Product-Led Advocacy with Ashley Stead

Will: 00:00

Ashley, thank you so much for joining us here on the show today. I am really excited to get into this conversation.

Ashley Stead: 00:06

Thanks for having me. This is going to be great.

Will: 00:10

Now, in our intro here, we told people a little bit about you and the topics today, but I’d love it if we could break it down a little bit and help us walk through how you got to a place where we are today. We’re going to talk about referral marketing, customer advocacy programs, but how did you get here?

Ashley Stead: 00:26

It’s a great question. A lot of product people just fell into this. Maybe 15 plus years ago, I started my career as an analyst. I moved into some marketing roles that turned into operations, which turned into UX research. None of these things seem linear. They’re all over the place, right? It turned into UX research and it turned into product management. About three years ago, the company that I’m at now, Nesto Group, they reached out to me on LinkedIn. They were looking for somebody who has a product management background and technical background, but who’s worked with marketing teams. And that’s my niche.

They wanted somebody with some UX experience, because this role in particular was one that worked with our own dev team for product management, but also leads the practice of conversion rate optimization and experimentation for all of our brands. They found me and I fell into this all by just checking out different roles. Following the string, see where it leads me.

Will: 01:40

I think that’s the story we hear so often, that it wasn’t linear. Different stories, but it wasn’t this logical path. But I think, and I’d love your take on this, I think that diversity of experience, that diversity of background is some of the superpower that helps this role. What do you think on that?

Ashley Stead: 02:02

I agree. I think it’s a niche. There’s lots of product people out there that come from a really technical background. There’s lots of product people that come from maybe a project management background or operations, but this niche of product and marketing and UX and this whole thing we’re going to probably chat more about today in this full stack marketer lens is just my niche. It’s something that I’m really passionate about.

Will: 02:31

Absolutely. And I do want to dive in to some of the meat here, but before we do that, just maybe one thing quickly, just for context of today’s show, could you maybe just tell our listener a tiny bit about Nesto Group, just so they understand contextually what we’re talking about today?

Ashley Stead: 02:45

Yeah, for sure. I’d love to. I work at a company called Nesto Group, Canadian tech, big leader. We’re building the mortgage ecosystem of the future. Nesto Group is the big company. And then there’s some entities underneath. We’ve got CMLS, we’ve got IntelliFi, we have Nesto, we have a marketplace.

What this means is there’s all these different pieces end to end of a mortgage journey and financing solutions and we’re really tech driven. There’s lots of offerings that we have in different segments out there. Nesto Group as a whole has about $73 billion of mortgages under administration. It’s pretty big.

I started at the company when there were 200 employees and now we’re over a thousand. And it’s been three years. It’s just rapid growth and it’s really, really, really exciting. It’s a good time to be at the Nesto Group, that’s for sure.

Will: 03:53

Wonderful, that does sound very exciting. Maybe a little chaotic, but also very exciting.

Ashley Stead: 03:58

Yeah, I love it all.

Will: 04:01

I want to jump in here. You sit within the marketing group, but have more of a technical purview development teams, something we don’t normally hear about as often. I’d love to understand just a little bit of what that structure is. And then I’d really like to understand, how did you convince leadership to actually approve this and bring this model into being?

Ashley Stead: 04:27

There’s a couple of models out there for marketing teams where you have dedicated development teams or you have development teams that are within your own department. Very less common, I realize. And the common scenario is a marketing team that has a shared resource area that’s a development team or product team. And then you need to vie for the prioritization for your work to get what you need done.

Nesto is awesome in terms of their stack and the support for especially the marketing team. And they find that having our own development resources to be the most valuable so that we can move fast. It’s one of the core values. It’s a superpower of ours and of the team. There was really no convincing. However, I do think that I played a part with the expansion of the development team within the marketing department.

That happened by, I have this formula, I guess, about when you’re starting a new job. It’s nothing that’s crazy or really breaking the mold here, but I think that the best place to start is really to find the forum or make a forum of how you can express the value that your team is adding or that you are adding and make sure that it’s really visible. In my experience, the resources just follow the impact that’s being shown and the value that’s being added.

Our team is taking on more responsibilities in this area. I met with this other dev team and they weren’t able, this is what happened in our scenario, but this other dev team can’t take on this work, but we’re equipped to take on this work. They’re happy to just do a knowledge transfer with us. That’s a really big win. Now we can move even faster. Over time, we just started taking on more and more responsibility and our team works on all of the triple W side of all the websites that are underneath the Nesto Group brand.

It’s really cool how it’s evolved over time. But the way to get the resources is to show the work, show the impact and the value and then the resources will come.

