How Metalab does design-led product management with Megan O'Rourke - Head of Product @ Metalab

Welcome back for another lesson in product management. On today's episode, I'm joined by Megano Rourke, Executive Director of Product Management at MetaLab. She brings nearly a decade of experience working across dozens of products and teams. In this conversation, we cut through the noise and get to the fundamentals of alignment, communication, prioritization, problem-solving, and understanding users and their context at a deep level. If you've ever wondered what truly defines great product managers, regardless of the environment they're in, this episode is packed with clarity, insight, and some incredibly practical wisdom. Let's jump in. Hey, Megan, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for the conversation. I'm excited to hear more about what MetaLab does. But before we get into everything, for the listeners who haven't met you or maybe don't follow you on LinkedIn or anything like that, could you give a brief description of what you do today and what MetaLab does? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. My name's Megan. Most folks call me Mego, so feel free. I'm the Executive Director of Product Management at MetaLab. I lead our PM practice. I support some of our higher-profile clients. I get to meet with new and interesting clients all the time and try to stir up new partnerships for our teams to work on. I spend a lot of my time just thinking about how we shape and build teams that build great products. A quick background on me, my journey actually started in advertising. I got my teeth and an agency called Crispin Porter-Bugusky. They were very much known for very bold and disruptive ideas. While I was not on the creative team, I definitely appreciated being part of the creative process. It really instilled in me a passion for design and creativity and the detail craft. Eventually, I moved away from advertising and the one and done campaign world. Something that fell a bit more long-tailed and that brought me to MetaLab in 2016. I'm actually coming up on nearly 10 years here, which I think is a real testament, especially in agency land, to just the type of work that we do, the really interesting clients with whom we get to work and the amazing roster of folks in talent on the MetaLab team. It's a little bit about me and my journey. You talk about what does MetaLab actually do for those who don't know? Yeah, absolutely. I'm not going to lie. When I first saw MetaLab, is there an association with Meta? I don't know if you get that all the time, but it's kind of funny. We have. Maybe there was a cease synthesis in there. MetaLab is an end-to-end digital product agency. If you're at a Codore website, you'd see just a very simple explanation of what we do. We build interfaces or we make interfaces, which I love. You might think it's like a bit reductionist, but it really boils it down to our core and suffering. I think it is a nod to our Canadian roots, which are just very humble. Essentially, we design and we build interfaces, which ultimately drive product experiences. We're very much design-led. We have an emphasis on core product design, but we also have really awesome talent across a peopleful branding team, research and strategy, engineering, and of course product management. We partner with a range of companies. Literally everyone from early stage first time or maybe experienced founders who need help going zero to one, which is always fun, or maybe scaling up an MVP. Then some clients come to us with the need to help work on a North Star vision for their product. Some come to us for an overhaul of maybe an existing product or portion of. It's really quite varied. That's part of what keeps the work interesting, both for myself and then our larger team. No two projects are the same, two products are the same. At the end of the day, it's really just about we're building digital experiences that are really amazing and get built and get to see the light of day. That's very cool. I know in a lot of product circles, there's this debate between being product led and being sales led. You mentioned that MetaLab and its core is very design-led. Could you share more about what that means and how that plays out in practice? Yeah, I'd say at our core, we're all kind of designers at heart, but we actually have a true talented design function. They're really at the forefront of all of our projects. As a service agency, the core service that we are providing is product design. Unlike a sales team who might be driving a feature roadmap or certain promises that you're selling through to customers, we're in a position like as an agency, we're hired by organizations to often accelerate or deliver that world-class design experience. For us, that can take shape of design as there from the conversation, starting with our sales. If we're talking to interesting customers, which for us are the clients, the product companies, that conversation is being had with myself, a design leader, and someone from our partnerships team to make sure that even just how we're structuring the work and approaching the opportunity is very much through a design and a creative lens, not just a scoping conversation. And that comes through the delivery of the work. It's our designers who often are out front and center leading workshops and really influencing the roadmap, the features, the experience, because we're just deeply believe in our core. Solving a customer need and a business need is ultimately delivered through a great experience. Of course, there's trade-offs and there's conversations that come with managing a scope and delivering the work and the feasibility of tech. But we really try to position our designers as leaders in those conversations. The other functions are really supporting that design vision. Yeah, I love that because even as like a, I started my career in product as UX researcher. So I think I have an appreciation for design and research and some of the adjacent product functions to the PM that other PMs might not have. But I think design often gets slept on as something