Paul: Michael Stobo is a senior product management leader who has successfully launched and grown products across Asia Pacific, EMEA, and Latin America.
We spoke about his beginnings in product management, his 10+ years in the online travel industry, his impressions of product management in Japan, and much more.
Hi Michael. Thanks for your time today. To get us started, could you please give us a quick self-intro?
Michael: Hi, I’m Michael. I’m from Lanarkshire in Scotland (I grew up in a small town about half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh) and I’ve been living in Tokyo for almost 10 years now. During my career I have lived and worked in London, Singapore, Beijing and Tokyo.
You studied law and business at university back home in Scotland. What kind of career did you have in mind for yourself back then?
When I was at high school in the early 1990s there was a popular TV show called LA Law which I loved. I knew it was Hollywood glamour, but still I imagined myself wearing the fancy suit and swanning around courtrooms making smart comments so I applied to and got into law school, but when I got there I found that I wasn’t really very excited by it. A lot of it felt very old fashioned.
In 1994, the internet was just beginning to become something that the public used and I remember going to my tutor and asking them to sign my ‘IT Labs Request Form’ to allow me to get this thing called an email account. I would sit in the IT labs starting to explore the world wide web. The world seemed to be changing. Sitting in law lectures hearing about things that were decided in 1780 felt very dull and so I decided in second year that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. In my final 2 years, I chose subjects which were more business focused. I studied Company Law, Banking Law, Employment Law and something that was very innovative at the time: Internet Technology or Computer Law.
Tell us about your early career and how you ended up in product management?
After university I joined Reuters on their graduate training programme. The programme involved 4 x 6 month assignments over the first two years with one of the assignments being a guaranteed overseas assignment. At the time, Reuters had one of the biggest private networks in the world for delivering news and financial information and one of my first projects at Reuters was to help build the product case for a new service for corporate investor relations managers. So, very early in my career I was exposed to managing information products, how to market them, how to deliver them, firstly on a proprietary network and then on the Internet. Although in those first few years, I wasn’t product manager by job-title a lot of what I was doing were things which are now considered to be product manager skills.
After Reuters, I moved to a start up which was part of British Telecom’s incubator programme. My role there was managing the content on the site and I was able to develop my online marketing and SEO skills. My fourth role (at InfoSpace) was the one where I actually had Product Manager as my job title. InfoSpace at the time was one of the large players in the search engine space, providing meta-search solutions which combined search results from Yahoo, Microsoft/Bing, Ask Jeeves, and others. Google was still in its growth phase at this point. My role was to look after the European search brands to optimise the search results and improve both conversion for the consumer sites but also profitability for the B2B product which combined paid search results and free search results to give a deeper search result set.
After InfoSpace, I joined eBay in their classifieds division. I worked for the Gumtree brand in London and my team looked after the community operations. We were tasked with ensuring the quality of the ads on the site, reducing scams and fraud and managing the support queries coming in from users. One of the interesting parts of this role was that we would identify where there were problems affecting users and I would then use those insights to create product improvement suggestions and work with the development team to make those changes on the platform. It was very much hybrid role but it was great for building up my team management skills an also understanding the relationship between customer issues and how they can be quickly resolved through product improvements.
You entered the online travel industry in 2010 when you joined TripAdvisor, spending time in London, Beijing and Tokyo. Tell us about that.
I joined TripAdvisor just as the company was accelerating its expansion into new markets. When I joined in 2010, my first project was to launch TripAdvisor Thailand followed by Singapore, Russia, Indonesia, Greece and Taiwan. The interesting thing about these new market launches were that they combined a lot of my previous product experience: the new sites had to be good quality of course, but a lot of the focus was on search engine optimization because that’s where the traffic initially came from. On entering a market like Indonesia we needed to make sure that the search keywords were relevant to Bahasa, the Indonesian language.
During my career at TripAdvisor I launched 30 new markets with 13 of those in new languages. Those were really interesting projects to work on and I collaborated very closely with colleagues in the Localization, Sales, Marketing, Data and Engineering teams.
In 2012 I was able to go on secondment to Beijing to work with the China team. My role was to bring some of the best practices we had been developing in London to the China site. It was fascinating to see the rapid growth of travel and tourism in China and to live in a city like Beijing, not being able to speak the language and having to work out how to do things in daily life.
