Office Hours: I’m Sandy Huang, VP of Product at GoodRx. AMA!Featured

Posted in:Product Office Hours Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Management and Leadership

Hi everyone, I’m Sandy Huang.

As VP of Product at GoodRx, I focus on innovating to provide Americans with accessible, transparent, and affordable healthcare. In my 20+ year career in consumer tech product management, I’ve had the pleasure of building products that delight millions of customers.

Before GoodRx, I was Head of Product at Amazon where I led Visual Shopping and developed AI-powered products that enable people to shop with images. Prior to that, I built Alexa content experiences on the Echo Show for which my team and I received a couple of patents for the innovation.

My background prior to Amazon has been a mix of mid-size companies and venture-backed startups including Shutterfly, Flipboard, and Minted. I’m also a product career coach and advisor.

During my downtime, I love traveling, taking dance classes, and watching live theater.

I’m a huge advocate for diversity in product leadership. Ask me anything about product management, innovating, developing strategy, leading teams, aligning stakeholders, being a woman in tech, career/interviewing strategies, and growth into senior leadership!

ElphaStaff·Oct 28

Thanks so much for joining us @sandyhuang!Elphas – please ask @sandyhuang your questions before Friday, November 1st. @sandyhuang may not have time to answer every questions, so emoji upvote your favorites 🔥👍🏾➕

Vilma32·Oct 31

I'm a Sr PM trying to position myself into a people manager/leadership role in my next job (I'm actively applying for roles). I don't have any experience building teams, but I have done a bit of mentoring. I've definitely improved organizational processes, which itself is a change management thing. I'm curious to know how you would advise me and others similar to me who are trying to move to the next level?

sandyhuang·Nov 01

Being a mentor is a great way to show leadership, and identifying, proposing, and implementing organizational processes to keep things running more smoothly and efficiently is another way. You could also host lunch and learns on a topic you have a super power in or is more unique in your organization. One of the toughest things I’ve seen in going from individual contributor to management is showcasing strategic chops. You can do this in the form of documents and in 1:1s - get this in front of leadership. The ability to think big and show vision is critical for getting into a leadership role and in my experience, it's has been the number one hindrance for promotion from individual contributor to management.

daliahk·Oct 30

Hello, Sandy. Thank you for hosting! What would your advice be to someone trying to switch from marketing to product management?

sandyhuang·Nov 01

As a marketer, you’re also thinking about the customer needs and how the solution is answering the customer’s problem. My advice on making that transition is to do that within the company you’re already at, where you can get on projects that showcase product management capabilities if need be in preparation to pitch your move. You already have a track record there and it’s easier to make that switch with people who know your work. If you try to do the switch externally with another company, make sure you target companies within the same space. It’s extremely difficult to switch role types and industries/space at the same time. Good luck to you, @daliahk!

mcorreiaangis·Oct 30

Hi Sandy! Thanks so much for being open to answering questions. As someone who is relatively new to the Product world, and I have seen that it is an extremely competitive market, what do you suggest to Product Owners to help them stand out and succeed regardless of industry?

sandyhuang·Nov 01

Welcome to the product world, @mcorreiaangis! Your reputation will follow you so make sure you excel on these fronts: have ownership, have a bias for action, and deliver results. Having ownership doesn’t mean you have all the answers but that you are proactive and identify and seek to solve for any gaps. Having a bias for action means you can make decisions and unblock any blockers effectively to move forward. And deliver results - make sure you are hitting the mark in terms of what is considered success for a launch. These three things will go a long way. And network! Most jobs are found/helped through your network and you never know who may be able to assist you along the way (and who you may be able to assist).

mcorreiaangis·Nov 04

Thanks so much Sandy! I really appreciate the insight and will definitely make sure to keep those points at the forefront as I continue looking for a new role.

AllieCo·Oct 31

What was your biggest challenge as VP of Product at GoodRx, and how did you overcome it?

madhuchavva·Oct 31

Hi @sandyhuang,As VP of an upcoming startup, I often run into challenging situations. Handling situations where stakeholders are divided can be extremely challenging, especially in a fast-paced environment. How do you effectively mediate when stakeholders have conflicting priorities—particularly in the startup ecosystem where decisions need to be agile yet impactful? Are there specific approaches or frameworks you use to drive alignment while maintaining a focus on innovation and growth?Thank you so much for your time!-Madhu

Kattw·Oct 31

Hi Sandy,Thank you for the opportunity to ask you product leadership and product operations questions. If you were hired for your first Director of Product Operations or Product Operations Manager role, what's the most important thank you'd do in your first 30 days to ensure you go off to the fastest and effective start possible?

