

(42:57):
They gave me a real project. They said, "Hey, our IoT devices aren't selling well and you're
here from an IoT company. Can you please help us?" It was 10 weeks of, "Here's everything you're
doing wrong." But it was very useful for them to learn. I mentor interns every summer and they get
a really good idea of this is what the discussions are. This is how the companies run and importantly,

(43:24):
this is what the culture is like. I knew going in that I liked the culture and compared to the things
that I had heard from other people at other companies, the culture stood out to me. Over
five years that I've been at Dell, I've never heard anybody lose their temper, raise their voice,
scream, curse. I've never had a toxic encounter. They screamed for that. They go, "Look,

(43:51):
we're a multinational company. We work around the clock. We have people in Taiwan and Singapore and
Austin and they're all spread all over Europe. You will never meet many of these people.
Everybody needs to be pleasant to each other." They really foster that. We have a culture code
that explicitly lays all this out. I really align to that. I think people join companies

(44:17):
because they want to get their bag or they think they're supposed to. They're chasing prestige or
a title and they overlook how important the culture is. They get in and they're like,
"I heard stories about friends leaving their internships crying every day from an awful
manager working on something they don't care about." I didn't want any part of that. I was

(44:39):
willing to make compromises to not have that. Going into Dell, I knew what I was signing up for.
So nice to hear. It feels so easy to read through whatever's on LinkedIn or what people are broadly
talking about on the internet and lose some hope that there are still companies where there is a
healthy culture and people are kind and thoughtful and considerate and nice to work with no matter

(45:02):
what time zone or country you're in. It's really nice to hear, Nate. Moving on to teaching us a
little bit about your work here. Can you walk us through how to do one of the most useful or high
impact parts of your job? Sure. I'll use a really simple example. This comes up with our customers
all the time. Some of them want longer battery life. They say, "My battery only lasts four or

(45:28):
five hours. Please make it last longer." Some people really care about weight. They tell us,
"Device is already too heavy. Make it lighter. I have to put this in my bag." You think about who
the users are for these. There are some people who move around all the time with their device.
There are some people who leave it plugged in even with the lid closed and they never
disconnected at all. There are people who have it in a backpack. There are people who carry it in a

(45:53):
bag or a briefcase. The weight physically, ergonomically matters to some people more than
others. The difficulty is we can solve one of these things, but it automatically unsolved the
other. We can build a bigger battery. We can give you great battery life. It will add weight.

(46:13):
You make 10% of the people on that end of the spectrum more happy. You make, realistically,
20% of the people that are weight conscious at the other end of the spectrum very unhappy.
No matter what you do, you're going to make somebody unhappy. We sit in the middle and we
try to figure out what the right median point is. There are different ways that you can go about

(46:39):
solving for that. You can, for example, throw cost at it. You can invest in higher energy density
batteries so the battery itself doesn't get heavier, but it can pack more of a punch,
but it adds cost to the device. When you go talk to someone who's about to buy 20,000 of them,
every dollar matters. We say, "Sure, it's only $10 more." They go, "Cool, you just broke my budget."

(47:02):
You can solve it with engineering cleverness. You'll see we actually do this where you have a
standard three-cell battery, but you can elect for the two-cell version of it where one-third of the
battery is actually just lightweight filler. You get two-thirds of the runtime, but also two-thirds
of the weight. It turns out that doesn't make anybody happy. It's not enough weight, and it just

(47:23):
screws the battery life. We see sub 4% attached on that option. Everybody just springs for the big
battery. A 4% attached essentially means people electing for that feature. Is that the term of
the art? Yeah, it's the two-cell option. It has a 4% attached rate and the three-cell has a 96%.

(47:43):
Basically, that's the market telling us, "Forget your two-cell little thing. We're going to accept
the higher weight for the larger battery," which would then tell us, "Should we build a four-cell
battery?" Maybe we have better attach rate for that. We get into complexities of supply chain
on this battery type that we then have to hold in reserve in case you need to replace them.

(48:06):
There's a whole slew of practical issues around making a new type of battery, a new size, but
that is one option we could do and just sell it to the runtime people. There are other options.
For example, we can invest in a lower power panel. The panel consumes four or five watts.

(48:26):
The device is at the screen? It's a display. Yeah. Just for context, if you have a 60-watt hour
battery and your device is pulling 10 watts total, you have six hours of runtime. Well, if you could
drop that to five watts total, then your device has 12 hours of runtime. A five-watt panel versus

(48:47):
a three-watt panel doesn't sound like much. It's two watts, but it makes all the difference when
that is a full workday versus a half a workday. That's one option. You could spring for more
energy efficient processes, but all those things have cost. Then when you pitch it to somebody,
they go, "I did want longer runtime, but I didn't want to pay $100 more for it."