that is just a visual discipline. You use the word experience a lot and I think the X part of UX often gets overlooked. What is the overall experience that you're designing? Not just the pixels on the page. So I'm sure that's something that I guess that's something that you might deal with. What do you hear from clients? When they're expecting your agency to come help, do they get it or do you have to coach through that sometimes? It really depends. What comes top of mind is we were recently working with an organization like a fast growing startup that was all engineers on their team, which isn't uncommon. You've got a founder, you've got a team of engineers, the focus is on building quickly, validating, and then we'll worry about what it looks like later. So we often find clients come to us kind of when they're at an inflection stage of okay, they figured out product market fit, but they haven't quite landed like a delightful user experience or one that people feel is, feels really effortless or easy to navigate. So oftentimes clients will come to us at that stage and them have design acumen and some honestly don't and they look to us to really help guide them through that process. Occasionally we'll have clients who might even have a design background themselves and then there's a little bit more like a design acumen and understand the process. And I think for some folks, it can be uncomfortable, right? Because there's divergent design thinking and we're like, okay, we're going to go broad and we're going to try on all these different options that doesn't necessarily feel like we're immediately moving toward shipping, but it's an important part of the process that when we educate clients on how we're going to operate, they come along for the ride and they see the value of going divergent and exploring different design patterns or interactions that can truly elevate the experience. And for many clients at that stage of inflection, that experiences what becomes a bit of a differentiator and it takes it from maybe a minimum viable product, sometimes you hear a minimum lovable product. And we often think of like, well that can be a differentiator at that moment where design is a core part of the experience and we just philosophically can't extract the two. Yeah, I agree with you. I've said in many conversations that it seems like the more that code is getting democratized with AI tools and in general, like roles seem to be consolidating. It's designed and taste that really set people apart, right? So instead of competing on features or copying competitors, it's really like how do you differentiate that experience to where someone's going to choose you over someone else because of the way you make them feel or how easy you make their life? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like when I think about what gets our clients like lit up in calls of remote work, it's that like design element and that's the differentiated part of the experience that, yeah, becomes more and more important as soon as, you know, everyone has access to these tools that you can just create a pretty run-of-the-mill onboarding experience. It's like, okay, well, how are you going to create a differentiated onboarding experience that actually meets the needs of your particular customers? You know that. You know what they need and we can use that as an input to make sure that the type of experience that we're putting forward actually meets that particular user's need rather than it just being something that no shade on cloud, I love cloud. But yeah, like it now anyone can create an onboarding flow. So it's becoming more and more important to have, yeah, that like kind of tastemaker element to it. That democratizing design is a bad thing. It's just shifting the emphasis toward tasting curation rather than maybe generation. 100%. So I'm curious. I know we've talked a lot about what Metalab does and kind of being design-led and what that means. But as the head of product, what is that mean in terms of like, as you view what Metalab's product is, like how do you view that as the product leader? Yeah, it's a great question because product at Metalab is like, it's tricky when it's a service provided. So I'd say like just looking at what is product management, even mean at Metalab, it's not what you'd find in-house. So like we don't have growth PMs or platform PMs. Like the PMs are a team they're generalists, they flex based on the type of work, the client, the stage of the product. And yeah, it's like what doesn't change is that there's like an inherent need for PM specifically to I always say like they're responsible for creating the conditions for great work to happen. Like the conditions for the team to succeed both in the product and the team and the client experience. So what that looks like in practice is our PMs, I'll say like on a Z to one. They're working with founders on really validating the market, shaping the roadmap, building the plan for how that all comes to life. Like they are the founders partner in doing that. Very much like hands-on, hands-on, I see work. And then on the other hand, we have some projects that maybe we're working with a mature organization or more like up-leveling an existing product. That PMs role might be more in terms of like clarifying requirements or untangling stakeholder priorities and needs. And so what what product looks like Ken Verry, but it kind of sits in between a bit of like classic product management and a bit of project management depending on the scope of the client. So it does it does vary and I recognize to you like clients don't come to us for product management. They come to us for design as they should. But I'm a firm believer that what makes clients stay and working with us is the experience of how we work and work together and PMs are a big part of shaping that. So metaphors you know can vary from air traffic control. Like sometimes it's a bit more behind the scenes, a bit more operational and sometimes it's a bit more of you know conductor of an orchestra where we're out front and kind of making sure that we're all marching to the same