Will: 06:54

I think there’s just so many marketing teams that would love to have their own development organization. And I think that for some, maybe that’s possible, some that isn’t. But I think there’s one thing that we talked about before that I think applies to all of us, but as a maybe a newer concept to some marketers. You talked about this idea of many marketers working campaigns, but you think more in infrastructure. How do we actually enable this infrastructure with a marketing lens? And you use the term product led advocacy, but I’d love it if you could help us understand this lens of infrastructure versus campaigns and maybe then how you’ve applied that to product led advocacy.

Ashley Stead: 07:37

Sure. A lot of people think about advocacy and these referral programs as a campaign or as something that they can bolt on throughout maybe a journey. And I just treat it differently. And I think it comes from a very collaborative space. Everything on my end is all about systems, APIs, integrations.

Anything that we automation, anything that I can do to contribute to a strategy that allows the marketers to be self-sufficient. Less we can focus on other development tasks if everyone can be more independent. That’s the lens that I come to this work from, but I also facilitate some discovery that leads us to product led initiatives and product led advocacy.

A typical session when we’re starting something like this, a kickoff or discussions might be me acting as a consultant and we’re talking about what’s their objectives, what do they have that’s available to them already, what have we done already? And then it’s really key to bring in people from all different areas of the business because what I find happens a lot of time when you’re mapping out a journey or to get to a particular objective, everyone has the same end goal, if it’s from the same business area or the same flow. And everyone wants to connect with the person at the same time, or this is a good opportunity, or this is a good opportunity along the way. And what ends up happening is you’re competing with other people’s messaging within the same company. Do you know what I mean?

You might have some people on the phone that are talking to them about moving along in a step, or you might have some people that are in a center or in an office talking to the same customers about their particular thing. And you really just have to clear this out. What I try to do when I’m starting any product led strategy is think about what we already have, what systems we have, what automation we have in terms of insights to help inform the strategy.

Then we break it all out and we talk about, this data is showing us that we need to add some micro yeses before each big conversion. And what I mean by that is people will take maybe three or four steps to get to the initial conversion and another three or four steps to get to the initial version. We break it down really small into steps by channel, by product, by segment. We break it all down and then we start injecting where it makes sense for there to be a call to action related to referral and advocacy where we already know that they’re not ready to take that next big step.

It’s all about the micro yeses and truly, truly understanding the data and the way that you can get that if you’re not even maybe an analyst is just get some automation going and get those insights and find a way to get some data about what people are doing at which stage. It’s typically a mistake I see. They jump right to the big conversion and they just spray referral messaging everywhere.

Will: 11:06

I love that and I think you’re right to identify this point where we have these competing messages. I think, unfortunately in my experience, I’ve worked with a bunch of organizations that don’t even have the map. They don’t even know what’s happening. And I think that’s a starting point. It’s valuable to do this process. You talk about this and there’s a very large theme park company where I remember years ago looking at their website and it was an absolute concoction of pitches.

It was not effective to the customer in any way from what I could see, but I was clear that I could imagine the boardroom battles that were going on for everyone to get highlighted all at once. And it was just an affront to my senses. And I was just thinking, this is corporate politics on the commercial website. It was brutal.

Ashley Stead: 12:00

Wait, there’s more, you can add this on and if you try this or don’t try this thing instead. It ends up being the opposite of what you’re hoping to get to.

Will: 12:10

And as you’re looking at those micro yeses as those steps in the journey, competing interests to talk to the customer, do you have any methods that help you resolve those inevitable boardroom conflicts or any experience there that’s helped you get clarity for that journey?

Ashley Stead: 12:31

Absolutely. I mean, when you work at a new company or you’re working on a new initiative, the best thing for anyone to do is to find a whole bunch of subject matter experts in the whole bunch of different areas and build those relationships. It’s not about everyone needs to meet their objectives. Everyone needs to talk to their customers. It’s really about getting alignment together, not making a decision. Maybe you can help propose, hey, if you were to chat about your thing here, I think it makes sense because the data is showing that there’s a bigger uptick when you do it at this stage. You’re already on the phone with them. It makes sense for you to do this from your sales perspective, but maybe it makes more sense for us from this perspective to talk about this referral or this message at this time.

It’s collaborative and marketers always are collaborative and that they, in my experience anyways, they’ll reach out to people at different times, but it doesn’t always happen where you’re planning with all of the different people in the room at the same time. No one’s an expert in every single part of the customer journey as much as they say they are. The people that are in the operations roles and in the sales roles and in finance, wherever they are, everyone has a different perspective to add.