(49:10):
Right. Not like that.
Yeah, exactly. You're basically taking the pulse of the market all the time with these different
tradeoffs and in nothing static. The technology on battery chemistry, battery density, display power,
all of these things are constantly evolving. As a team, we have to be aware of, "Hey,

(49:31):
this new thing came out," or the price dropped on this old thing. Does that make it palatable to
customers where it wasn't even last year? Now, let's go back to the drawing board. Let's figure
out whether we want to incorporate this new technology or not. Cool. The product manager's
dilemma is that we're trying to solve all these issues and that our levers, if we go one direction

(49:53):
or the other, somebody's going to be upset no matter what direction we go. It sounds like we
can use costs. It sounds like we can use brilliance in engineering. It sounds like we can have some
other clever ways around it, like being more efficient and what have you. When you're thinking
about the intuition or the art to that science and figuring out which of the levers you're going to

(50:16):
pull and who you're going to disappoint inevitably, how did you begin to develop the sense of,
"Okay, this is still going to upset 5,000 people, but it's better than the alternative." How did
you get to feel for that? No, upsetting 50,000 people.
[Laughter] Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Some of that just comes from, I go back again to knowing your customers, all the research

(50:38):
I was doing on my previous team, new technology, commercialization. You put these options in front
of somebody and you can have them take surveys and polls and you take statistical averages and
you do it region by region, certain regions of the world care more about certain things than others.
You build up this intuitive understanding at large. It just takes time. I don't know how I

(51:04):
would communicate this to somebody in any concise way of, "Here's all the thousands of data points
that I've been exposed to that let us know that investing in 10% denser battery chemistry this
year for the first time will pay off. We should do it."
So, I'm thinking perhaps a year or two's product line, so we're not divulging anything that's

(51:28):
confidential. How did you begin to think about the balance on the battery and which levers did you
pull maybe two or three years ago? So, this is not going to harm anybody.
The two biggest things that contribute to power consumption, now we're getting really into
deep product is the processor and the display. So, the processor is not in our control,

(51:49):
but Intel is like we're big on Intel integration. They're improving their power consumption
5% to 10% each year. So, that's inexorable. That's going to free up what I call headspace that you can
then rethink about how you want to spend that in the device. If it's more efficient, you could cut
the battery down or keep the battery the same and give you more runtime. It's like you get the

(52:14):
benefits of that in some way. The big push was in displays as well as the second piece of what
consumes a lot of power. We worked with our suppliers and said, "If we can start looking
at shaving watts or even half of watts out of the total power consumption display, that adds up."

(52:35):
So, you can do things like that. There's the backlight on the keyboard. We started looking at,
"Where are all these watts going?" That was hundreds of milliwatts. You save that by going
to a new kind of LED that was worth investing in. So, you start. It's a dozen different decisions,

(52:56):
none of which is the silver bullet, but you do look for 3% here, 5% there, and you add that up
10 times. It's 30% more efficient. The way that you describe it, I know it's
tremendously complicated actually working through that and figuring out what little things to change,
but the way you describe that, that makes a lot of sense. Look at all the little constituent pieces

(53:19):
and parts, add it up, and see what you can shave down a little bit every year.
We'll get back to the conversation shortly, but I wanted to tell you about how I can help you
find your fit. I offer one-on-one career coaching services for experienced professionals who are
preparing to find and land their next role. If you're a director, vice president, or a C-suite

(53:40):
executive and you're ready to explore new opportunities, please go to goodfitcareers.com
to apply for a free consultation. I also occasionally send a newsletter which includes
stories from professionals who have found their fit, strategies, and insights that might be helpful
in your job search and content that I found particularly useful or interesting. If you'd
like to learn more, check out goodfitcareers.com and follow me on LinkedIn. Now, back to the

(54:05):
conversation. To continue our deep dives here, let's maybe pick one of your favorite projects
you've worked on in the last few years. Is there something that you'd like to walk us all the way
through? I've said at the top, I did not like consulting, but the project I was working on,
I did find very meaningful. This was 15 years ago, Electric Utilities, talking about culture

(54:31):
already as well. They're very conservative culture. They have this, "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it." This is the way we've always done things. People expect that when you flip the switch
on the light, the light comes on. They don't want to disabuse anybody of that. Its reliability is
their top metric, 99.99%. People were talking at the time about adding renewable generation to

(54:59):
the grid, putting on intermittent sources like solar and wind. Wind, big utility scale wind,
but solar could be on people's roofs. People were installing these things. There was no
permitting process. They would connect it up to their electric hookup and in many cases,
be generating more power than they consumed, which basically meant that power was going upstream,

(55:24):
back up into the power plant because of the excess generation on the roof, as opposed to
downstream. These are 100-year-old systems. Electric Utilities has been in stasis for
100 years. Power is made at the power plant and flows out on these just one way feeders,
right? It's distributed out to the people. Now the people are making more power and they're

(55:46):
sending it back up. It was damaging equipment to the dude in millions. Interesting.
It was quite a nightmare. The utilities reaction, who knows who listening, goes
familiar with this in the early 2010s. They were just like, "Shut it all down.
Stop all PV deployments. Nobody can do this. They need the permit. We need a switch on your roof