gate. But yeah either way like the product function is ultimately responsible for making sure that we're all pointed in the direction. Yeah I think that alignment piece never changes right? No, I mean there's there's so many parallels like it's it's such a different flavor than in-house PM but many of the principles stay the same. Like communication is at its core stakeholder management whether they're internal stakeholders or for us are clients stakeholders it's still stakeholder management they're still storytelling they're still buying they're still navigating pivots and changes in priorities and while the the scope management side might be a bit different for us because of you know where we would be an external agency. There's still you know prioritization that happens every day as a PM. So certainly a lot of parallels but it's a slightly different flavor. No for sure I teach a lot of aspiring PMs and I tell them that you know you'll see a lot of noise on the internet that product management is so different everywhere that you go and I think the environment and the circumstances are different but you you shine light on the point that I always try to coach them on is that at its core if you look at the fundamentals of what a product manager does and what product management is those core tenants don't change right you have discovery and delivery and then in between you have everything you just said of stakeholder management buy-in alignment like planning prioritization and so like those things really never change and it's just interesting to hear from your perspective where you're not in a house team but you're kind of bringing in your your teams to kind of jump into another organizations kind of world and figure things out and help create value through whatever stage of design or design problem that they face. Yeah absolutely and it's varied and it's fun and that's why I think a lot of folks enjoy the variety that comes with 80. There are certainly trade-offs right like we don't get to see it through years worth of cycles we don't necessarily have visibility for especially large orgs like you know what different areas of the product we might not have visibility into but what it offers is is variety and also like add bats like one of the one of the I think is so special about A&Z PMs is in a given year like you might work on one two or three zero one products like you might be bringing multiple products to market or yeah working with a number of clients to like you know translate their new branding into a product and helping build a design system from the ground up or part of a transformation effort and this is happening multiple times a year and I just can't think of you know an in-house experience that would enable so many reps in such a a creative time and I think that's something that that makes us so good at what we do from design to product to engineering is like we're constantly going through these different types of cycles and engagements with clients that yeah maybe an in-house PM wouldn't have as many types of reps and that type of work in such a small period of time yeah that's definitely food for thought for the listeners because I hear that from a lot of product leaders that I respect highly is that the the thing that separates good PMs or average PMs from great ones is reps and at bats and it sounds like your PMs get that pretty frequently they do and in its stressful it's hard but there's also so many great learnings that we get to apply from from one product to the next so it only gets better with time. No that's really cool so as you look across your client base one thing that struck me was you know with the need for profitability for a while investment kind of dried up and people were like super focused on retrenching but it seems like metal labs tuning really well and I'm curious where are some of the areas that metal labs clients are saying hey we really need your help here because either we pulled back too much of our internal resource thing and now we're lacking here or there's new challenges that we don't have the competency to deal with like what are some of the things that you're seeing come up that's opening opportunities for your organization. Yeah I'd say there's probably like three or four main moments that a client would come to work with us and one that's particularly top of mine especially with emerging technologies is really having help with creating like a clear vision for the future so some clients come to us with like a sketch on an Appkin which is fun sometimes we're working with big enterprise who might have like you know years bless of roadmaps behind that but as they're looking to the future and they're thinking like okay we need to we need to pivot or we need to have something that we can really work toward in terms of like a two to five year product vision and not just like a strategy deck that sits on a shelf metal of anti anti deck we're very and and that's part of that design led thinking is like we're we're big believers in like having the tangible prototype in your hand that tells that story so I'd say the first the first grouping of client needs is really like clients coming to us for help with a new future vision and they want to have that aspirational state that they can socialize around their organization and say okay we're all pointing towards the same North Star and all of these different business units or squads within the organization understand directionally where we're going and they can prioritize their efforts against the lab so I say that's the first one the the second would be kind of like raising the bar on design so we kind of talk about this election point earlier it's like okay you've got a viable product in market but you need to differentiate it somehow and that differentiation might be through the actual experience of the product so client has found product market fit they need to uplevel the experience and they want to go from that MVP to the MLP the minimum level of product so that's an area that we often help translate one of that next iteration and help them scale so like we're defining systems and