Interview with John Martin, CPO at Housecall Pro

 John Martin joined the inaugural CPO Accelerator cohort in September 2020 as Head of Product at Homebound, and has since become the CPO at Housecall Pro. He tells us how Divinity School led to building products, how he tackled extreme learning on the job, and how the CPO Accelerator helped him prepare for his serendipitous path to the C-suite.

Can you tell me about your path into product? Your LinkedIn tells an interesting story.

Right out of college I did nonprofit work that was focused on trying to explore the world and expand beyond the experiences I had had so far. Then, in the way you would spend a couple of years working in something business-related and then go to business school, I went to divinity school for graduate school to gain a broader perspective on the nonprofit world. I got connected to a homeless shelter with a food training program where folks worked in a kitchen to gain skills. But, the program was not super effective. I came from Colorado where we have great burritos, and there was no burrito shop in the Columbia university area, so we created one, and had all the homeless folks staff it. I did that for two and a half years of divinity school. 

Then I hit a fork in the road–do I stay on the social enterprise nonprofit path, or get a ‘real’ job and pay the bills? We had just had our second child as school was ending. That’s when I found out about strategy consulting, and I took a pretty extreme left turn. I climbed that ladder for six years, but I really wanted to be a leader and see initiatives all the way through. So I jumped off and joined HomeAdvisor, which is a marketplace that connects homeowners with home service providers.

In my first year in the finance and strategy group I did a lot of deep customer research, focusing mostly on the service provider side. When our CPO asked if I wanted to join product and build out the service provider product, I again took a leap and veered off this strategic finance path. Consulting had prepared me to do half the job—all of the customer and market research, identifying the problem to be solved, and communicating strategically. But I didn't have any idea how to do the other side, which is actually create a solution, design it, build it and ship it. So I treated myself like an associate PM while also trying to build out the group and set the strategy. I didn't even know how to do anything agile. I had to learn all the ceremonies and the vocabulary, deep dive into what an API is and how data flows back and forth. 

How many people were you managing at that point as you were learning?

By the end of the first year, we had a total of four product managers and three designers and all the engineering and analytics resources associated with that. So I was kind of building the ship while figuring out how to sail the ship in the first place. 

One of the most important things about that time was meeting and working with an incredibly talented designer. He and I have now worked together at three companies and he is now my Head of Design at Housecall Pro. It’s an important professional relationship that got forged in those early days. He was really helpful in teaching me about how all of this works. 

After a couple of years I started leading some new initiatives as a VP of Product. I was reading a tremendous amount through this whole learning curve—I just buried myself in product books. I'd read enough and developed my own theories and felt like I wanted to go try it on my own. So when I got connected to Nikki, the CEO at Homebound, and we saw the world the same way, I decided to go lead product there. And it was at Homebound that I joined the CPO accelerator.

What made you seek out the program? It was your last month at Homebound when you started the CPO accelerator, right?

That's right, although I didn't know that at the time. I wasn't planning on making a move. 

I joined because even though I was really well steeped in outcomes-based product management, I had been self-taught and had come to it late. I felt like I had missing arrows in my quiver. I didn't quite know what I didn't know.

This was about the time of this renaissance of new product literature, and I had really enjoyed Melissa's book. I knew that I wanted to be more than just a product leader, I wanted to be a broader business leader. But I felt like the product track was the right track for me. I was preparing myself for what, at the time, I thought would be the role I’d grow into at Homebound.

How did Housecall Pro happen? Did they come looking for you?

Yes, Housecall Pro had gotten a new CEO, who had actually started HomeAdvisor.

He was building out his leadership team at Housecall Pro and we got in touch to talk about something different. Halfway through the conversation, it became a ‘Hey, why don't we talk about this for real?’ Within a week and a half, it all came together. 

Homebound was interesting in that it's a tech and real life company—they make money by selling somebody a house and building the house for them, and the software is a critical piece in making that work efficiently and effectively. But I had just started to feel a pull towards being a Product leader in a company that sold software to make money. I knew there was an opportunity to grow a team and really establish a formal product management function there.

What stage of an organization is Housecall Pro? 

The company was coming out of startup mode, but not yet fully into growth mode when I started and now we're fully into growth mode. I was probably employee number 150–we're over 600 today. 

How did the Accelerator help you prepare for the CPO role in hindsight?

Especially in the the first month or so at Housecall Pro, I had five of the CPO Accelerator decks bookmarked and I flipped between them everyday, because I really had everything to do when I started–build the team, create the operating cadence, articulate the strategy, organize the whole org to deliver on that strategy. So everything that we had talked about in the CPO accelerator was incredibly relevant right away.

The program provided this sense of calm for me.  Being self-taught and not knowing what I didn't know, there's always this anxiety that I was relying on instincts that were honed over the years in these different professional settings but weren't ‘true’ product instincts. But this time around, I felt like I knew what the universe of things were that needed to be done, and I had this scaffolding that was really helpful to help implement it.

Of course I ended up modifying a lot—I look at the materials I’m producing now compared to those from a year ago and they look a lot more like my own stuff. But the principles from the CPO Accelerator are still embedded into them. 

You've been in this CPO role for a month or so now– what are the things that feel the most different from your SVP role? 

I’m taking a more holistic view of the product with a bigger focus on the business value that our products are creating, not just product marketing, not just the emails and the in-app messaging, but how we sell it and the customer support of it, the financial modeling that goes into the forecast, and being responsible for hitting the numbers that we put in that forecast. So it just feels more like broader business work than necessarily pure product work—although the pure product work is the engine of it all.

What challenges do you foresee that you might not have predicted prior to taking on this new role?  

As we've grown, we've had the good fortune to invest so much in the team, and now our squads are gelling and we are producing just a staggering amount of product. I've got 20 products we want to bring to market over the next year, and they're all going to be good for our customers. 

We're a SaaS tool for relatively small home service providers that use our tool every day, all day long. But as they're running their business, they don't have time to learn a bunch of new stuff–so if we change something on them, it’s pretty disruptive to their workflow. How do we not overwhelm them with new products, how do we build trust that we won’t keep changing the product all the time, but also have them appreciate these positive changes we’re making? So it’s a good challenge to have, but still a challenge.