(56:07):
that we can turn this on and off at will." It was very reactionary. They were doing estimates of how
much it would cost to upgrade all the equipment on their grids to handle increase in distributed PV.
It was to the tune of tens of billions. They have to present a rate case to their

(56:28):
governing bodies basically to say, "Hey, I want to raise electric rates by X amount next year to pay
for grid upgrades, like better equipment, two-way flow equipment for all these people,
putting all this solar on the roof." They called us in to validate the utilities estimates of how

(56:51):
much that was going to cost. The utilities, going back to early 2010, they just picked a bunch of
their distribution feeders at random. These utilities could have thousands of these things.
Some serve a city block or two. Some serves a factory. Some serves 10 customers 50 miles down.
You see those poles going out along the single-layered road. That's a distribution feeder.

(57:15):
They picked them at random and they estimated the cost to upgrade
that random set. It came out to $10-ish billion multiplied across their whole system.
My project was, "Is that right?" Or, "Can you take a more accurate sampling of the distribution

(57:35):
feeders in that system and say, "This is more representative. So if we estimate the cost on
this more representative sample and then multiply that out, it's actually going to be more accurate."
It came out to $8 billion. In doing that, it was actually $2 billion less expensive to go do it.
You undercut the utility saying, "This is going to be an unmitigated disaster."
They got the rate case approved and they went and deployed it over the ensuing decade or so.

(57:58):
They have been fine. The rate of PV generation has continued to go up and the system has been
able to handle it. The thing that I liked about that project was it was quantitative.
I got my hands on these distribution feeder data sets. I'm going through with a statistical mind of,

(58:18):
"How do you take a representative sample of this? How do you consider two feeders similar enough
that one could represent the other? The ones that all serve one factory, you can represent with one
feeder, but these different mixed use ones are the ones that are super long out into the rural areas.
How do you represent those?" That was cool. The other thing that was cool was to see the culture

(58:42):
change a little bit. Even while we were working on this project, they had come in with this idea of,
"Well, if we present this 11-digit number, $10 billion, everyone will balk." But in fact,
we got it down to $8 billion and everyone said, "Yeah, that's worth it." That was the company

(59:02):
getting a real kick or feedback from the community or the society that they serve that
this is a new priority. This isn't going away. In fact, $8 billion probably would have said,
"Okay to 10." They definitely said, "Okay to eight." They went and deployed it.
The utility like them, you see this machinery start to move, "Oh, this? We got to get up off

(59:27):
the chair and get back to work and re-engineer the system because this isn't going away. This isn't a
trend. This is real dollars that society wants to spend on this." That was cool to see. You can't
just have the technology ready, which is the PV on people's roots. You can't just have the engineering
assessment done. You need to have the culture shifts to go along with it. Over the ensuing

(59:52):
years, they've now been turned into total proponents of this and they've learned a lot from these
upgrades and now they're future-proofing their systems to handle even more. It was this mindset
shift that had to take place. Did you know before you started the project that there was room to
just make a more precise sampling and get a more precise number?

(01:00:13):
No. In fact, it could have gone the other way. It could have come out at 12 billion.
It was obvious, at least from the start, that they weren't taking the exercise seriously,
that they were being voluntold to come up with this estimate and they think this PV thing is

(01:00:36):
a trendy thing that'll go away and this is not the way things are done and this is
backwards. The power is supposed to go out, not in. Everything about it was upside down.
So they're like, "All right, here's a bunch of feeders we sample, 10 billion."
Being able to come in and say, "Hold on, let's do this rigorously and let's actually assess it instead

(01:00:57):
of trying to avoid the truth. Let's just get at the real answer and then figure out whether that
cost, whether it's 10, 8, 12, 15, who knows? Let's just get an actual answer in front of us that we
can trust and then I'll decide based on that information whether it's worth making the
investment." Which I guess goes back to what we talked about an hour ago. I just like actually

(01:01:19):
solving the problem and then figuring out how to take action on it.
I feel like that ties back not only to your current job, but all the way through your education,
those first few jobs, the precision and being able to have a really definitive, let's figure
out the actual answer and that's stayed with you through your entire career so far. How cool?

(01:01:42):
I mean, that's awesome, man. Thank you for sharing.
I try to be a little consistent.
Yeah. No, I mean, it makes a lot of sense and it also becomes more and more obvious that the work
you're doing now is a good fit. It's in that icky guy spot because it requires the rigor,
but it also requires the curiosity that you have, the understanding of how the hardware works,
the software works, the empathy for your constituents. I mean, that's awesome. I love that.

