Magic in the Mayhem: Scaling Digital Product Management Culture with a 131 Year Legacy

Product managers are inundated with best practices for their craft. While these are fantastic resources, we can’t help but compare these seemingly perfect strategies with our very imperfect realities. As a Senior Mobile Product Manager at Verizon Fios, I face this self-doubt every day. However, through evangelizing fundamental principles of constant collaboration between IT, design, and business; smaller releases; incubating a culture of testing and growth; and always asking ourselves how we can improve, the team has begun to reap the benefits of a better product and a more invested workforce. So, no, we are not perfect; far from it. And, no, you probably aren’t going to ever see the modern day equivalent of the Ma Bell app as ‘sexy’. But we are affecting change at scale in a 160K person company with a 7M customer footprint by fearlessly trying new processes, chucking out what no longer works, and doubling down on what does. Failure for us isn’t a little bit of craziness and ruffling some feathers to push boundaries; it’s business as usual.