Human Relationships are Product Management

Jamin Brazil is managing director of HubUX for Voxpopme.

He started his career as a market researcher in the 1990s, before founding several companies, including HubUX, a qualitative automation platform and community management platform targeting market researchers and UX professionals. He very recently sold the company to Voxpopme, a video gathering and analytics platform, and he’s staying on as a managing director.

Jamin has plenty of experience growing companies, and he’s quick to share his underlying philosophy: “As an entrepreneur, as a builder, as a founder, I become a solution as opposed to a software. … I think about a business in terms of defensibility and growth and how you’re able to enter into the companies and then expand and really become the solution provider of record for that particular problem you’re trying to solve.”

For Jamin, though, the real secret of his continued success goes deeper. It isn’t rocket science — or even research, for that matter. It’s human relationships.

“There’s only one USP that stands the test of time, and that is relationship,” he says. “Figure out how you can become indispensable in terms of the problems you solve for the customers. But even more broadly, you need to have that human relationship and connection inside of the organization where you are indispensable. … You can lean on those relationships —but not in the way of extraction — in the way of adding value into them … and people like that, and they like you, and they’ll want to work with you.”

Learn more about Jamin’s road to repeated success, including his best practices for conducting successful research throughout your company (hint: he believes research is a “team sport”) — plus where Michael Jordan and Stranger Things fit into the narrative — on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript: 

Here are some highlights: 

• Stranger Things and Dungeons and Dragons
• Who should own the customer relationship?
• Best practices for basic market research
• Who should be conducting the research?