(01:02:04):
When we're thinking about perceptions and misconceptions here, how do you believe
the world sees Dell and your job as a product manager?
Good question. Unlike a lot of other tech companies are generally not in the news.
You never see Michael Dell testifying in front of Congress. Our tagline, our slogan is,

(01:02:29):
"Build technologies that drive human progress," which sounds super vague and generic, but in fact,
our products to some degree or another are just, I don't want to say vague or generic,
they're ubiquitous. It's the tool that other people use to do their job.
And so we want to be a bland provider of the tools that people need to do their job and build

(01:02:52):
the tools well and not get wrapped around the axle of a lot of the things that befall other
larger tech companies that stick their foot in it. And they get stuck with what their AI is outputting
and whether they're suppressing information and things like that. We're just like, "Look, man,

(01:03:13):
we're building a laptop. You go to work, you use the laptop, do your job." And I like that.
I hope that the world sees us that way. We're a nonpartisan just provider of tools, basically.
I like being the person who designs the tools.
Do you think there are any misconceptions out there about your work? And specifically,

(01:03:37):
I think product management is so popular. The concept seems to be so coveted to be in that
kind of product management role. What do you think people might not have totally right about
their thoughts about it? I get the sense that people look at our laptop, they see something
they don't like about it. It weighs too much, the battery life sucks, the display is not bright enough,

(01:03:57):
any of those things, even the ones that we hit on. And they go, "How hard could it be just add a
second USB-A port? Come on. I'm not ready to upgrade all my stuff to USB-C, so add another USB-A
port and don't get rid of the HDMI port and make this keyboard have more travel." And it's like,
the touchpad is too sensitive, make it less sensitive. And I know from talking to customers,

(01:04:20):
they think, and each one of those individually is, "Why can't you just go south of this for me?"
And I know now behind the scenes, there's so much complexity around everything I just said,
that even from an engineering point, and then even from a go-to-market point of
supply chain management, risk management, holding excess supply, making sure that we're meeting,

(01:04:40):
hitting the fat of the bat of what people really care about, ports are a big one. But
all of those things in isolation, I think people think, "Oh, how hard could it be just add the
port?" And it turns out it's very expensive, or it requires trading off something else.
And when we talk about going down and investigating it, we end up not doing it. It's not for a lack of

(01:05:05):
trying. I feel like it's so easy to take for granted. Just like, "Oh, why wouldn't they just
do this?" Or this one silly thing is so frustrating. But I imagine at this scale,
when we're talking about however many millions of devices per year and however many billions of
dollars in revenue that you guys have probably thought through as much as any layman out there

(01:05:26):
in their wildest imagination consider.
And there's always another layer of the onion to unwrap as I've learned or peel that.
Sure. Totally. So Nate, as we're finishing up our discussion here on perceptions and misconceptions
about your role, about product management, about this whole world that you have now really become

(01:05:47):
very proficient in, is there anything else you'd like to share, any other reflections on that career
path? Yeah. I would just want to touch on the one thing that I got an MBA. And I think that that
was actually a very useful degree to have in this role. Most of the people on my team have an MBA if
they haven't had a ton of experience in the company. That's really the best way to end up

(01:06:08):
in product management. A lot of my friends who were in my MBA class who went into tech,
they were ending up going into product management. I think the degree itself touches on a lot of the
different pieces that we've talked about already here today around understanding your customer,
understanding product market fit, understanding the quantitative analysis of what things a company

(01:06:32):
should go do, what things they should shy away from. It gives you exposure to all the different
ways to think about those things in addition to wrap a whole business around a product and actually
bring it to market. And so I want to just have that out there as something that somebody might
want to think about. They could go get an MBA as a part of their journey if they want to go

(01:06:56):
into product management or get closer to product management type roles.
That makes a lot of sense. And if I could just ask one little follow up here,
I feel as though MBAs and going back to get your MBA has less and less value in a lot of mainstream
positions these days. But it sounds like at least what I'm hearing from you is that within product

(01:07:17):
management specifically, that the MBA, especially ideally at a premier MBA program, can actually be
a useful and important component to getting into that field as opposed to in some other business
context where it won't necessarily get you a raise. It won't necessarily get you that next
advancement along the same career path, but for product management, it seems to matter.

(01:07:37):
Yeah, I would say that. I know MBAs get a good and bad rap. People sometimes hate on them for
overly businessifying things that they think should be a little bit more organic. I do think
that there's a lot of core skills that go along with getting an MBA that do apply to product

(01:07:57):
management specifically. Personally, I loved getting an MBA. I loved the courses. I loved
thinking about it in a more rigorous way than I was thinking about it before getting my degree.
I think it's just a very helpful, useful way to frame out the things that we talk about day to

(01:08:19):
day. It really did help me learn the language that ends up getting spoken in product management
discussions. Makes a lot of sense. I think while we're on the topic, I have one more question I'd
like to ask in terms of what the work-life balance and the lifestyle is in the product
management world. I know that you're an avid traveler. I know you've been almost everywhere
on earth. Did this path allow you to continue your global explorer lifestyle? How did you find

(01:08:46):
that balance between what you love to do and in your normal life and the work that you do day to
day? That's a really good question, especially in the context of perceptions and misconceptions
that people sometimes have, misconceptions. I think it depends on a couple different factors.
One is the product itself. Another is the company that is shipping that product. Then the person

