Billy Kovalsky | Sisense | How Do You Build Products for Developers?
Host: Eyal David · Guest: Billy Kovalsky · About the host
Billy Kovalsky, VP Product at Sisense leading Embedded Analytics, moved from front-end development at Yotpo into product management, and from there to Wix's App Market. His view: if you build products for developers, you have to meet them in their own environment (IDE, Git, Slack), give them quality of life rather than just dev velocity, and check what they need instead of assuming you already know. He also believes every product manager needs to be technical to a degree, and that within a year or two every PM will also need to be a bit of an AI PM.
In this episode
- Developers are a neglected persona: they want quality of life, not just speed. A developer product has to meet them in the IDE, Git and Slack, with good documentation and error messages we would never dare show in a UI.
- "I'm a developer, so I know what developers need" is a dangerous assumption. Under the word developer there are many types and levels, and you need to validate with them exactly as you would with any other user.
- Billy believes only in outbound product managers: a PM needs to know the market and bring the pain or opportunity to the table, and the reasons to build something should come from customer pains and be weighed against impact.
- Three things he looks for in a product manager: the ability to tell the essential from the trivial, real empathy for users, and the soft skills to persuade and lead without authority.
- Every non-junior product manager needs to be technical to a degree: to understand what an API, a webhook and an asynchronous process are. It's learnable, for example by sitting with developers at a whiteboard or using ChatGPT to understand code.
- The AI PM is a transitional stage: just as the technical PM was absorbed into every product team, AI will become a basic skill of every product manager, only it will take about two years instead of ten.
Listen to this episode
Episode Description
Billy Kovalsky, VP Product at Sisense, describes running a distributed product organization of seven product managers across four countries, and why he believes only in "outbound" product managers who stay close to customers and are driven by impact. He shares the three things he looks for in product managers (telling the essential from the trivial, empathy, and soft skills), how he works with sales and customer-facing teams on prioritization, and his path from front-end developer at Yotpo, through a guerrilla team that gave birth to Yotpo Ads, to reviving Wix's App Market. The core of the episode is about building products for developers: error messages, documentation, time to wow, and AI tools that generate customized code without taking control away from the developer. Finally, Billy explains why every product manager needs to understand APIs and webhooks, and how the AI PM role is likely to spread to every product team much faster than the technical PM role did.
Chapters
- 00:47 · What Sisense does and what Embedded Analytics is
- 04:12 · The first wow moment and the product team structure
- 09:29 · Outbound product managers and impact-driven work
- 12:00 · What Billy looks for in PMs: essentials vs. trivia, empathy and soft skills
- 17:31 · From development to product at Yotpo: the guerrilla team and Yotpo Ads
- 22:11 · Wix App Market and reviving the developer ecosystem
- 25:37 · Building products for developers: error messages and documentation
- 29:43 · Why every PM needs to be technical, and how to learn
- 35:03 · The future of developer products and AI
- 39:52 · The rise of the AI PM
Full transcript with speakers and timestamps
Selected quotes
“I believe only in outbound product managers.”
“In a UI we'd never show "internal server error", while in an API it's totally fine to send that to someone.”
“The mindset isn't "cut my dev velocity", it's "make it more pleasant for me".”
Questions & answers
What is Embedded Analytics and what does Sisense do?
Sisense gives companies tools to embed analytics and data-based products into their own product without building it all themselves: connecting data sources, handling performance, and embedding it so it looks like part of the product. It can be a dashboard, a chart inside a flow, a data-driven notification, and in the AI world also a conversation about the data.
How do you build good products for developers, according to Billy Kovalsky?
Shorten the time to wow, meet developers in their environment (IDE, Git, Slack or Discord), provide tight documentation and informative error messages, and validate what developers actually need instead of assuming. Billy also likes having a developer advisory board, since developers are willing to give feedback quickly.
Does a product manager have to be technical?
In Billy's view, yes, to a degree: a non-junior product manager needs to understand UX, data and basic technical infrastructure such as APIs and webhooks. It doesn't require a development background, and it can be learned within a few months of working with developers.
How did Billy move from development to product management?
At Yotpo he joined as a front-end developer, roughly the tenth employee, built the front-end team, and then led a guerrilla team that tested ideas for a new product line. One of the experiments became Yotpo Ads, and along the way he realized that code was a means to an end for him and that what he really loved was product management.
What is the future of the AI PM role?
Billy expects it to follow the same path as the technical PM: today there is one product manager who specializes in AI and advises the others, and within a year or two most product managers will be able to integrate AI themselves, with the specialist needed only for infrastructural topics or products where AI is the core.
People & resources mentioned
People
Tools
- SendGrid
- Tableau
- Snowflake
- Salesforce
- Confluence
- Slack
- ChatGPT
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