birgitt·Oct 28

Thank you so much for the opportunity to ask you questions, Sandy! This is a really tactical question (coming from someone who's been in the startup world all of her professional career): when proposing a new product, what tools do you like to use to pitch/present the roadmap to leadership and to your team? E.g., value maps? A startup-like pitch deck? Thanks again!

sandyhuang·Nov 01

Great question, @birgitt. I’d look at this from a product management perspective because you need to meet the needs of your customers. In this case, your customer is your leadership and your team. So the question is, how do they best receive a proposal? What would be most helpful for them to understand the proposal? Some teams/cultures receive information best as visuals/in a deck, others prefer documents or narratives, or spreadsheets. Understanding their needs is the best way to ensure you’re communicating in a language that works best for them to receive it.. Then it’s a matter of answering questions such as: What’s the north star of this product? What does success look like? How does this product fit into the overall business strategy? What’s the working backwards plan (which is essentially the roadmap to get to the north star)? As for actual tools, I personally like to keep it simple using a document to lay out the WHY (backed up by a SWOT analysis) we want to build the new product answering the questions above, and then a table of the roadmap items in prioritized order to describe HOW we will build the product.

cassandralang·Oct 30

Hi Sandy! Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA—really excited to learn from you! Fun fact Sandy was my highschool nickname on the Soccer team! I have a couple of questions:Taking on a Stretch Role: I’m currently in a position that the job title is a little bigger than where I am in my product career journey. I took it on knowing that I would have a lot of growing to do, which is exciting but also challenging. How can I best prepare myself for what’s next? Do you think working with a career coach is worthwhile? I spend a lot of time learning independently, but I’m not always able to apply what I’m learning directly. Do you recommend rounding out skills that aren’t actively in use right now?Stakeholder Management: One of the biggest areas I’m working on in my role is stakeholder management. I’d love to hear any tips or strategies you’ve found helpful throughout your career for building strong relationships and ensuring alignment across teams.Thanks so much for any advice you can share!

sandyhuang·Nov 02

I like the fun fact, @cassandralang! Good for you for taking on a stretch role, it's really how we all continue to grow! Make sure to see how others in that job title now are successful in their roles. Each company/role values different things so understand what's valued for your role (ask your manager, have 1:1s with those already in the role). Find out what are the most important problems to solve and what the end goal should look like. Working with a career coach can certainly be worthwhile. They can hold you accountable, help you think through things as a third party, ask questions you may not have thought of, and more. There is a leap from what someone learns to actually applying it and a coach can help you map out a plan to put what you learn into action (feel free to reach out to me if you want to explore). It's good to round out skills if you have strong areas of growth but make sure those are the things that your company/org values. Strong stakeholder management requires solid understanding of your stakeholders needs in order to align them. It could be that a stakeholder isn't aligning because they have different goals. Only by understanding what they want can you be able to start addressing them when you are trying to get alignment. Building strong relationships comes from trust and one of the best ways to earn trust is to do what you say you're going to do and do it well. Strong collaboration is also important - involve your engineering and design counterparts in the discovery process of any initiative. It's much easier to get buy-in from others when they have been part of the process from the start.

cassandralang·Nov 04

Sandy thank you so much for this thoughtful message and for all the great advice! I appreciate your encouragement and totally agree about understanding what’s valued within the role and aligning with stakeholder goals to build those strong relationships. I'll definitely keep in mind the importance of collaboration, especially early on in the discovery process.I’ll absolutely shoot you a DM to learn more about the career coach situation—it sounds like it could be such a valuable support system for growth in a stretch role. Thanks again for offering your insight!

Rema6·Oct 29

Thank you so much Sandy. In your view, what were your biggest takeaways and the habits you embodied to go from a Senior PM to a VP of Product? What have you found are the unique challenges of being a woman leader in tech and how do you tackle them?

sandyhuang·Nov 01

Thanks for the question. I have several takeaways and habits in going from an individual contributor to leadership. 1. Being able to communicate at the right depth. When I was a Senior PM I had to communicate with my peers stakeholders at a very detailed level. As I moved up and needed to communicate with executive stakeholders, right-sizing the communications was critical. Executives are busy and context-switch like crazy so learning to roll up communications, be succinct, giving just the right amount of context without getting into all the details has been critical.2. Learning to empower my team. As I made the transition to no longer being in the day-to-day details on my projects, I learned to scale myself. In order to scale myself, I need to give my team the right context, goals, and north star to enable empowering them to act and make the right decisions day-to-day.3. Listening. Listening. Listening. I have strong conviction on product roadmaps and product direction but I’ve developed the habit to listen more. First of all, it’s an important way to empower the team to have a dialogue as the teams often just hears from the leader. I learn so much from listening, not just about considerations of the product I hadn’t thought of before, but the dynamics of the team–are they healthy?Being a woman in tech does have its challenges. Unconscious bias is unfortunately still prevalent. As women, we often have to work harder than our male counterparts to move up. When we offer an idea, it’s often attributed to our male counterparts. Being aware of these unconscious biases is important so we can point them out and make others aware. As a leader, I call these out when I see them. It’s also very effective having male allies who call them out as well. One very actionable thing is making sure that others, like your manager and leadership team, know about your work. As women, we often perceive telling others about our good work as “shameless self-promotion.” It’s not, we should be celebrating our wins and not be afraid to publicly speak about them. Another issue that I know I worked through in my career is feeling that I’m not ready for the next level job. Studies have shown that women won’t push for their own promotion or apply for a job as much as men do because women feel like they need to fill 100% all the qualifications before doing so. I removed this mentality early on when I learned about this fact.