(01:09:09):
themselves and your interpersonal relationships with the people on your team and your boss and
things like that. As far as the product, there's some products that just have higher intensity or
need for more hands-on management. I would say hardware as opposed to software, hardware ships
in waves, for example. We ship a product every year. There are three or four months a year that

(01:09:33):
I call the busy season that I'm in the office most days working with engineers and designers. We're
actually holding up models of the products that we're going to ship. I need to be there. I need
to hold the products. There's no good way around that. There are other parts of the year that's
quite a lull where we're doing early stage planning for the product that might be close to two years

(01:09:54):
out. If I'm doing that from somewhere else, that's totally fine. It ebbs and flows. Software,
things are a little different in that it's continuous. There aren't these annual shipping
cadences or even bi-annual or anything like that. It is features that go out over time and the
product improves. There, I think it's even more important what your relationship is with

(01:10:19):
your immediate team and your supervisors. If they're comfortable with you being more flexible
with your time or not or where you're calling in from or what time of the day you're calling in
or managing things, you obviously want to make sure that you're there at present to do the job.
But I think there you can more readily search for a good fit that will be more continuous over time

(01:10:47):
as opposed to hardware where you have this higher intensity and often you're shipping hardware,
you got to hold the product. Thank you for that, Nate. That makes a lot of sense. Let's briefly
talk a little bit about setting expectations for folks and then we'll move on to the advice you
might have for your younger self. When you're thinking about somebody who wants to be in product
management, whether it's hardware, software, or anything more broadly, let's try to be relatively

(01:11:09):
all encompassing in product management. What sort of expectations would you set for someone who's
decided that this is their desired path? I don't want to sound like a broken record, but as I said
before, the biggest thing is knowing your customer, is being able to put yourself in your customer's
shoes. It's very helpful if you use the product every day yourself. So one of the reasons I like

(01:11:29):
laptops is I use a laptop. I know what frustrates me about it and now I can sit there and try to
fix it. Having other things that you care about with enough passion that you go, "I want to fix
this and if I can't, I want to know why it can't be fixed," that is like a customer symbiosis,
either with other customers or yourself as part of the customer. That's the biggest expectation

(01:11:55):
that I think you have to have. I don't see how somebody could not care about the product they're
building and do a good job at it. When you're thinking about your younger self and perhaps
what advice you might give yourself, if you had that magic wand and could go back in time,
what would you tell yourself? That's a good question. It's hard to say because I really

(01:12:15):
love my current role and my advice would be to my current self to go try to find my way into
a current role, like a role like mine earlier, but then I wouldn't know that until I got into it.
If I could, I'd tell my younger self, "Listen, engineering plus customer empathy, go find your
way to product management earlier." I kind of meandered toward it, but I would have loved to

(01:12:41):
be more intentional about it, have found my way to this even faster. When you're thinking about
hiring and being hired, you may not have a bunch of hiring responsibility currently, but can you
think about how you've contributed or perhaps your philosophy to contributing to hiring within Dell?
I have had some exposure to hiring as we've pulled people from adjacent teams onto our team.

(01:13:05):
And the question that I asked them, everybody has their own flavor of hiring,
I asked people to sit back from their desk and describe their workspace to me
in as much detail as they can. And I was like, "Tell me how you've arranged all the stuff on

(01:13:25):
your desk. How do you use our products day to day?" And they go, "Oh, I have a laptop and a display
and a keyboard and mouse." I go, "Okay, already you're talking about using peripherals instead
of the keyboard that comes with the laptop. Why?" They go, "Oh, well, I have the laptop on a stand."
So the keyboard is a little high up. "Oh, interesting." So in the monitors next to it,

(01:13:46):
so you're okay with these two different size screens. Why wouldn't you have the laptop
close and two displays? They go, "Well, I actually have thought about doing that
and I never got around to it." That's the kind of thing that we encounter with customers. "Oh,
yeah, I know I should buy up to a better workspace and I don't." So you're already getting a sense of
how they're interacting with our own products. And I think it's essential because we did a research

(01:14:13):
project during COVID where we asked people around the world to sit back and take a picture of their
workspace and send it into us. And it was remarkable how different everybody's space was.
I mean, there's some general trends, but there are a lot. The craziest thing I saw, I'll share this,
is somebody who had set up their laptop on an ironing board and they worked from their couch

(01:14:36):
in the living room on this shaky ironing board that's like fabric. So it's overheating and
what are you doing? They go, "Well, I share my space and now I'm working from home and I don't
have a room for a dedicated desk or even an area. So this is my temporary desk every day and I put
the ironing board back over on the wall when I'm done for the day." And that was understanding

(01:15:00):
that's people's reality, especially in places where you have smaller personal spaces generally.
We saw a lot more of that kind of stuff, not that extreme, but having that kind of understanding of
how people are using the products we make is so important. And so when I have had the opportunity
to talk to people coming onto the team, I just asked them, "How do you use it? Do you think that's

(01:15:26):
the optimum way? Would you do anything differently?" It's very interesting because I think people expect
that everybody uses the device like they do. And in fact, it's a huge myriad of differences.
And what do you think it tells you? Where do you get the strongest signal on that sort of question?
Oh, the part two, which is what do you hate about our product right now?

