This article was written to give more information for anyone looking to better understand what working on the Product Team at Solstice is like.

Every software and technology company does Product differently. Some well, most poorly. At Solstice, we try to focus on how our team can be self healing and self correcting in an effort to grow and improve.

Every unhappy product team is unhappy in their own way.
-Tolstoy (If he were born in Silicon Valley.)

From the way the role is managed, organized, and resourced to the very way that the function of product is viewed, there are few things in tech as inconsistently implemented as the role of Product Manager and, by extension, a “Product Team.” (By Product Team, I mean a team comprised of design, product, and engineering.)

To make matters worse, team culture is a very hard thing to glean when interviewing. Usually, one tries to assess and hopes for the best.

Unfortunately, I have found that this is one of the most important variables that influences whether someone finds their job fulfilling or not and is highly correlated with teammate retention.

Sadly, there is a major problem for folks looking to start a job: It is extremely hard to gauge Product Culture when you aren’t working full time at the company.

That’s why I feel it is important to explain here how we do Product at Solstice.

I want to explain this for two reasons.

First, Solstice is a start up, so there are not a lot of alumni of the company that can give you an honest assessment of what it is like to work here

Second, we try to be extremely intentional in how we empower the members of the product team. Our product culture is always in development. I want people to know they are joining a team that will devote time and resources to coaching their development, a work environment that is very collaborative, and a team process where we are trying to be self learning and self correcting. That’s not always what someone is looking for.

Here’s how Product at Solstice differs from other companies

Your success is our success: We are committed to your professional growth and satisfaction. We do not expect 80 hour weeks. We respect your life is more than this job and are flexible to support you when life doesn’t neatly fit into a 9–5 work day. We want you to grow.

A north star beyond profit: We have all the same goals and desires for growth and scale as other companies. But we also have our eye on a greater purpose: combating climate change, empowering low income and marginalized communities with clean energy solutions, and showing integrity and purpose in our work.

We are a startup: New teammates will join the nascent Product Team, operating in a startup environment, which means the resources you need may not be easily accessible or may not even exist yet. We are looking for people who are versatile and comfortable with expressing doubt and uncertainty. People will have considerable flexibility and responsibility to navigate this, while still rapidly iterating and generating valuable insights to use in the pursuit of our product goals. You do not need to be an expert at everything, but you need to approach the unknown with a growth mindset.

Collaboration and urgency: We have the privilege and incredible responsibility of spending each day working on issues that have tremendous significance to our world. We have a sense of urgency in this work, while maintaining thoughtfulness and quality of life. To this end, product development at Solstice is a deeply collaborative process and you will work in concert with your product, design, and engineering team leads to have the autonomy for rapid learning and discovery.

Diverse perspectives: We know that innovation thrives on teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems in ways that are just now possible. As such, we explicitly seek people to join the Product Team that bring diverse life experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, skills, cultural perspective, and work experiences. We ask candidates to be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our team.

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For folks considering a role on the Solstice Product Team, I hope this helps convey what the experience may be like. We are eager and hungry to learn. Please give feedback on this post if you have a comment or question.

Finally, we believe character and competency outweigh experience. If you don’t have the level of experience described in the role you are considering, but you still think you would be great for it, we encourage you to apply. See open roles here.

After reviewing a bunch of traditional MBA programs, reading online recommendations for business subjects, and studying the No-Pay MBA guide, I triaged the MBA subjects into three levels of priority.

MBA subjects that I think are high priority:

• Data analysis
• Growth and marketing
• Product design and testing
• Entrepreneurship

MBA subjects that I think are low priority:

• Family Business
• Project Management (not that I don’t want to learn this, but because I think I have enough experience in this already)
• CSR/ESG
• HR / people development / hiring
• Supply Chains
• Economics (my college major)

MBA subjects that sound interesting but I am not sure their priority yet:

• Finance, operations, and accounting
• Venture Capital
• Negotiation
• Social Psychology
• Law and policy
• Management and Leadership

My first step was to prioritize the high priority subjects into a plan for the coming months. Keeping track of all the classes and subjects started to get messy, so I mapped it with Post-its.

The diamond Post-its are certification programs. The square Post-its are individual classes. The Post-its that are torn in half are very short classes (ones I can complete in under a week). This let me see learning clusters by topic to get a sense for how much I wanted to dive into each one.

