Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you tell yourself you just need to crank out a bad version, your job isn't to have all the answers, it's to ask questions and a researcher oriented mindset. Set a timer for an hour or 20 minutes, whatever it needs to be, crank out a bad version and then start socializing it with folks. You might have 20 years of experience in a given field, but it absolutely does not mean you have all the answers. It is like total liberation for the perfectionist person.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire. Not in money, but in the real
[00:00:37] Speaker C: measure of wealth, time.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments. The 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
[00:01:14] Speaker C: Hi and welcome. Thanks for joining today's episode of the Time Billionaires podcast.
Our guest today is Julia Farina, Director of Product Marketing at Calendly, where helping millions of people save time, isn't it nice to have. It's the product.
Julia leads the work of bringing new Calendly features to market, partnering across research, sales, product and leadership to launch tools that help people reduce busywork and find space for what matters. With over a decade of experience spanning scrappy tech startups and global organizations, she's helped teams stay focused through rapid change, acquisitions and shifting priorities, all while staying intentional about time and energy.
Thanks for being here, Julia.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: I'm really glad we're having this conversation. We were introduced by a friend of mine who works at Calendly and said so rightly that you would have just a wealth of knowledge to share, which you have so far in all the conversations we've had. And one of the things that I really like that you talk about is how you manage what you call nebulous projects, these big unclear problems that you have to solve with a lot of people's opinions and maybe some pressure attached. And so when you're getting started on these, how do you decide what actually deserves your attention and then when to give it that attention?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So for, for those of your people in your audience that don't aren't familiar with product marketing, it's, it's a very middle child role where you know you're here, you're working across a lot of teams, sort of like you mentioned, to bring products into the market.
And a lot of times the work is very execution oriented, where it's very straight, the plan is very straightforward. It's just about, you know, execution and coordination across a couple of teams and, you know, shipping, shipping a feature via an email or some sort of social campaign. But other aspects of product marketing are a little bit more, I mean, you said nebulous, but I would say just sort of bigger in scope. So you might be asked to figure out a problem like, hey, we're releasing these new products next year. Can you figure out what our pricing and packaging should be? You know, that's a big ask, which involves a lot of different stakeholders and, you know, research, customer research.
You might be asked, hey, you know, we're building these AI products. We need to figure out how do we talk about our AI products to our customers in a way that makes them feel like they can trust us.
So these are kind of like bigger projects where the answer is not like right in front of you and it's not just about doing something right away. And this is where I think a lot of product marketers as sort of like middle child personalities who want to do a great job and you know, high achiever types can get a little bit stuck because there isn't sort of a clear path to the outcome from the get go. And so I would say the first, the first thing that needs to be done is like a mindset check. Like, okay, I've been asked to handle this problem.
Whoever has asked me believes in me. So I need to believe in me even if I don't know how I'm gonna get to the solution.
And it reminds me, I'm gonna age myself by saying this, but it reminds me of like Legends of playing Legends of Zelda as a kid, where it's like you're dropped into this world and you're not exactly sure how to win the game or what you're supposed to be doing, but you just start sort of like wandering around and having conversations and you meet like a troll, like figure on the side of the river and he gives you some magic beans and you're like, sure, I'll take these magic beans. And then later, those beans are essential for getting to the next level or some unexplored part of the game. And so if you think about it that way, when you have these big projects, your job is to ask questions and not have the answers right away. So first I would Say mindset is so important. And then go on a listening tour to kind of build some confidence and momentum and ask others their point of view. Say, hey, I've been asked to figure out whatever it might be, planning a garden for the first time, pricing and packaging whatever the big overwhelming project is.
And I wanted to get your take on your perspective, whether, whether it's like they're an expert or they're not, you just start having these conversations and taking notes. And after a certain amount of conversations, ideally with customers too, you start to form nuggets of a point of view.
And then from there it's all about creating like some sort of bad version draft of a plan.
Like I said, the point of view, like if it's, you know, how to position something in the market, if it's how to start a garden, put your plan together. And I always tell people on my team that when you put pen to paper, it's often the time when people get really, really stuck and scared and that perfectionist mindset comes in and you're judging yourself as you're typing on the page. But if you tell yourself you just need to crank out a bad version, just crank out a bad version, give yourself, set a timer for an hour or 20 minutes, whatever it is needs to be, crank out a bad version, and then start socializing it with folks and tell them, hey, here's a bad version draft of how I think we could solve this based on some conversations I've been having. Let me know what you think.