(01:15:51):
I go, "What's frustrating you in that home workspace?" They go, "Oh, well, now that you
mentioned it, I wanted to have the HDMI port on the other side here so that I could reach the
external display more easily and it's not over here. So I have to wrap it all the way to the
other side of the device. And why do we put the HDMI port over there? Why can't we put it on the

(01:16:11):
back in the middle so that it's equal for whichever way you want to set it up?" That's a great question.
Turns out that's where the thermal exhaust is and the routing would be a nightmare to
get all of the cabling to that HDMI port. But ideally, you'd love to put the HDMI port on the
back in the center and make it almost ambiguous or ambidextrous to whoever is configuring their

(01:16:34):
workspace in whichever way. That's the trade-off we had to make. And so we started talking about
that and then they're like, "Well, how much could it really cost to move the HDMI port?" I go,
"Let's talk about it." We actually know that.
Yeah. And by the end, I get a really good sense of... First of all, do they have a list in the
back of their minds of things that they actually find kind of nudgy about the device that they

(01:16:57):
wish they could fix, that they hadn't thought articulated. But then we dive into these details
and they start articulating the trade-offs themselves. It's like, "Okay, you understand
our product. You understand the pain points. You'd be great."
Oh, cool. And I love how elegant and simple that question is to get to specific skills,

(01:17:18):
experiences, drivers, like what they're motivated by, what they're actually like to work with.
In just one question and letting that open-ended discussion run, you get a really good preview of
a whole bunch of different key elements in evaluating a candidate. That's really brilliant,
Nate. Good job, man.
Thanks.
When you're thinking about taking a chance on people and for any of your roles or any of your

(01:17:43):
projects, even if it's taking a chance on somebody on an internal project and you're not necessarily
full-time hiring them, is there anything that really might compel you to take a chance on a
candidate?
Yes. It should always be yes. You should always take a flyer because you might have biases in the
way that you're hiring. And so throwing some randomness into the mix, I think, is always

(01:18:04):
healthy. I would want to test, I think, at the most fundamental level, do they care about the
product. You could lack every other skill set. You could lack every other experience.
If somebody was fresh out of school and said, "All I care about is commercial notebooks. And
here's why I think the HDMI port should be in the back in the center. And what are you still doing

(01:18:26):
with this headphone jack and this display isn't bright enough. There's this...
Coming in hot.
Coming in hot. It's like you've never worked a day in our team, but you care so much. The first
thing I do is send you to customers to go see how much do they align with the things that you
care about. And you get a sense for what things they care about. But then you're well on your

(01:18:49):
way to being a useful contributor to our team. But it starts with, "I really care about this product."
And for whatever reason, whether it's commercial notebooks or something else,
you care so much that I know you're going to bring the level of diligence and rigor and running
things to ground that is required to kind of explore. We've talked about the little things

(01:19:10):
here and there throughout this conversation. All these little things require some degree
of investigation and being thoughtful about how you're assessing the trade-offs. You need to know
that somebody's going to bring that level of rigor to bear to make a good decision.
I'm going to ask you two questions about the future here. The first one is more broad. What

(01:19:31):
do you broadly... The world, the universe as we know it, what are you excited about for the future?
And then we're going to get to Dell and your product specifically.
What I think is actually a pretty straightforward answer. I'm very excited for face wearables.
Not in the condition that they're in today. I think they're too bulky. The battery life suffers.

(01:19:53):
There's a lot of problems, to put it in the lexicon that we've been using. There's a lot of
product trade-offs, very severe product trade-offs that I think these V1s that I call it,
that we're seeing, they're on the right track. But you can imagine the technology miniaturizing
and becoming more efficient over the next five to seven to 10 years. I think we will inevitably

(01:20:15):
get to a point where you could have... What we described today is a pair of chunky sunglasses,
thick rim sunglasses that you could put on. And you can have this heads up display overlaid on
the world. It's giving you directions, turn by turn directions without having to reach into
your pocket or sacrifice one of your hands to use. That can give you reminders, pop up reminders

(01:20:39):
in your periphery. I think what you're basically doing is taking a laptop and strapping it to your
face for your day-to-day life. And we already talk about how to improve the displays. Well,
what if the display is just overlaid on your face, you see through, and it's showing everything in a
way that isn't cumbersome. Yeah, I've been dancing around it, but it's augmented reality or spatial

(01:21:04):
computing as Apple calls it. I see that as the end state of all the technology that's been
progressing 3% here, 5% there. You get to a really efficient battery with a really efficient processor
with a really lightweight display that's not powered consuming. You put all of that together

