Suggestions
Tucker Christiansen
Product Management Leader @ Intermountain | Ex Adobe | Building world-class teams and software that deliver results
Jon Christiansen, who goes by Tucker Christiansen professionally, is the Director of Product Management, Digital Services at Intermountain Healthcare.35 He is based in Saratoga Springs, Utah, United States.3
Professional Background
Tucker Christiansen has a strong background in product management and digital services:
- He has 16 years of highly successful experience in product management, consulting, and people leadership.4
- His current role at Intermountain Healthcare focuses on Consumer Digital Solutions.2
- He has expertise in optimizing paid search campaigns with website analytics, as evidenced by his presentation at Adobe Summit 2018.6
Education
Tucker Christiansen holds a degree in Management from Brigham Young University.4
LinkedIn Profile
His LinkedIn username is tuckerchristiansen, which aligns with the professional name he uses.4 This profile likely contains more detailed information about his career progression and professional achievements.
Tucker Christiansen's role at Intermountain Healthcare, a not-for-profit health system committed to helping people live the healthiest lives possible, suggests that he is involved in developing digital solutions that support the organization's mission of providing extraordinary care and superior service at an affordable cost.1
Highlights
I just finished chapter 10 last night in Transformed by Marty Cagan. This book is pure gold! This chapter alone is worth getting the book. Anyone looking to build a real product team (or even aspiring to become a PM and wants the inside scoop on what good companies should look for in a PM) should read this.
The two side bars topics at the end hit home particularly for me:
(1) Everyone in a company with product managers should read about the importance for the product team to have direct access to users, customers, product data, and business stakeholders. Marty Cagan please make a variation of this as a blog post, I want to share it all over the place!!! Every salesperson, customer success manager, implementation consultant, support desk agent, and anyone else who is customer facing needs to see this! Every data, analytics, research team, finance, and anyone else who has key product data needs to see this!
(2) The relative importance and trap of focusing on hiring for domain expertise compared to other skills was masterfully put by both Marty and Shreyas Doshi. In my career I've had the opportunity to dig into dozens and dozens of business models across hundreds of companies. As someone who has learned and taught both domain expertise and product management to a number of individuals; I can attest that it is far more difficult to learn to be an effective empowered Product Manager than to pick up the domain expertise of a business.
Also consider that your company likely already has many people with domain expertise. This isn't your company's skill gap.
Bring in a PM who has the PM skills, but not (yet) a domain expert is an opportunity and forcing mechanism to help rapidly build trust between the PM and business stakeholders. Most people generally want to be helpful and their expertise acknowledged even if they are busy, especially if they can see it being a worthwhile use of their time.
Imagine the impact to expedite relationship building with this sort of introduction from a trusted product leader to the business stakeholder: "Hello Bob (the business stakeholder), I'd like to connect you with Jill. She's a exceptional product manager that we just hired from [prior company]. She's going to help lead taking our [name of product] to the next level. Could you spend 30 minutes with Jill helping her get up to speed on [something specific where Bob is an expert]?"
This lines the PM up to demonstrate directly to Bob how good she is with discovery as she asks him compelling questions. Trust grows instantly and that 30 minutes quickly becomes additional meetings, co-visits to customers, additional introductions to key people in Bob's network, etc.
I think this book is going to go down as one of the most important books for driving innovation ever! Thank you Marty and the whole SVPG team for giving inspiring content that empowers leaders to transform their business!
This looks like an interesting webinar from Shreyas Doshi on March 23. Any other product leaders planning to attend? I find Shreyas' content to be quite insightful.