After launching the new sites we had to identify how to grow traffic, revenue and engagement. The original TripAdvisor site launched in 2000 and grew rapidly. For a language like Japanese which has less global reach, the site needs more attention to help it grow and make it useful for people in Japan. In 2014, the opportunity came up for me to move to Tokyo to manage the APAC Product Team and drive the growth of the APAC sites. This was a great challenge on many levels. In Japan in particular, the travel industry is distinct to the rest of the world. For example, you book a hotel per person per night rather than per room per night. You also have unique elements in the travel industry: for example, a ryokan is not something you will find in other markets.
My team made many product changes, some projects taking features that already existed and making them more relevant to the local market, while other projects were building new features specific to Asia.
You moved to Tabist, the hotel operator (formerly OYO) in November 2020 as Product Director, moving into the Head of Product role in December 2021. The pandemic obviously hit the travel industry tremendously hard. Talk us through what was it like experiencing those difficulties day to day?
2020 was tough. It was very difficult watching borders closing and then seeing big global travel companies having to downsize and shut down offices both here in Japan and across the world. So much of the work that we had been doing in the travel industry was being rolled back or cancelled. It was particularly upsetting to see the impact in Japan. The Tokyo Olympics were meant to be a key part of Japan achieving its target of 40 million inbound visitors but instead, the world shut down. We saw last year in 2023, that 31 million people did visit Japan but that 40 million target is still waiting to be achieved.
OYO Japan was created as a result of the turmoil in 2020. When I joined the company, my role was to build a team to build products in Japan for the Japan market (OYO Global would focus on markets which were more similar outside of Japan). Over the course of two years I hired 30 people including designers, back-end and front-end engineers, devops, QA, and of course, product managers. We delivered the website and app to help consumers find information about the hotels and make reservations. On the business side, the hotel management system helps hotels to manage their operations. It’s the system used for check-in, check-out, invoicing etc. The final product we delivered and the one I found most interesting was the dynamic pricing product. This calculated prices for all of the hotels in the portfolio for the next 365 days and then delivered those prices out to the market so the correct price was showing on sites like Rakuten, Jalan and Booking.com.
Doing all of this in the pandemic was a challenge. One of the things that was really difficult was hiring the team. Joining a tech company in the travel industry in the middle of the pandemic, with the border still closed, was not seen as a great career move by many candidates. I’m very proud of the team I built – they are a fantastic group of people from Japan and many other countries – but it took a lot of effort and a lot of evangelising on the future potential of the business to get potential team members to value the opportunity. I still firmly believe that travel within Japan is a huge opportunity. It’s only going to get bigger it’s only going to get stronger. I believe we are still only in the beginning stage of inbound travel into the Japan market. Though I’m no longer with Tabist, I’m cheering on my team and excited to see what they will deliver next.
You’ve now been in Tokyo almost 10 years. Why did you decide to settle here?
I guess I never really intended to be in Tokyo for 10 years. My initial relocation here was a three-year arrangement. I was keen to stay for 2020’s big travel goal of 40 million inbound visitors. Everything I had been working on had relevance to that goal. The atmosphere in the city during the Rugby World Cup in 2019 was incredible and I was excited to see what the Olympics would bring.
So when COVID came along, I still felt that there was a unfulfilled goal of being here and helping support the travel industry. How should Japan cater to those inbound visitors? How do we provide that information in other languages and make Japan a comfortable and easy destination for travellers to experience? Part of why I’m still here is that feeling of unfinished work to be done in the travel space.
Outside of work, I have loved living in Tokyo. Of course, there are days where language issues – my lack of proficiency – can cause problems, but generally it’s a surprisingly easy city to live in. I’ve been lucky to have great colleagues here who have welcomed me and shared their knowledge of great restaurants, bars and activities. The facilities are world class, from transport to shopping, arts, entertainment and of course, the amazing food.
You’ve been working as a freelance product management consultant since last summer. Tell us a little about that.
As you can probably tell by now, my fascination with the travel market in Japan is strong and what I was keen to do as a freelance product management consultant was continue to work on projects in the travel space. With the current situation in global tech firms, there is not the same variety or number of roles as there were pre COVID and so I decided to spend some time working freelance because it allows me to work with different companies but retain my focus on the travel sector.