(01:21:28):
in a package where the form factor meets some threshold where somebody says, "Oh,
my usual thing is I put these on and I walk around." We already do that with sunglasses today.
If you could get it down to roughly a pair of sunglasses like the Vision Pro, the rest of that
line will probably have a Vision and then maybe a Vision Air. The Vision Air, I feel like, is the end

(01:21:50):
state. Yeah, that makes sense. And for Dell or for whatever you're working on today and whatever you
feel comfortable sharing, what are you excited about for that future? I'm going to watch out that
I'm not being too specific here, but I think it's this Gen Over Gen evolution, all of those things
trending in the directions that they've been trending. At some point, you can envision,

(01:22:15):
for example, people are using the Vision Pro on an airplane and they're bringing a huge workspace
with them into a very physically spaced constrained space. It's spaced quite a bit, but the idea is
that you can decouple from the physical hardware to some degree. We're limited to the display size
that we can ship today. You can obviate the need for a physical display and it's like the world is

(01:22:41):
your canvas. And so I would think that that just naturally progresses. Today, you could take the
laptop lid off of a Dell commercial notebook and instead substitute a Vision Pro kind of thing like
an AR face wearable. As that improves, the base of the laptop also joins the face wearable and

(01:23:07):
you're walking around with all that capability with your hands free and you're not tethered to
the physical workspace that you're in. All of that, I would think is 10, 15 years, the logical
conclusion of all of that. I think if I'm going on a walk or a hike today, I've got a phone in
one pocket. I'm often wearing some sort of earphone. I'm normally wearing sunglasses because it's very

(01:23:30):
bright here in Colorado. And so I feel like I've got a huge set of gear already on. It doesn't
feel all that far away to have a slightly heavier, slightly more cumbersome set of glasses, maybe a
slightly bigger and heavier phone or device to make that possible and then have this immersive
world, not just listening to a podcast, but this whole world where I can be both productive and

(01:23:51):
engaged. I mean, that just sounds incredible. I feel like I'm going to walk into a bunch of stuff.
But see, you already said I'd be willing to make trade-offs that the thing that I'm carrying today,
if it was a little bulkier, heavier, whatever, I'd still wear it if it could do all of that.
Thank you.
Now, what if you didn't have to make that trade-off and in 10 years, the capability

(01:24:14):
that we just described could be available in a package that's even lighter than what you're
currently wearing? Of course you switched to that. So I think that's just every component of the
technology is trending toward you get to a point where it is as lightweight as putting on a pair
of chunky sunglasses without compromise with an all-day battery life.

(01:24:36):
Sure. And your vision for that is 15 years out or so?
2035, something like that.
2035. Okay, wow. So really relatively close.
Yeah, I think it's every year or two, you'll see meaningful step functions in improvement
in one dimension or another. And it converges to great, it's down to it, much like laptops

(01:24:57):
20 years ago, there's these thick bricks the size of a textbook. Now we've got them down to
two centimeters and even thinner in some cases, and three pounds. They used to be six or seven
pounds. It's down to you've wrung everything out of it. You give AR glasses another 15 years of run,
you get them down to, right? Take out your big pair of chunky sunglasses, you got your life

(01:25:23):
overlay and go about your day and your hands are free and it listens to you and talks back.
Wild. That sounds amazing. To pull that thread a little further and thinking about product
management specifically in that era, do you think your job, let's just say that you end up
being the product management lead for this life overlay wearable, do you think your job is going

(01:25:44):
to be all that fundamentally different from what it is now? The nuts and bolts of it? No. I mean,
if you think about it, Apple Vision Pro, it's a laptop strapped to your face. They had to make
trade offs around weight, materials, thermals, acoustics, display size, display resolution.
Those are all things that we worry about. I mean, they made the device heavier because they insisted

(01:26:07):
on making it with metal instead of plastic. That's a design choice. Some people say it feels a little
heavy. They could choose a lower resolution display and have had a wider field of view.
They said, "No, we want to have best front of screen even if it's a limited,
I think it's 110 degrees instead of what could have been 150." Again, trade offs, right? They

(01:26:30):
have this battery pack that you have to plug in, a separate battery pack. They could make it
underpowered and last longer. Again, a design decision. That's all the kinds of things that
we debate day in and day out as part of my role at Dell. How cool. I'm ready for that future,
Nate. Would you please build that for us and make it happen as quickly as possible?

(01:26:51):
It's happening. It's coming. To bring this to a close, do you have any words of advice
or inspiration for our broader audience out there? Broadience is a good term.
I would say, I think in most of the things we use, we take the thing for granted. It is what it is.

