Anne Steinhaus, Head of Product at C2FO, joins Zach on today’s episode. Like many we’ve interviewed, Anne’s career path was quite circuitous (thanks, Anne, for the vocab word). Believe it or not, she started out as a biochem major, working in a lab her first year post-grad before changing course to data analysis/marketing. After a few years and two cross-country moves, a recruiter introduced her to Product Management, and Anne found her niche.

From startups to Trip Advisor and now finally at C2FO, Anne brings a great deal of heart, passion, and forward-thinking to her product teams. Anne gives great advice to aspiring tech leaders, touching on authority vs influence, analysis paralysis, ambiguity, and much more. No matter your career goals or path, Anne’s insight is valuable; there’s something here for everyone.

Key Takeaways:

• Take Risks: Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and try new things, as some of the most rewarding experiences come from taking risks.
• Find Mentors: Seek out mentors who can offer guidance, advice, and open doors for you throughout your career.
• Always Be Learning: Stay up-to-date with new trends and technologies by reading articles, attending conferences, and taking courses to continuously grow in your career.
• Embrace Diversity: Recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry to create better products and outcomes for everyone.

View This Episode On:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/k5uaQtw9ZUM
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/next-level-a-videocast-for-aspiring-engineers/id1742833688?i=1000663131782
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3j9nVc6Yx1cINpfFUtk48p?si=c6b0954c455f4651
• … or wherever you get your podcasts!

About About Guest Anne Steinhaus:

Anne Steinhaus is a product leader and problem solver with a history of guiding companies to success. Her pedigree includes everything from startups to large enterprises, like Trip Advisors. She is passionate about product management and believes in leading through influence and by example. In addition to her professional pursuits, she is an avid runner and a dedicated mother.

About The Next Level Series:

Next Level is a Videocast for Aspiring Engineers with Keyhole Software’s Chief Architect, Zach Gardner. This series dives into the pivotal question every software engineer faces: what direction should my career take?

Like many of us, Zach grappled with this dilemma until he found guidance from incredible mentors. Now, Next Level brings these insights to you. Zach interviews tech leaders, delving into their diverse career paths and success stories. Spoiler: careers in tech rarely follow a straight line! Discover the stories, challenges, and strategies behind these industry giants, all aimed at helping you map out your own journey.

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Partial Episode Transcript

Note: this transcript section was created using generative AI tools like YouTube automated transcripts and ChatGPT. There may be typos, slight content changes, or character limits for brevity!

Zach Gardner: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Future. I’m Zach Gardner, the Chief Architect at Keyhole Software. I’ve had the privilege of working with some really amazing mentors in my almost 20 years of doing software development. People along the way that have taken time out of their day to help me solve challenges, help me to think about things in ways that I perhaps wasn’t thinking about. Maybe I was being a bit too myopic and opening my eyes towards what are some of the potentials, what are some of the things that I need to be thinking about. Honestly, I felt like it was time that I give back, that I pay it forward, that I help other people who are in shoes that were very similar to mine. Maybe not size 13s, because maybe not everyone is 6’6″ like me, but people that really want to advance in their careers.

So I decided to go out. I scoured the four corners of the WWW and I found a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life. Some are consultants, some are FTE, some are CTO. But I wanted to focus today on Kansas City companies because, although it looks like I live in the future, I actually don’t. I’m in Lenexa, Kansas currently. With me today from the product side, which is someone who I think this is a first for me—I’ve never interviewed someone from the product side—is Ann Steinhouse, who’s the head of product at C2FO. How are things going?

Ann Steinhouse: Oh, things are going pretty well. How about you, Zach?

Zach Gardner: Can’t complain. I’m going to go see “Inside Out 2” after we’re done recording this. This is in no way a—I’m not being reimbursed by “Inside Out 2.” If anything, I am paying them the privilege of seeing the movie.

Ann Steinhouse: Yes, I have already seen it. My daughter has seen it. One of them has seen it twice, so yeah, there’s a lot there.

Zach Gardner: Good, good. I’m really looking forward to it. And of course, all the views and opinions expressed in this program, the views and opinions of the participants, don’t reflect their employers, don’t reflect any trade organizations. They don’t even reflect any movie theaters that they might be going to here in a few hours. We’re just two people. We’re just having a good time.