One of the companies I worked with in 2023 have a really interesting product. Their smartphone concierge allows guests to scan a QR code when they’re in their hotel room and instead of having to go through the manual in the drawer reading pages of information, they can see everything in language on the phone. I think that’s a great example of how you support inbound travellers into Japan and it’s a great way for hotels to keep information up to date without spending lots of money on printing hundreds of pages for every room in the hotel.
In general, what’s your impression of product management in Japan? The tech industry here tends to lag behind global trends and standards in many areas. Is it the same in product management?
When I first came to Japan in 2014 it was a long time before I met anyone who also had ‘Product Manager’ as a job title. If you fast forward to now, it is more common to find other product managers in Tokyo. There has been rapid growth of the startup scene with many more local people involved in tech. Compared to other markets, I think Japan is behind and slower to adopt new trends, but it is changing. I think that where product managers in the rest of the world are often able to focus on pushing boundaries with new features, a lot of time in Japan is spent making an idea work for Japan, for example, earlier, I mentioned some of the travel-specific differences like ryokan. Adapting to regulatory or cultural differences can take time and thought.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product concept which encourages fast innovation by building what you need to prove a business concept. It could mean that a company spends 6 weeks to build and launch a service to book glamping weekends for yoga enthusiasts. To test the service, as long as the tent can be reserved and payment taken, you should be able to determine if there is a viable future business opportunity. But at launch, there may be minimum payment options or support may be provided by email only. In Japan, the consumer expects high quality and service and so it can be difficult for a product manager to practice MVP here. Companies will default to having multiple features and full-service built-in at launch which obviously takes longer. But you also have the concept here of kaizen or continuous improvement which is very much a key feature of good product management practice, though it will be referred to as product optimisation in the rest of the world.
What does your typical day look like?
A typical day for me will start at my home desk around 7am. I’ll check emails from overnight and then I’ll have breakfast while looking at Twitter/X. I follow a lot of product management and travel industry accounts and so there’s always some interesting insights. I’ll often bookmark articles to read later.
If I’m working from home, I’ll get started by 8am or I’ll travel to the office of the company I’m working with. I try to make time to have lunch because I think that the relationship building that happens over lunch is valuable in Japan. When I think back to my time in London, much of the office is sitting having a sandwich at their desk, but in Japan when you do go for lunch with colleagues you do learn something. I’m very aware that I sit a lot staring at screens so I aim to walk 50 kilometres every week (about 7km per day), so on the way home I’ll often walk or get off the train early to go via the park. I try to keep contact with friends and current/former colleagues and so I’m typically out for dinner or drinks three or four nights a week.
What are some of your goals for the future?
Short-term:
See more of Japan. During COVID, I got out of the habit of travelling and I still have so many places I want to see in Japan.
Do more mentoring. Two years ago, over a period of about 6 months, I was mentoring someone who wanted to get into product management. I’m keen to do more of that, to help develop others and share skills I’ve learned.
Personal: I’ve always wanted to learn to sail. I kept putting it off when I lived in London, but I’m keen to make sure I don’t leave it too late.
Professional: I’ve always liked the idea of managing my own business. I just need to settle on a start-up idea!
As an experienced product management pro, what advice would you give to someone looking to break into the field of Product Management for the first time?
Often, I see presentations about product management that are very company-specific. For example, the impression will be that you must have a software engineering background or be able to code. Some companies may have that preference, but I see the key skills as being an enthusiasm for delivering or seeing a product being launched, an ability to break down a big goal or problem into manageable pieces and most importantly, an ability to work with stakeholders from different teams and backgrounds to remove barriers.
I’d encourage someone looking to break into product management to look to where their existing role has touchpoints with product. For example, if you are in account management or customer service, you will hear product feedback and issues from customers all the time. Instead of just forwarding on that feedback, think about what could be changed on the product to improve it. Make a bullet point list. Think of what’s most important for the business, for the customer, sketch out the changes. That will help you start to think like a product manager. It can then be an easier discussion in the company to spend a % of your time working with product team to deliver the changes. That will give you the experience to start putting yourself forward for product management roles.