And so it just sort of frees your mind to be creative and not get in your own way and gets you to a draft that you can share with others really, really quickly and then sort of refine, refine from there.
[00:07:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that example. Yeah, it in the bad version draft as the goal was such an unlock for me when you shared it. And I realized that earlier in my also product marketing career, I thought my job before I put something in front of people was to have it be so good they would agree with it. But I actually found people are more likely to be bought in because we'll never be the experts in demand gen. I really thought as a product marketer, here is my perfect plan. You're welcome, demand gen team. All you have to do is this, this and this. Aren't you so thrilled with me? Right? Newsflash, that's not what happened. And I think it's so helpful to make that part of the goal, this bad version as actually something that you're striving toward. Because then it lets us also have what I like to call an acceptable miss as part of this plan. All of these plans have goals and KPIs and things that risks or things to mitigate. But, but one of the things I noticed getting stuck in these big cross functional projects was, and even in personal life with my husband, different definitions of done. And so if we started getting pushback from the sales team, for example, it could be because they think they're expected to be technical experts in a product when all we want them to do is add this slide to their deck and let people know it's coming. And so if the acceptable miss for a product that we just really want to start teeing up in the market is it doesn't have to be perfect, we just have to start more quickly sharing that it's coming, then everyone realizes, okay, we don't have to have Tier 1 launch ready resources behind what we internally would think of as a smaller tier release. And I think this is so important in personal and in work because we'll never have a clear counterfactual to some direction we ultimately have to pick.
So we'll never know. Could it have been slightly better if we did X, Y or Z? But when we have this first step of like aligning around what's actually important to optimize for what isn't an acceptable miss is something we can just kind of ignore because it isn't a risk to our goals, then we can be more confident in the direction that we're going and can bring more people with us. With your bad first draft example, yeah.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: I mean, you might have 20 years of experience in a given field, but it absolutely does not mean you have all the answers. And you should never, as a marketer or even just a human assume that you should have the answers and you should be able to create that perfect draft. Because the moment you think that you're set up for failure because the world is always changing, the landscape is always changing for marketers.
It's like, what's happening in the market? What are your competitors doing?
How is the company strategy changing from last year to this year? And so to think that you as one person could put together the perfect thing is really setting yourself up for just a really hard emotional comedown when you do share that perfect draft. And so I've learned this like most the hard way in my career. But now I tell any product marketer on my team, it's like, hey, your job isn't to have all the answers, it's to ask Questions and have a researcher oriented mindset and start talking to people, start exploring the magic world and finding the magic beans and you'll figure out where to place those beans later. Like trust that it's sort of like you have to trust in the process versus letting the sort of magnitude of the problem paralyze you from taking an action. So by taking these human actions of just having a conversation with someone that you respect, they might not even know anything about pricing and packaging or marketing, but they might know a thing or two about the, the landscape that you know you need to work in or certain stakeholders learning styles or, you know, you just don't know what you don't know. And so I think embracing the process makes it less scary and it also, it can actually make it fun, which ultimately it's like, work's gotta be fun. You're gonna spend eight hours a day. This is the work. But how can you make it make it fun?
And it's not fun when you go alone and you sit in like a, a cave and try to come up with your perfect draft. Like that's a great way to, to burn yourself out over time with that kind of pressure, you know?
[00:11:49] Speaker C: Yeah. Or then really double down on a mediocre option because if you think that's your job, there's always a third, fourth, fifth version of whatever you focused on. And so sometimes.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's never done.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: You can ideate forever.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. I'm doing a pricing and packaging project right now actually. And it's funny that you say that because it's true. There were really, we thought two levers to pull something about the product, new feature, something about how we'd price either the core product and, or this new functionality that's being released. But there's lots of different levers, we realized. And it didn't take very long of having a few more conversations to realize there were actually better solution that came out of a mediocre first option that we never would have gotten to if we had started doubling down and saying we just have to commit to this. And so really understanding when it's time to ideate and when it's time to then commit and pick a direction and then how you'll measure progress.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And test, you have to test it with, with your users. I mean, they will, you might have a fully aligned point of view on packaging and pricing or whatever the project may be and, or the messaging for your homepage or, you know, whatever it is and you show it in front of your target audience and they, they might, you know, have a different point of view. And so that. That's another sort of like input to a project like that or to any project marketing related that that's so, so important.
