Smith Cochrane (right) accepts the Emmy with her colleague German Cheung

Smith Cochrane (right) accepts the Emmy with her colleague German Cheung

Kathryn Smith Cochrane’s (MBA 2016) recent Emmy award win didn’t have the anticipatory stress of the ones you see on TV. Her Technology and Engineering Emmy win for her work on YouTube TV’s Key Plays feature was announced in April, several months before the Primetime Emmys air. “For this particular Emmy’s ceremony, the Academy decides and announces all the winners in advance so you don’t have the pressure of being nominated and finding out live whether you won or not,” says Smith Cochrane, the Group Product Manager at YouTube TV. One of two big news items this spring (she welcomed a daughter just two weeks earlier) we asked her where the statuette resides—and her path to the podium.

Is there a special place you plan to keep the Emmy?
On a shelf next to the trophies from my coed, slow-pitch rec league softball trophies. The primary statue will be on display in the YouTube office.

What drew you to this type of work?
I’ve always been a big sports fan (go Celtics!) and I knew I wanted to work in tech product management, but it wasn’t until my internship at YouTube during HBS that I realized I could make a career out of these interests. The YouTube TV team was just starting to form in summer 2015 with a goal of reimagining cable TV and I was really intrigued by the opportunity to build something brand new in a space where consumers hadn’t seen much innovation in recent years. Once I graduated in 2016, I became one of the first Product Managers on the team and led all of the sports features, among other parts of the user experience.

How do you use what you learned at HBS in this work?
The particular feature that won an Emmy (Key Plays) resulted from many hours of user research to understand the unmet needs of sports fans and then months of prototyping and iteration, all of which were hard skills I learned in TOM and the Product Management course. The development and launch of a product like this also requires close collaboration across many functions (Design, Engineering, Business Development, Marketing, Operations, Finance, etc) so I also found myself relying a lot on the management and leadership lessons from classes like LEAD and GMPA.

What advice would you give current students interested in following a similar career path to yours?
Product Management often relies on leadership via influence, and to be influential you need to be credible. So get your hands dirty. Talk directly to customers to understand their needs. Build a prototype. Ensure that no one understands the problem and solution spaces better than you do.

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