I think it’s important to bring everyone in. It doesn’t have to be this big, long, arduous process. It’s just something that’s short, sweet. Hey, where do you find that your messaging makes the biggest impact? And then you can look back and see the data, make sure that you have all the stuff that’s available to you. And if you don’t, you can test to see what makes sense but you’re really working together on that. And that’s what I think people need to do more is involve many, many people, listen to calls, do some experimentation. And if you don’t know, just try to find a way to get the answer and just try your best.

That’s a challenging one because it happens everywhere. There’s lots of opportunities to collaborate a bit more with people that you don’t chat with every day.

Will: 14:46

And I think when we get to that collaboration, especially when we’re coming across technical teams and non-technical teams, the inevitable question that comes up is, should we build this or should we buy this? And I don’t know if it’s always based solely on the math. I don’t want to suggest there’s ever ego in the mix, but sometimes there might be. But I’d love to understand, how do you look at the build or buy situation? Any decision frameworks or anything to share there?

Ashley Stead: 15:12

To me, there is a starting point for all of these discussions. I have this best practice rule of thumb that I follow. If it’s a differentiator, let’s spend a little bit more time thinking about building. If it’s table stakes, you need to start with the buy. Start with there. What ends up happening in terms of a framework is there’s always that evaluation that happens. There’s always the, what is the opportunity cost? What’s the development cost? How can it be scalable? How can it have, any partnership that we have with platforms or with different companies with their tools is, does it integrate with our systems? Is it easy to use? And how scalable is it? We do that whole exercise.

And I put a little bit more weight based on if it’s the differentiator path or if it’s just table stakes path. But what ends up happening a lot is it’s a hybrid. We work with excellent partners and we leverage their platforms, but then we build pieces that layer on for the differentiation along the journey. We might have something that we build that’s really custom that is, I call them engagement modules. And that’s me just saying, what’s going to get somebody to keep clicking and keep interested, or can we get a piece of data from somebody to help determine what their next steps are? And those are typically the things that our dev team builds to layer on to build out this differentiated product led advocacy strategy.

Will: 17:04

Interesting. I mean, I think working with those different, thinking about that table stakes, thinking about that differentiator, I think that’s a great way to look at it. I think that we’ve all run into maybe groups that want to build, and maybe sometimes the table stakes are even appealing to build because they, on the surface, seem doable. Have you ever had to argue that out of somebody’s purview or opinion, do you ever have that challenge or is your team very just, or all your teams you’ve worked with just been very pro the logical decision?

Ashley Stead: 17:40

No, there’s always negotiation and discussions and there’s stuff that’s happening that it’s, we are buying this despite the case that’s made. That happens everywhere. That’s not really new. I think that the job of someone like me on a team is to ensure that we check all the boxes and we understand the capacity of everybody’s teams and how fast we need to go or how much time we have and really work with executives to make that decision. You can provide recommendations, sometimes it’s taken, sometimes it’s not.

But I have an example of something that happened just recently where we needed to move very quickly for this opportunity and it was an event opportunity. I was already working on side of desk on what building maybe a platform might be versus buying a platform. And what ended up happening is exactly what I said. There was a hybrid approach where there was a bit of a build that I worked on. And then there was the buy approach where there was a part that we needed to just go and go fast.

And I’m lucky I have the support of our leadership team to be able to move quickly on any build versus buy scenario. But it’s just like anything else. There’s a lot of discussion. There’s even discussion where I’m not involved in, and then it comes back and then I learn a little bit more about the situation. There’s negotiation that needs to happen and all you can do is show your work and make the case and then just be involved in all the discussions where applicable and see where it goes. But you’ve got to be adaptable. Things change all the time.

Will: 19:32

We talked, as you’re talking about that, it reminds me of this point we talked about before, which was around this idea of being a full stack marketer or full stack product team. And I think that the more you understand that product process, the more you can have those conversations completely. I think there’s a lot of marketers who unfortunately are in the situation where they just have to trust their product and engineering teams. They honestly don’t know how all of that works. But I’d love to understand, how do you think about that? Any frameworks, tooling, suggestions for people who want to dive more into understanding product from the marketing perspective?

Ashley Stead: 20:20

That’s a great question. And it’s something that I think a lot about and a lot of people on our team think a lot about. And especially when you’re in this, we came from this startup environment and you’re working in tech and everything’s fast and everyone’s moving quickly. The main goal for our team and our development team is to really empower the marketing team so that they can move quickly and they make really great decisions that are data driven and we keep the underlying tech still robust.