polished and interaction patterns and rather than these kind of one off experiences so that is they continue to scale their product they're building on like a solid foundation and then the third is is really going zeta one so it's always fun and a big challenge when clients come to us to act as like they're in house product team so they might be a founder with either few or a couple of engineers and they need help bringing that idea to an MVP so we'll staff up a team with strategy research design product like we'll handle that tip to tail and help them ship a first version then often help them scale up a team to take that on in in the long tail so and see those are kind of the main three and maybe the fourth one would be related to that upscaling in terms of design but just really like modernizing legacy experiences so we'll we'll work with partners oftentimes like very large organizations who a big established businesses but maybe they realize like they're not keeping up with modern expectations or leveraging emerging technologies and so that's an opportunity for us to come in and kind of inject some some life and some love and some design thinking into what might be yeah like a trailing experience. No it's very cool so with with AI kind of swallowing the world like software did you know a couple decades ago and still is today how is that impacting your clients world and are you seeing more of an uptick in like AI centered projects. Oh yes and we have for like a long time I think they've actually been working on AI for like a better part of a decade and in the last two years have gotten more requests than yeah in the in the last ten in terms of that being a focus on an emerging tech and it it varies like we see clients will come to us typically with like one of two asks there's the first being like how can we just like integrate AI into our product what's kind of a layer of AI here and I think that's that was a bit more in the past couple years whereas more recently it's help us design and experience that's fully AI powered like that is the driving force and the differentiator and I think for us like in some cases the the value for the business and the user it's like it's really obvious like we might say yeah let's let's add an intelligence layer or there's a competitive advantage here but also like there's also times in which it's not so clear and I think probably lots of lots of people especially in the PM role like they feel that pressure like you see that on on forums online you know there's there's a strategic directive like we need AI but why like why is that a leadership mandate is that driven by the board is that shaped by a competitor to ship the product that had AI slapped on top and so now we need to go provide something similar and so yeah it's become a topic not recently but but more generally like whether or not we're evaluating AI products or just any sort of feature product in general our our chief design officer Sarah Vienna she has this hard hitting question that I love if we're ever in a design crit and there's like a feature being proposed she's the first one to ask does this even deserve to exist and it's just like woof yeah you better have some solid rationale for why and so you know we've long been asking that during design crits and reviews and evaluating priorities and features as they as they take shape and so now we're just evaluating that a bit more with the lens on AI so continuing to ask ourselves like does this product deserve to exist and like what what place does AI really have in this product like are we solving a real problem like let's just ask ourselves that question are we introducing like new or meaningful value here or we just react to a bit of a hype cycle which I think is is always you know a fair question to ask and so yeah I think at its core it's like AI for AI sake as with any any trend or technology like a distraction but certainly AI when thoughtfully applied and leveraged like and for us that means is it delivering on a business need is it delivering on an actual user need like there's absolutely magic there so yeah certainly we're seeing an uptick in terms of that being an ask and more so just as it being a driver in a product and no longer just a layer of a feature yeah and those are exactly the PM fundamental questions you should be asking right for anything is like is it going to create value for the business and for the customer is it is it actually solving a problem is it is it actually doing something worth doing or we just doing it like you said AI for AI sake and I find I find myself having asked that question is heads of sales or founders or others are like hey we should do this thing and it's like yeah but for what reason like why would we do that and like how is that helping us meet our objectives and yes I totally empathize and that totally resonates with my experience yeah and I just encourage people to never stop asking those questions like it can be really easy to just execute on a directive when there's so much energy and it's it's like there's just so much momentum around that and it doesn't have to mean that you're an ace there it just means that you're forcing the objective questioning and discussion that I think every product decision-maker should should have so it's not necessarily a bad thing I don't think people should feel any shame or be perceived as digging in their heels but like people are looking to product managers to ask the hard-hitting questions and the critical questions to make sure that yeah we're focusing on the right things 100% and I think any good business leader would appreciate that too so I know I could be kind of scary but it's it's a valuable question set to ask yeah and and maybe it's it's yes but not right now or maybe it's yes but not on this right like yeah it's we're certainly not anti AI it's but uh we love it but it's yeah it's important to to be objective of course yep so kind of along that same vein right what are some of the underrated aspects of bringing AI into existing products so so you're not going zero to one but you have an existing product people are like on the