[00:13:14] Speaker C: Yeah. I think even life related too. There's always another option. We may think we have a perfect solution and then we put it in front of our partners, our friends, the world. Something happens that we couldn't have expected. And more ideating in your silo wasn't going to make it better. Getting out into the world and seeing what the options were is what makes it better. Yeah.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: And it's hard sometimes to let go of our ideas though, isn't it? Yeah, I know. Especially with our partners.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: It is.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: I think it should be done this way, but okay. You know, sometimes it's easier in a work environment than at home.
[00:13:46] Speaker C: But yeah, it's true, it's true. I like that saying. In either environment though, the person you're talking to isn't the one you're looking at. So like whatever you think you're having, there's a reaction that comes from all of their historic life, whatever's happening in their day that's influencing what you're hearing. And so whatever you're seeing is just the surface level of what's actually happening. And that's true of our partners, our yoga teacher, whomever. Whatever the reaction is isn't coming from that or. Right. What's that? That's saying if the reaction's over a 5 out of 10, it's about something else. If it's a 9 or a 10, the trigger super old of. So like whatever's influencing this strong reaction is probably a signal to pay attention to and then can double down on our goals.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely.
[00:14:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Is there more? So go ahead.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: No, no, please.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: The bad first draft.
Writing a book. This is something that really helped me when you shared it a couple weeks ago.
The timed bad first draft, being an actual deliverable goal is helpful for my brain. That sort of thought. As much as everyone would say you don't write and edit at the same time. You just get it out for whatever reason.
Making the goal bad really helped me just say, okay, I am just going to now write for 45 minutes and it's bad. The goal is to make it bad. That really unlocked a lot of the filtering that I've heard improvisers talk about too that when actually improvising in scenes, the shame circuit their brain. And I think there is this shame circuit I really actually would say of I was Ashamed to be putting down things that I knew were bad.
You actually unlock that by saying, oh, that's the goal. Great, make it bad. And then the next stage is where we refine it.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Yes. So I call this. Actually, this is something that it's hashtag Bad version is the official word. Hashtag bad version. Make a hashtag bad version of your draft or whatever it is.
And this is actually something that I learned from working at a company called Envision. It was a design collaboration software for designers, and it was part of the culture, this concept of bad version. And it was so liberating, it is like total liberation for the perfectionist person.
And so I have to give that company and that culture credit for this word that I have carried with me and brought to every team that I've worked with and product marketing at least.
And what's so beautiful about it is, you know, in a digital working environment, you're often sharing things on Slack. You're not in an office where you can interact with, you can hand someone something and see their reaction and like, know that it's okay. You're posting things in this digital channel and you see people's little screenshots, but you, it's like you're chucking it out into the ether and you have no idea what anyone's going to think about it. Hey, here's my, my point of view on packaging and pricing. Let me know what you think. Like, that's really scary for a lot of people.
Hence the trying to make a perfect thing and then taking too long on it and then spending too long on something when you could have got feedback that course corrected you. And so the, the hashtag bad version, it's like you just sort of weave it into how you share to, hey, here's a hashtag bad. That version of my point of view on this. Like, I tried to factor in xyz.
I love your feedback. I'm like looking to iterate, you know, but, but by saying that it's, it's your, you're relieving yourself of your own judgment and setting the expectations with your audience that this is, this is a work in progress. And I just want your input, help me help, like, guide and shape this. This isn't like set in stone. So it's, it's, it's truly liberated a lot of people. And I, like I said, I'm grateful for that part of the culture at that company that I worked for way back when.
[00:17:52] Speaker C: It's so empowering and even just adopting part of that into my brain has been really helpful.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Part two of this two part episode is coming to you next week.
Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me. Rebecca Shattucks on LinkedIn. See you next time.