I first needed to answer: What is the most important thing to learn right now?

My hypothesis is to start with Steve Blank’s How to Build a Startup. Steve Blank literally wrote the book on start ups and I think I would love this class. It would also be very applicable to the work I am doing now with a start up. However, it estimates about 40 hours of work. I want to test whether entrepreneurship was where I should start before I dive in.

To test my hypothesis: Take the introductory class “An Entire MBA in One Course” (Udemy’s most popular MOOC of all time). This is a survey course and will show me subjects I may want to dig deeper into. This is a very short class; one that I could finish within a week.

~~Cue montage of me completing this class in about a week.~~

The class was extremely helpful for testing my hypothesis (less so in teaching “an entire MBA” though…). I validated I should start with entrepreneurship. But I asked myself: what is my assumption that says Steve Blank’s 40+ hour class is the best way to learn that? I believe it is because he is a master of customer discovery and validating business plans. That’s where I am spending 75% of my time right now.

So I realized what I actually want to learn right now is about user discovery. Returning to my Post-it note wall, I grabbed the four hour mini-class Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers. My board also has another short class focused on a related topic: Marketing Innovative Products (about 10 hours). I made a note of that as a possible follow-up.

But wait: electives!

I want to round out my alternative MBA with some electives, which the Princeton Review describes should “provide a narrow focus” in a degree subject. These are classes that will give more advanced instruction into the topics I think will be most important to me. At the outset, these are things like product design and development, data analysis, energy, and entrepreneurship.

However, electives can also be classes that are not strictly “business” related, but that are simply great. I hyperbolically dub these the “life changing classes.” Of the tens of thousands of MOOCs available, which are the top 0.01%? The ones that are truly one in a thousand.

I culled such classes from Pickard’s book, from internet rankings, and from the highest rated ones on different MOOC platforms. Class Central has such a list here. I found some that look truly great, like this one, this one, and this one.

My Just-In-Time approach means I don’t need to plan it all out. Instead, I focused on ROI for time to complete vs. improving my future course of studies.

I decided on “Learning How to Learn” (another one of the most popular MOOCs of all time). At an estimated 15 hours, I thought this would have a very high potential ROI as it would improve the rest of my learning experience. (Note after completing it: It was an excellent class that I recommend to anyone who hasn’t already learned about the neuroscience of how we learn. It’s been extremely beneficial in the weeks since I took it.)

My plan for my first month became:

• Take An Entire MBA in One Course.
• Start (and quickly finish): Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers and begin Learning How to Learn.
• Based on what I learn from “Insightful Customer Interviews,” I’ll either take another short course on the topic, move onto Steve Blank’s class, or reassess a new plan of action.

(Note after finishing week two: I pivoted to entrepreneurial strategy and took Harvard’s Disruptive Strategy course by the late but legendary professor Clayton Christensen. I am following this with Steve Blank’s more tactical How to Build a Startup.)

Having experienced both a traditional MBA and now a couple months of an alternative MBA, I feel I have a somewhat unique perspective to judge the tradeoffs between them.

Benefits of traditional MBAs :

• Educational — Learn modern business practices with the unique pedagogy of in-class, real time learning with peers (socratic learning, group projects, presentations, etc.). This has not yet been replicated online successfully (in my opinion).
• Social — Gain a professional network from the alumni and university community.
• Professional — Improve qualifications with an advanced degree.

Costs of a traditional MBA:

• Financial — Expenditures and/or debt accumulation for tuition and living expenses. For those who don’t work while enrolled, the opportunity cost of lost wages. In total, this could approach $300,000–400,000. For me, I was in a 1 year program so the financial costs were halved, but I still estimated them to total $160,000.
• Work experience — Aside from wages, a loss of 2 years of work experience. (Again, for me this would have only been 1 year.)
• Educational — The converse of an MBA’s benefits is you must meet all basic requirements, regardless of their relevance or applicability to your immediate or long-term career goals. As Pickard writes much more eloquently:

If you pursued an MBA the regular way, you’d end up taking a lot of required courses that you may or may not be able to use right away. Years later, would you remember what you studied in Supply Chain Management 101? Worse yet, what if you never ended up needing that information at all? Still, business students in traditional programs must invest valuable time and money to complete course requirements that may or may not fit their particular situations. (Pickard, Laurie. Don’t Pay for Your MBA.)