So, C2FO, you know, started by Sandy Keer, Kansas City company. It was actually like less than 200 feet from our old office when we were off State Line. I’m curious if you could talk first a little bit about you, you know, what has your career path been like? What are some of the places that you have worked at? And then that should hopefully kind of segue us into, you know, kind of recommendations that you would have for others.

Ann Steinhouse: Sure, sure. Yeah, I took a pretty circuitous route to get here, which I think a lot of your guests have. So I grew up on the East Coast, in Massachusetts. I started out as a biochemistry major, which I really liked the subject matter but wasn’t super passionate about it. Wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Thought I might go into medicine. And so I worked for a lab and worked in a lab for a year outside college and I really didn’t like it. So I was fortunate enough a friend of mine had a job with a really small boutique research firm and I was able to kind of take over her job when she left.

It was my first foray into data analysis and it was kind of cool because I could use some of my science background. We were trying to analyze, you know, potentially bad drug interactions based on prescription data. So it was kind of cool. Got introduced to statistical software packages like SPSS and SAS. It was just really interesting problems that I could try to solve.

From there, I got into marketing. A lot of what I was doing was using that same kind of data analysis bent. I worked for Digitas in Boston, which is a digital marketing agency, looking at mostly email campaigns. And a lot of what I was producing was just PowerPoint decks based on what I was doing, but really got to dive further into SAS, got introduced to SQL. So, you know, I kind of geeked out on the data side of things for a little while.

From there, I worked for another agency. My husband is in medicine. He matched for his residency in San Francisco. So we moved out there. This was 2007, so, you know, it was before all the Facebook millionaires and changes to that city. But it was a lot of fun being out there. Worked for another agency while I was there and really got introduced to a mentor who took me under his wing. And, you know, he was basically my MBA program. So he taught me things like the five Ps of marketing, the Porter’s five forces, you know, things that I probably couldn’t recite today—how to do a SWOT analysis, all that fun stuff. But it was a really fun sort of education and so I got a lot out of that experience just understanding how companies work.

I also got to travel a lot, which I think just instilled in me sort of the feeling of like, you know, you get your stuff done on your own time. You don’t have to be beholden to a 9-to-5 or 8-to-6 sort of schedule. So I kind of picked up a lot from my four years there.

As part of this journey, my husband switched specialties and rematched in Boston. So moved back to the East Coast and, you know, it was I think 2011 when I sort of said, hey, I’m not loving this. Like I’m producing these strategy documents for clients. I can’t really see what they’re doing with those. I can’t see the impact they’re having on the company. I don’t want what I own to just be sort of a PowerPoint deck at the end of the day, although I was really good at PowerPoint and I still pride myself on that. So, you know, I got hooked up with a recruiter who introduced me to this idea of product management. It sounded like it ticked all the boxes for me. I could use a lot of the skills that I had acquired from having a solid foundation in understanding data, understanding how to work with businesses and clients, understanding end users through my marketing experience.

Landed at a startup. It was I think about 25 developers and me. I was the only female there, which was also very sort of eye-opening. We did hire a female office manager as well, so I wasn’t completely alone, but got really introduced to agile software development as well as startup culture. It was a lot of fun. It was great feeling like I was so much more hands-on. I got to really build things with and through other people, so that was a lot of fun.

After maybe a year and a half there, we got acquired. I was fortunate enough, I will say, to not be one of the people continuing because I wasn’t really excited about sort of the future of what that company was going to do. I thought I’m going to take the summer off. I’m going to just explore. I had at that point 10 years into my career and I really hadn’t taken a break. Within two weeks, I had two job offers in front of me. So, you know, the best-laid plans, right? It was kind of the first time where I felt like I was at a crossroads.

I had interviewed with a sort of boutique customer research consulting company, and that would have been I think a great job for me. It was more traditional. I would have had a pretty decent salary. And then the other option in front of me was I had been working with a friend of mine who was part of a really small early startup. There were three people. They had just gotten into Techstars and they said, hey, want to come on this journey together and make very little money and kind of go through a crazy experience? I was like, okay, well, I don’t have kids yet. This is probably the last opportunity I’m going to have like this. So I dove in.