There’s a lot of, as you can imagine, no code, low code solutions that we bring up with the team to help them. If you take a step back though, I think there’s two things that I could touch on to answer that question. One thing is sometimes getting the whole lens of the product and development piece starts with even further back, which is just process and marketing team processes. There’s a lot of free or low cost tools out there to help improve things like planning and automation and prioritization.

And automation, I mean, really not about the execution piece, but how you’re getting the data or how are you getting the insights to inform your strategy? I love meeting with people and talking to them about their role and their objectives and their pain points, and then get everybody on the same page about how we’re planning and prioritizing, and then move towards the more technical pieces later. But I bring the marketers along with me with all of this work. I make sure that everyone understands the why and the technical implementation. It’s, there’s no need to gatekeep anything about payloads and APIs. It’s, hey, we have this thing. And if you can find me this, I can connect it this way. And I can probably use some of my favorite tools to do it. There’s always this consultation approach. And I love Notion. I love Zapier. I love so many tools. Unbounce.

There’s a MarTech stack out there that works for so many different companies and it’s always different, but if there’s a will, there’s a way. But what I’ll say is if you don’t have, this is the second point that I’ll say, if you don’t have someone like me on your team and you don’t have that technical resource or the product resource to work directly with developers, there’s still stuff you can do. And one thing that I did for the department a couple months ago, maybe two months ago was, one of our department meetings, I was talking about how you can use this prompt. I gave the steps for the prompt. I can share it with you too, if you want to share it out with your audience or people can connect with me directly to get it. But either way, there was this prompt that people can put in to their own Gemini or GPT or whatever they’re using. And it’s really to help them build an AI efficiency pipeline for whatever they need it for.

Everyone’s different, their roles are different, and they have different steps and different little micro processes. And you can be more full stack on your own by just following a prompt. This is what I do. These are the steps that I take. This is the tools or the stack that I have available to me. If I don’t have any, can you suggest other tools? What can I automate? You’re just doing some discovery using AI tools yourself to help you become more automated and more full stack and get the information you need. Anyone can get market intelligence when they understand how to automate it and how to prompt properly to get what they need. And anyone can get what they need or at least a good starting point for good experiment. That’s where I’d say is a good place to start if you don’t have someone on the team to help facilitate those conversations.

Will: 24:29

I think it’s a good point. And I definitely think we can share that prompt out, but also we’ll share people how to connect with you afterwards. And I know that the more, the more that we play, and I’ll call it playing with AI, because it always makes me very happy when I see what comes out. I think that big piece of not being afraid to prompt a prompt, not being afraid to work, to develop a prompt, to think through things, to ask AI to help you with your thinking, to then ask it a question based on your thinking. Very, very interesting stuff.

Now I know we’re talking about product here, AI. I think you said at the beginning, I just want to come back to it here before we wrap the show up. It’s about showing your work, showing the output of your work. How do we stay data driven? How do we, while we’re working on these projects, we want to stay data driven and tech driven, we’ll still be easy for the marketers to use all of this. Any key insights there when you’re building infrastructure, you’re trying to help people make the right decisions and use the right tooling. I’m just curious how you present that when a project’s out the door effectively.

Ashley Stead: 25:44

That’s a great one. I mean, when I was talking about the infrastructure approach and how we come together to talk about product led advocacy, a great example of that is in our planning. It’s we streamlined how we do our planning together. And the data driven and tech driven is just to the core how the team operates. We help facilitate that.

When I was talking about things like no code or low code tools to help along the way, that’s really keeping in mind that we want to keep our technology and all of our back end really robust and we just want to assist with scalable options to empower the team to move forward fast. There’s usually just a good amount of collaboration early on in planning. And as I said before, there’s a lot of learning that happens along the way and some teaching too. I learned from some of the members of the marketing team when we’re going through about some of the challenges that they face. And they’ll learn from me about some options that might be available to them that maybe they didn’t think about before or something that’s in the tool that just came out because there’s this beta piece and they can take that on themselves.

We do a lot of pairing and work together. How do you make sure that everyone is data driven and tech driven when maybe people are not as confident when it’s related to the product world or the technology world? I mean, you just have got to bring everyone in and everyone can learn from everyone. It’s really about just how do you teach along the way about why this is important and what we want to look for and then learn about how it can meet the needs. It’s just bridging that gap together and understanding both areas.