hype wagon and they're like we got to do this but what are some of those unique challenges you found in in those scenarios with clients hmm hmm I often feel like it comes down to like what is the experience of using an AI product like what does it feel like as a user to use eye-powered product and and ultimately whether that's enhancing the experience and and building trust or the risk of like eroding eroding the experience or trust so we we talk a lot about like designing with humanity I feel like that's that's probably a common thing right now it's like we don't want to lose our human touch and you know the fact we we care deeply so um one of the things that that we often do is we start to approach our our design projects is starting with just experience mapping and grounding ourselves back into like user needs so we're walking through the product journey step by step and asking not just like what are they doing but like what are they thinking what are they feeling and it's that emotional context that we feel like really shapes everything we do so I'll actually bring it back to that like that question from Sarah um of like does this even deserve to exist being able to challenge ourselves and our clients like are we solving meaningful problems would this be valuable without AI as as an element within the product and then more tact tactically like is AI the right tool for the job here like those critical questions of like is it actually making the experience smarter as it faster is it more impactful and then the the risks associated with that like if we're if we get it wrong so if if we're doing something low stakes like content tagging and we mess that up like not not a big deal but if it's if it's a part of the product that affects trust or confidence or or accuracy or reliability and we don't get that right then there's a risk of like erosion in terms of the customer experience so that's why I think even bringing it back to that question of like does this deserve to exist we're often in the position where we are the ones challenging our our clients and our partners to think critically about that and try to present alternative solutions or experiences that kind of meet that that desired effect in terms of how to actually leverage AI yeah I love that there's recent a recent experience I had where we were getting some push for we we need a gentick AI just as a blanket statement right and it's like well what does that mean and I think there's there's certain archetypes inside of an organization that can get frustrated with some of those questions but but I think it is viable just kind of re-emphasizing what we've already said to ask those questions to come to to come back to like what is that objective what dollar we try to create not doing something for something sake because you know we get a lot of pressure to just go and do stuff and I'm sure as a as an external agency you get probably pressured like hey we have these ideas of what we want to do um and you got to kind of reel them back into reality so I I'm sure there's similar experiences there yeah I mean certainly like as an agency we are here to provide a service um but part of that service is not saying yes to everything it's like it's it's challenging those assumptions it's really challenging those things in those needs and sometimes I think we're actually in a in a position of that's maybe easier than sometimes having that conversation internally where it's like no we were hired on as this objective third party and if we're here to execute on every wish and desire that comes from our partners then like they're not getting the true value of what they're off they're what they're after so sometimes I think we're in a fortunate position and that our clients might be more receptive to being challenged versus if it's you know your what your boss who's saying do this thing you know there's there's inherently a different type of pressure that applies there totally I've seen that in my time as a PM where different consultants have come in and it's like you know part of part of me gets a little bit jealous because it's like we you know we've said similar things in the past it's like now you have this outside entity but to your point it is it is more objective because it's not does no one's trying to push an agenda like you're coming in your your your pays not on the line from like a performance bonus standpoint it's like an internal employee so I can see where that that can become an advantage to where you do have that leverage to push back and like this is why they brought me in is for for this very reason totally absolutely that's cool well sir thanks for for taking some time to kind of unpack what what MedAlab does and some of the things that you're seeing I know I always enjoy hearing what different trends are inside of organizations and different perspectives on on product life so before we go if someone is interested in working with MedAlab or connecting with you how can how can they do that yeah best place to start is check out our portfolio at medalab.com we're also pretty active on Instagram shout out to our marketing team for keeping the vibes high as you can see what work we're we're often publishing because we're really proud of the work that we do so medalab.com or follow us on LinkedIn Instagram for those regular updates and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well happy to chat with folks awesome well I'll drop those links in the show notes so if you're listening go find those in the show notes connect with Megan connect with MedAlab and thanks for listening so Megan thanks for joining today and I appreciate the conversation thanks so much John. Thank you for joining us for another episode in lessons and product management I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did before you go don't forget to rate and review the show follow us on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast go over and find us on the path to product youtube channel make sure to subscribe and like the video there as well and I will see you next time for another episode in lessons and product management.