If you’re not working yet but want to get into product management as a career, then there are some great presentations online about product management.
There are also offline meetups, including in Tokyo. Look for ProductTank and come along to the next event.
Quickfire questions
– what’s the most important piece of advice you’d give yourself if you could go back in time to your arrival in Japan?
Don’t put-off learning hiragana or katakana. It’s much easier to be able to read something aloud and ask what it means than having no clue at all.
– how do you learn new skills and what are you learning currently?
I follow a lot of industry sources on Twitter/X which typically leads to in-depth articles or YouTube links. At the moment, I’m spending time looking at different AI services to understand what they can do. There are many examples of “ProductGPT” which aim to help brainstorm different ideas, create user stories, and speed up the creation of PRDs (Product Requirement Documents). I’m interested to see how these tools may help in normal product management activities.
– tell me a few of your favourite or most recently read books, movies, podcasts, and games.
Book (business): Empowered by Marty Cagan [Amazon JP / Amazon US & others]
This book looks at how companies organise their teams and culture to create product teams with the power to deliver innovative profitable products.
Book (personal): Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success by Miki Berenyi [Amazon JP / Amazon US & others]
I was a fan of the band Lush. Their lead singer has written a book about her life growing up as half-Japanese girl in London and the good and bad things about being in a rock band in the 90s.
Movie: Asteroid City. I love the other-worldly-ness of Wes Anderson’s movies. His latest, Asteroid City, is set in the 50s during the space age.
Podcast: Formula For Success. I’m a huge Formula 1 fan – I’ve been down to see the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka three times. This podcast has former driver David Coulthard and former team owner Eddie Jordan talking about all aspects of the sport.
Game: PokémonGO. In 2016, around 10 of my colleagues started playing PokémonGO when it launched. I was curious about the augmented reality features, but quickly found an innovative game that can be played on the move, so it helps me with my walking goals too. No wait for a train or coffee queue is ever boring now! There are still four of the team playing and although we are all in different companies now, we still keep in touch gifting, collecting and battling in the game.
– what’s your favourite place to visit in Japan?
I visited the Sapporo Snow Festival in 2017. I really enjoyed the displays and compact city centre. You can go and see some of the displays or ice sculptures and after an hour or so, find a great café or restaurant nearby to warm up and enjoy some great food before heading out to see the next set of snow carvings. I need to go back and see more of Hokkaido.
– what’s the best thing you’ve spent 10,000 JPY on in Japan?
A JR Ski ticket to Gala Yuzawa. I couldn’t believe it when I first went with friends. The ticket included Shinkansen from Tokyo Station straight to the resort. No need for walking or transfers or bus journeys. You take an escalator up from the train station platforms to the ski-hire stand before turning the corner onto the gondola to the mountain. Train, ski-hire, gondola and lift pass were all included. Where else can you take a bullet train from the centre of a mega-city straight to a ski resort in less than 2 hours?
Finally, do you have any asks for our readers?
I’m going to go back to my mission of helping inbound visitors to Japan and talk about good design and product localization. If we look at a lot of the really convenient things in Japan which make life easier for locals and for visitors, I see a common theme of websites and apps not being built with visitors in mind. It’s not just about having a service in another language, it’s about how the site is built, what rules or procedures have a side-effect of preventing use by visitors. It is sadly too common to find websites with text displayed as part of an image. That means translation tools don’t work and so the offer or campaign is not accessible to visitors. Similarly, sign-up processes requiring Japanese phone numbers or a LINE ID or a credit card issued by a Japanese bank all become barriers. Sometimes these are a result of regulatory or legal reasons but in my view, many are a result of poor product thinking or design.
My ask to the designers, software developers, product managers and QA professionals in Japan is to think of the additional business every year which can come from 30 million+ visitors to Japan and to build workflows and processes which support their needs. Text which can be read by translation tools, booking flows that don’t break when the page has been translated in a browser, forms which don’t get to step 7 before telling you that if you have a Hong Kong telephone number then you cannot register, and so on. In most cases, these are easy to solve on the development side without significant effort. Please speak up when you see your company doing these things!
That was super interesting, Michael. Thanks very much for chatting with me.
You can connect with Michael via his LinkedIn profile and website.
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