Will: 27:44

You know, it’s funny as we, maybe not funny, but it’s interesting as we talk here today. I think that a big message I’m hearing is really just an inclusion of all perspectives, whether that’s in designing your customer journey, whether that’s in trying to bring people through to understand build or buy, or whether that’s here to try to make sure we stay data driven and aligned. And I think that’s probably one of the most important messages that we could share with the audience, these are not siloed activities. This is, to think about this as an infrastructure, to think of this as a complete product play, we need to feel like we’re collaborating and not just assigning other teams to it. And I say, unfortunately, in my role, I have seen more than a few tech teams walk into an assignment and be very unsure.

Ashley Stead: 28:32

It happens all the time.

Will: 28:34

What happened? Who’s here? What do we buy? What is going on? And it’s just a lot of who, what, why. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, but I think that’s definitely a thing I’ve seen in a big takeaway I’m having here. Now that I’ve stolen your takeaway, I’d love to know, is there one big golden nugget, one piece that you really think the audience should understand here today, maybe on top of that?

Ashley Stead: 29:00

That’s a fair comment. It still happens. But I think the more that you’re able to empower the people to do their thing without the developers, in my example, the developers can work on some of the parts that layered on for the differentiation. And as long as you have some consultation then with other people who are super smart in the area that they’re in, it goes a long way and it doesn’t have to slow down any process. That’s the problem that I hear all the time. People are, I didn’t have that session because we needed to move fast. I mean, you can move fast and get a lot of opinions really quickly and then just filter them down. Anyone can do that and act as the facilitator in the conduit to make something happen where you’re still making sure that you’ve got all the info out there.

But I guess my, I touched on this earlier, but the series of micro yeses is something I talk about all the time when I’m talking about conversion optimization and even when I’m talking about anything product led advocacy related. You really need to understand if you’re in charge of a portion of a journey, or if you’re in charge of the whole life cycle of something, the most important thing that you can do is break it down into smaller chunks and then try your best to get data that you need or at least experiment at a certain point to see what moves the needle better, this or this kind of a message.

The more you understand about the steps that people take and how there’s different entry points all over the place and who’s talking when, the more information that you have about that, the more that you can make this really strong product led strategy. And then everyone has their North Star, the ultimate goal of what they need to get to and how they know that the fast track way is to get there. But I’d encourage everyone to just spend that time thinking about what levers they can pull along the way or test or validate any hypothesis they have along the way to make sure that your product led strategy is the right time, the right message, the right people, and that you’re not muddying it up with something else that could be really crucial in the step of a bigger conversion.

And that’s what I see a lot in this space is people going right for the main conversion in all channels, in all paths, and they’re just spraying that message out there. And they might change the messaging based on the audience or change the offer based on the audience. I guess that’s part of the secret sauce of product led work and product led advocacy work and referral programs is just, when’s the right time to talk about it and how can you bring it up without it just being a message that you learn more about or click more about? How can you make it more engaging?

That’s the little nugget that I want to share at the end is as a tip that there’s a way to do it. Everyone’s is different. Every program is different. Every advocacy strategy should be different. You can’t just take this work for me, it’s obviously going to work for you. You really need to understand all the paths and then say, this is a perfect timing because they don’t have a big conversion that they need to focus on in the next step. We’ve got this much time with them. This is what they care about at this time. Then start thinking about it that way. And then you can just add little pieces here, just delight along the way. That’s the big one. That’s in the playbook that I use all the time.

Will: 32:53

I love that. I love that. Sometimes, you know, in its simplest form, those are the micro yeses, but the more we ask and introduce and play along with the customer, the more opportunities that we have there. And I think just being intelligent about it obviously really amps it up.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time here today. I know I learned a lot here. I’ve got some things that I’ve taken notes on that I’m going to take into my life after this call. Really appreciate the conversation. Thank you.

Ashley Stead: 33:25

Thanks for having me, this was fun!

Will: 33:30

Before we go here, I’d love to share with the listeners, how can they connect with you? How can they find you or reach out to you after the show?

Ashley Stead: 33:38

Sure, LinkedIn. That’s a good path. Ashley Stead, it’s S-T-E-A-D. You can just find me on LinkedIn. I post every once in a while something that’s funny or the last thing that I think I posted on LinkedIn. After I’ve had a lot of conversations about vibe coding versus rapid prototyping, I was giving my follow these steps. These cues will lead you to, you’re in a room and you need to talk about anything related to one of these tools, you need to read the room and say rapid prototyping versus vibe coding. Anyway, I add lots of stuff on LinkedIn. It’s where I love to connect with people, happy to chat about all things product led growth, product led advocacy. And it was really great chatting with you today.

Will: 34:35

You too, Ashley. Well, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to have you back on the show soon.

Ashley Stead: 34:40

Awesome, thank you. Have a good weekend.