The Techstars experience was really great. It was pretty crazy. Being in my early 30s, I already felt like one of the older people there. But that just gave me a lot more feeling of ownership and realizing that as a product person, yes, you are responsible for what engineers build, but you’re also responsible for the business. It was a really great experience but ultimately my heart wasn’t really in it. So from there, I landed at TripAdvisor. That was I think where I really blossomed, I would say, as a product person.

I got to work on some really cool stuff, which maybe I didn’t fully appreciate at the time but looking back, it was just amazing. I ultimately landed sort of in the search arena. At the time, if you were to go on TripAdvisor and search for something like “beachfront hotels,” what you would get is a list of hotels with “beachfront” in the name. At that point, we had reached our 100 millionth review on the site. We said, hey, don’t you think there’s some great content in these reviews that would be helpful to travelers? So we basically built a search engine where people could search using that content from all of those reviews to serve up more relevant results. Along with that came, okay, how do we index all of this stuff? This is just a massive database. How do we index, how do we store it, how do we retrieve it?

So I worked closely with our data science team, which was also a really great experience. Ultimately we landed, I think, on something that is still on the site today, which is TripAdvisor best value. So, the idea is for a particular search, we’re going to give you sort of the best value hotel for what you’re searching for, which is going to be a combination of the reviews and ratings and the price and availability.

That was really exciting. From there, I took on more projects, more sort of a leadership role. At that point, my husband was, I would say, almost burnt out on medicine. He was at Harvard Medical School, he was working in the lab all the time, he was working on research. We had our first daughter and he was like, okay, I’m ready to kind of find something different. He got recruited out to Kansas City by Cerner. That’s how we ended up here. I worked for a startup here for about two years, which was actually an Israeli startup, so it was pretty interesting working on Israeli time. Also the first time I managed a team, which was just super eye-opening. I think I grew a lot as a leader, got a lot of humility from that experience, and ultimately left to come to C2FO. It was just a super compelling mission, I thought, which was democratizing access to capital for businesses.

So here I am today, four years into this job. It’s been a wild ride. I’ve learned a ton. I love my team. I think we do great work. And now I’m here on this podcast.

Zach Gardner: Awesome. It’s been quite a journey, I can see. So what advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out in the industry or thinking about a transition like you did?

Ann Steinhouse: Yeah, I think, you know, there’s a couple of pieces of advice I’d offer. One is don’t be afraid to take risks. I think, you know, when you’re starting out, it’s really easy to kind of feel like you need to follow a specific path or you need to stay in a role because it’s safe. But, you know, some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had have come from taking risks and trying new things. So don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.

The second piece of advice I would offer is to find mentors. I’ve been really fortunate to have some amazing mentors throughout my career who have helped guide me and given me advice and opened doors for me. So, you know, seek out people who you admire, who you think can offer you guidance, and don’t be afraid to reach out to them. Most people are more than happy to help if you just ask.

Lastly, I would say, you know, always be learning. The tech industry is constantly evolving and changing, and it’s important to stay up-to-date with new trends and technologies. So, you know, read articles, attend conferences, take courses—whatever you can do to keep learning and growing in your career.

Zach Gardner: That’s great advice. I especially like the part about finding mentors. I think that’s something that can make such a huge difference, no matter where you are in your career. So, looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of product management and the tech industry in general?

Ann Steinhouse: Oh, that’s a great question. I think there are so many exciting things happening right now. One of the things that really excites me is the increasing focus on user experience. I think we’re seeing a shift towards more user-centered design and thinking about how we can create products that really meet the needs of users and provide a great experience.

Another thing that excites me is the potential for technology to solve real-world problems. You know, whether it’s through AI, machine learning, or other emerging technologies, I think there’s a huge opportunity to create products that can have a positive impact on people’s lives and on the world.

And finally, I’m excited about the growing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. I think there’s a growing recognition of the importance of having diverse teams and creating inclusive environments, and I think that’s going to lead to better products and better outcomes for everyone.

Zach Gardner: Absolutely. Diversity and inclusion are so important, and it’s great to see more companies recognizing that. Well, Ann, it’s been fantastic having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for sharing your journey and your insights with us.

Ann Steinhouse: Thank you, Zach. It’s been a pleasure.

Zach Gardner: And thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll be back soon with more great conversations. Until then, take care and keep innovating.