I want to make a point here that these tradeoffs are not conclusive. I am not suggesting we should end traditional MBAs. No one knows exactly what skills and experiences they will need in the future. Each person weighs the benefits and costs differently. Plus, having the advice of MBA professors, alumni, and staff in designing what they think will be the optimal curriculum is very valuable. And while you may be planning on a career where Supply Chain Management 101 seems useless, innovation is often found at the intersection of two fields that have not been connected before.

I don’t believe that an alternative MBA is better than a traditional MBA. I don’t think MOOCs have found a way yet to replicate the benefits of a traditional MBA’s pedagogy or alumni network. An alternative MBA will never be the same thing as having attended an accredited university’s MBA program.

But different does not mean worse. An alternative MBA simply optimizes for different things.

What are the fundamental distinctions?

• I can take any class I want, whenever I want.
• I can take as few or as many classes at any time depending on my availability.
• I can save a considerable amount of money.
• I can apply an agile approach using “just in time” learning:

Traditional business school [are] a “just in case” education, where students learn most topics “just in case” they might come in handy later. But “just in case” doesn’t square with the world of work that we now inhabit. Increasingly, people need skills that can be acquired and refreshed “just in time.” New educational tools like MOOCs can not only help you acquire specific skills just when you need them, they can refresh a skill that has faded over time. (Pickard, Laurie. Don’t Pay for Your MBA .)

Since I only have my best guess as to what my optimal course curriculum is, I will develop hypotheses that I can test before committing to a course. While I have a full core curriculum with possible electives documented, I won’t finalize classes until necessary.

By using this approach, I will have the best chance of prioritizing the highest valuable material and postponing the least valuable material.

To see this in action, you can read my post on how I picked my first week of classes.

Like many of you, I occasionally get a LinkedIn connection request from someone I have never met, never heard of, and for whom I can’t even offer a plausible theory for how or why they found me. For those I accept, waiting for them to introduce themselves is a bit like waiting for water to boil on a stove that’s turned off. Which is to say, they do not.

So then I will message them with polite but straightforward questions like “How did we come to be connected?” or “Was there something in particular you wanted to connect about?”. Other than the Russian hackers who probably have all my login credentials, these messages go unread into the internet universe.

In fact, from January 2020 — May 2021, of the invitations I received from strangers with no introductory note or follow up only 25% responded to my initial message and 0% followed up beyond a short, no-action-item reply. It was odd. And it felt bad. Like I was being conned into contributing to their vanity metrics of increased connections. And I’m sure this is not a unique experience.

Starting in June, I changed my response. Instead of asking what they wanted to get from me, I asked about them. “What kind of projects are you working on?”

This has changed things considerably. Whereas before not a single “stranger connection” developed into anything meaningful, I have had a 75% response rate from the people who I’ve asked about their projects.

Even more, the responses have been more personal and interesting to read. Some have told me about professional projects they are engaged in right now(one of these may even develop into a potential professional collaboration), some have told me about their personal passions, while some turned out to be typical sales leads. However even in the case of the latter, the sales pitch they shared had a more personal story behind it than I was used to hearing, making them more human and thus more interesting.

I think it has been more successful because asking someone about their “projects” is a pretty novel question and feels sincere. It is non-discriminatory: one can answer it whether they are unemployed, a student, a salesperson, an artist, or a CEO. At the same time, it lets a person highlight themself and what they may want to connect about in a way that does not feel forced. Heck, I may even start trying this on people IRL…

Try it yourself and let me know what the response is like for you.

I spent most of this Sunday morning (June 6, 2021) at an outdoor table in the shopping mall near my house. It’s a fairly large mall and, in the style of all malls in southern California, all outdoor. It hosts boutique shops, grocery stores, a movie theater, fast food, restaurants, panda express, Walgreens…everything you’d expect.

I had come to the Starbucks to use its wifi. The Starbucks was closed, but the mall itself had free wifi. Stocked with coffee and bagel from the nearby Einstein’s, I opened my laptop and got to work.

Within 45 seconds, a woman came to the Starbucks and pulled on the locked door. Soon, a man and his partner came and similarly pulled, hopelessly, on the door. Within 5 minutes, 6 people had attempted to get inside. Each demonstrated their own unique flurry of emotions, but generally followed the same pattern.