(01:27:18):
We don't think too hard about it. Maybe this was dimension or two that we decide on.
Price usually dictates a lot of it. I think to the extent that people think about product management
at all, day to day, or whether they're interested in becoming it, it's thinking with an even more
critical eye about the products that we use, the trade offs that we make, no matter what product

(01:27:41):
it is, somebody's behind the scenes thinking about those trade offs and why did they do this and that
and what were the compromises they had to consider. I end up thinking about it in other
products outside of laptops. I gain a deeper appreciation for the product as it's manifested,
as it made it to us and all the little things that happened along the way, the trade offs,

(01:28:07):
the decisions, the price point considerations, all of it that got it to its end state in my hand,
using it for whatever it is. That makes a lot of sense. Don't take it for granted. There's
a lot of smart people trying very hard to make these product decisions and these trade offs.
It makes a lot of sense. Are there any books, podcasts, or other content that you would like

(01:28:28):
to share or recommend that we might not know about that we might love?
I'll share a podcast and two books. One is podcast Stratecory. I know I've talked about it before.
He's a Kellogg grad and he previously worked at Microsoft and now he runs his own podcast and

(01:28:51):
email newsletter. I find him to be an extremely thorough critical thinker when it comes to
product management, especially tech product management. I kind of corollary to that Neil
Seibart, he is an analyst. He concentrates on Apple. Everything that he writes on his blog above

(01:29:17):
Avalon is couched around what does this mean for Apple or what Apple is doing, but that necessarily
encompasses quite a bit because Apple covers so much. I think both of them are really sharp,
pragmatic thinkers. Think about the customer, think about their use cases, think about the
technology and who's actually going to use it. For what? They're asking all the right questions

(01:29:39):
every day. I love reading both of them. That's Stratecory and above Avalon?
Yeah.
Right on. You had some books?
One book is The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. He's a former professor at HBS.
He came up through a lot of his research over decades on this thesis basically that new

(01:30:01):
innovation is basically brought in by new entrants to the market because incumbents often,
for whatever reason, can't pivot. It's not just unwillingness to. Sometimes they know we need to
pivot and the business sense just can't justify it because every dollar that they go invest in,
the new thing is a dollar they take away from monetizing what they already have.

(01:30:24):
Bringing new innovation to market is often this race between a startup entrant with no resources
and a tenuous hold on the bottom of the market and an incumbent with all the
advantages on the surface, but in fact, is hamstrung by their own success.
The book goes through scenario after scenario of that, which I found to be very enlightening.

(01:30:49):
You see it play out over and over. You'd see these big headline announcements from a big
incumbent company and you think, "Oh, well, okay, they're going to crush the thing."
And then they shut it down six months later because they're not invested in it.
They don't want to spend the resources. I thought that was very enlightening.
One other book, if you're interested, is Zero to One by Peter Thiel. This is the part of innovation

(01:31:13):
that I'm most interested in, I think, is taking new things from it has not shipped to it has shipped,
the V1 of something. It's very hard to get out the door because a lot of people tend to let the
perfect be the enemy of the good. I just kind of ragged on the Apple Vision Pro for all of its
hindrances and shortcomings. It is a bold thing to do to put out something that might appeal to some

(01:31:39):
people. It gets the ball rolling with developers, gets the ecosystem growing, their V2 is going to
look demonstrably better than V1. And by 2035, you get the chunky sunglasses that you just put on and
go about your day. And so it's such an important step. It's so much harder to go from zero to one
than one to 100. And so the book kind of details the challenges in doing that and how people have

(01:32:03):
done it. So I've always found it to be a very useful kind of frame of reference to think about.
That makes a lot of sense. And we'll have all the links to the shows and both books in the
show notes here. Nate, are there any closing thoughts, any reflections? We've gone in such
great detail on a lot of topics here, but is there anything that we skimmed over that you want to

(01:32:24):
make sure we touch on? Well, I thought we did a pretty comprehensive job here. I would say for
anybody who is thinking about getting into product management hardware, I love it. Software,
the sexier side of things in many cases. In any case, knowing the product and then understanding
the customers, just to reiterate that, that is the heart of it. You can't excel at the role without

(01:32:50):
really being passionate about what you're building and who you're building it for.
That makes a ton of sense. Nate, thank you so very much for joining me, sharing your perspective.
You've been so very generous with your time and your insights. Thank you for being here.
Hey, thanks for having me. It's great speaking to you.
Our next episode is with Dan Croft, former director of engineering productivity with GitLab.

(01:33:12):
In instances where there isn't a capability in the product, we'll go build tools. So it's not just
implementation and support. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe for new episodes,
leave a review and tell a friend. Good Fit Careers is hosted by me, Ryan Dickerson, and is produced
and edited by Mellow Vox Productions. Marketing is by Story Angled and our theme music is by Surf

(01:33:36):
Tronica with additional music from Andrew Espronceda. I'd like to express my gratitude to all of our
guests for sharing their time, stories and perspectives with us. And finally, thank you
to all of our listeners. If you have any recommendations on future guests,
questions or comments, please send us an email at hello@goodfitcareers.com.

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Nate Buch - Product Manager at Dell

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Nate Buch - Product Manager at Dell