Nele020·Oct 29

Hi Sandy, thank you for the opportunity to ask! Given your experience leading AI-driven visual shopping initiatives at Amazon, I’d love to know how you see AI transforming search and discovery on e-commerce platforms in the coming years. What unique challenges or opportunities do you think product teams should consider when developing AI-powered shopping tools to enhance the customer experience?

sandyhuang·Nov 01

I love this question, @Nele020 ! I see AI completely transforming search and discovery for e-commerce. With search, you can really pinpoint what you want to find, especially if you use a multimodal approach - using an image AND text/voice to fully describe what you’re looking for. With AI, you’ll be able to get whatever you can imagine with generative AI. You can describe some image/graphic and fine tune it with some prompts and create custom products for yourself for e-commerce platforms that can create on demand. AI is so powerful and efficient with large amounts of data so being able to search like you’re having a conversation with a friend will become commonplace. You can ask things in search like, “I need an outfit for a special event. I love purple so anything purple or floral would be great. I usually look better in long dresses so that’s my preference and please keep my jewelry minimal and gold” and find entire outfits for yourself. In terms of challenges, it’s important to always start with the customer need/problem to solve rather than an AI solution. AI is a tool so don’t get caught up in a loop where you’re looking at an AI solution and trying to invent a need for it. Get crisp on the core of the problem to solve, then understand what aspects of AI you can leverage to either make the solution better or faster/more efficient to market.

Nele020·Nov 02

Thank you very much for answering, Sandy.

melanietaylor1·Nov 01

@sandyhuang I'm a senior health tech PM trying to transition from working for ResMed (CPAP manufacturer) to a company that works on ecosystem healthcare value. What do you see as the core focus areas and attributes for making this shift? Thanks!

tinaslee·Oct 30

Hi Sandy! Thanks so much for doing this! I'm curious about your path into executive leadership as a woman of color. In my own experience, I discovered some strengths we may have (eg. collaborative problem solving, EQ as both talent developer and cross-functional leader, empathy for user) are not always seen as important to successful leadership, but often much needed for both the team and the business. What do you feel are some strengths you had that enabled you to progress as a leader within these orgs, challenges you overcame to prove your value, and/or were there things you consciously did differently? Also, if you wouldn't mind sharing a leadership failure story that you learned a valuable lesson from. :)

sandyhuang·Nov 01

What a great question, @tinaslee. It’s important to lean into your strengths and super powers to progress as a leader. I spent more time during the earlier days in my career focusing on my weaknesses than more strengths. If I had leaned more into my natural strengths, I think I would have arrived to where I’m at a lot faster. One of my super powers is empathy - empathy for customers as well as empathy for those on my team, stakeholders, and others. So once I began to lean in on this, my leadership career really blossomed because I was building the right things for customers and thereby making significant impact to the business because it would show in the revenue. But also the empathy allows me to match those on my team to doing what they want to do with what they are good at. Early in my career, I didn’t know much about unconscious biases. It wasn’t until I educated myself on all the unconscious biases that I was able to look out for them for myself and for colleagues. Education is power and with the knowledge, I could do something about it, like call it out. Or be aware that as a woman or because of my cultural upbringing/ethnicity, I’m more prone to certain biases within myself and from others so I can do something about it. As for leadership failure, in the first question above I talk about understanding the way teams need to receive information. At one company, I spent the first six months communicating with the executive team through documents and wondering why my message wasn’t sticking. I was too slow in realizing that the currency of the company and the way messages were best received was through slides and visuals. So it was a good lesson for me to internalize that what’s best for me in terms of how I like to communicate ideas is not always best on the receiving end, and if I need to get the buy-in on the receiving end, I need to use their language.

tinaslee·Nov 02

Thanks so much, @sandyhuang! This is so interesting and helpful. I love the point you make about leaning into natural strengths - empowering to approach leadership in this way. Awareness of unconscious bias and communication styles are so huge as well. Thanks for the advice!

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