First, the shock: Their steps quickening as they reach the finish line, a warm cup of coffee beckoning, the thought of splurging on an $800 cake pop… I could literally see the change in physical demeanor as someone got close to Starbucks. There was a heightened energy, an excitement (or maybe a relief) for the soon-to-be-served treat.

Second, the denial: Pulling on the door, waiting, pulling again, as if the door needed a moment to collect itself and would be very sorry for the inconvenience of not opening right away. This reminded me of blowing on the Nintendo cartridge from my childhood and turning the game back on, waiting to see if it would work. Fate’s cruel fickleness, this door was not going to open. One poor woman, whom I empathized with entirely, pulled on the locked door, read the “closed” sign, then looked up to the heavens and shouted “WHY?!?” I am not making that up. That really happened.

Finally, the confusion: As they turned to go, some would gaze upon other groups sitting at the tables nearby. Many of these people were enjoying…a Starbucks coffee???

This is where things got interesting — there was an open Starbucks in the Ralph’s grocery store directly next door! The “closed” sign did not provide this piece of information. One good samaritan was telling the dismayed Starbucks’ pilgrims where they could find salvation, but she left fairly soon.

At this point, I became oddly fascinated that I was able witness such a cruel disruption of so many people’s fundamental Sunday routine. For the next 50 minutes as I finished my coffee and read the news, I took notes every time someone tried to go inside.

A couple things stood out to me from this.

1. Starbucks lost out on a LOT of revenue. Let’s assume that the average revenue per person is $6. (An outdated estimate, but let’s go with it.) In the 44 minutes I recorded, Starbucks lost out on $246. That’s nearly $5.49 a minute! It would have been worth it for Starbucks to hire someone to stand outside and tell people “Go to Ralph’s 20 feet over there.” Which leads me to point 2.
2. Why didn’t they put this information on the “temporary closed” sign??? Maybe this is a fault in Starbucks’ store licensing model. Perhaps the person in charge of this store had nothing to do with the Ralph’s location or — even worse — perhaps is at war with that location for Starbucks customers. It seems Starbucks is still the owner of all its locations though, so I’m not sure if that is the case or if the manager of this location just really dropped the ball.
3. Starbucks has been a part of my life like many others. Yet, it wasn’t until I watched so many people respond to seeing it closed that I understood how this product has become a part of people’s routines. It just wasn’t the same to get a coffee from the Einstein’s or McDonalds. This actually disrupted people’s Sunday morning — not in a long-term, consequential way, of course. But I think we all have our personal pleasures — jumping onto the couch with takeout on your Netflix Night, ordering the “usual” from your bartender/kind of friend during your weekly happy hour, or your morning coffee on your one day of leisure in the week. In a way, it isn’t even about the coffee. Completing your routine is something deeper. It’s about safety, comfort, pleasure, simplicity. I thought of all the pieces of a routine that are intangible. The 5 second conversation with the barista who remembers you and asks how you are (these micro-interactions have become even more important during Covid), the certainty that comes with the same place having exactly what you want to order, the memories that may be triggered from the smell or taste or look of the order. In a way, it’s a sense of belonging.

Recognizing the visceral relationship that customers would have with his company, Howard Shultz explained in 2003 why Starbucks would not franchise: “We believed very early on that people’s interaction with the Starbucks experience was going to determine the success of the brand.” The interaction was too valuable to risk losing by franchising its locations.

For Starbucks, the experience is the product.

There was an opportunity to delight customers here even though the store was closed, but Starbucks really botched it. For instance — they could have sent push notifications over the app with the information, they could have coordinated with the Ralph’s Starbucks team and had someone (or just a damn sign!) at the closed location, they could have made up for the disappointment by posting a discount code to take to a different Starbucks location, or they could have realized a Sunday morning routine is an important ritual in many people’s lives and taken herculean steps to make sure the store was open at least for the morning rush.

It’s interesting to think about how when you have a product that becomes a part of someone’s life, you need to account for the experience when you have to take that product away (taking the website down for an upgrade, closing the store due to unforeseen circumstances, ending a beloved product line for a small but passionate user base). When designing for the full user experience, you must account for how users interact with the product but also how they manage without it.

By the way, the Einstein’s coffee was very good.