the goal of your kindle strategies these like non-scalable hacks they only exist to unlock the fire strategies to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users pinterest airbnb tinder reddit canberra hip camp fair eventbrite what do these companies all have in common i'll tell you casey winters as far as i know casey has worked with and advised more consumer companies on their product and growth strategies than
anyone in the world he's also really generous with his time and sets time aside to help founders and product leaders i always learned so much talking to casey and i'm really excited for you to hear this episode in our chat we cover casey's advice on making trade-offs as a product leader justifying non-sexy product improvements the spectrum of product people and how to level up your skills and wherever you are in the spectrum new growth's trends
and tactics and strategies that i seek when to focus on growth and his top advice on growth strategy and a bunch of other stuff as a big bonus we're actually going to be doing a live ama with casey in my newsletter slack
community it's going to be an august 5th at 10 a.m pacific time and so if you'd like to ask casey any questions make sure to get into the slack until then enjoy this episode with casey winters hey casey winners what do you love about
coda code is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because i got to work on their launch when i was at greylock but in terms of what i love about it you know i love loops and coda has some of the coolest and most useful
content loops i've seen how the loop works is someone can create a coda and share it publicly for the world this can be how you create okrs run in your planning build your own map whatever every one of those codas can then be
easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally even wrote it so they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops which is something i'm personally passionate about i actually use coda myself every day it's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation i use it for first drafts organize my content calendar to plan each podcast episode on
so many more things coda is giving listeners this podcast one thousand dollars in free credit off their first statement just go to coda dot io slash lenny that's coda dot io slash this episode is brought to you by mixpanel offering powerful self-serve product analytics something we talk a lot about on the show is how startups can build successful and amazing products and relying on gut feeling is a really expensive way to find out if you're
heading in the right direction especially when you're raising money because vcs don't want to pay the price for these kinds of mistakes that's why mixpanel will give you fifty thousand 000 in credits when you join their startup program with mixpanel startups find product market fit faster helping you take your company from minimal viable product to the next unicorn access real-time insights with the help of their pre-built templates and know
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that kind of blew my mind on product or growth or even just the world and so i'm really excited to have this conversation mostly to selfishly extract as much knowledge out of your head as i can in the hour that we have together and so
with that welcome very kind happy to be here so you've worked at so many iconic companies and worked with so many iconic companies it almost boggles the mind just looking at your linkedin trying to scroll through linkedin and
you have to click on see additional experiences on and there's just so many places you've worked so many companies you've worked with could you just give listeners maybe a 10 000 foot view of your career arc through product and
well i started my career as an analyst at apartments.com on the marketing side so it was my job to measure every channel for effectiveness and driving needs these are things like you know seo adwords affiliate marketing email
so once i got good at measuring that i naturally started working on optimizing those channels directly and then i started you know going to do re user research and understand how the product could be better so that we could convert leads better and it was at that point that i got the feedback from the company that i was this weird marketing and product hybrid and they really know what to do with that because those were two totally
separate departments it wasn't until i got to grubhub and i was the 15th employee and they were like dude we don't care like as long as you grow how many people order food i don't care if you work on marketing i don't care if you change the product do whatever we'll have results and we now call these roles growth but you know that term didn't exist at the time so i basically worked on growing the demand side of that business from series a to ipo
we ended up creating a product management function out of my team there but for the first four years we didn't have product titles either that you know that was kind of a newer idea also it wasn't until i went to pinterest that
i was actually formally labeled a product person i ended up leading the growth product team there we basically had to rebuild the growth model of the business to to reignite growth so i was there from 40 million mau to 150 million mau
it was around that time that i started doing some more advising you know with airbnb on the demand side with pocket and then i went to a vc named greylock partners and worked with their companies on on growth and scaling and then i just independently started working as a full-time advisor with companies like you know eventbrite tinder thumbtack canva and after doing that for a couple years eventbrite opened this cheap product officer role
and they asked me to take it so now i've been doing that for three years now that's an excellent segue to our next little segment that i want to get into which is uh partly your cpo role and the work that you do there and also touching a bit on a bit of the writing that you've done so you're currently chief product officer at eventbrite which is a company that i love i have so many friends there and they're all amazing uh such a big
fan of the company and i know a lot of listeners are maybe thinking about becoming cpo someday as a goal and so i thought it'd be cool to chat through some of the challenges that you're having and some of the things
you've learned in the role sure cool yeah i'll be more specific so one of the things that you mentioned that you're working on is thinking about trade-offs and being very explicit about trade-offs you're making communicating why you made
certain trade-offs and then just generally communicating that upward it's executives and across the company so i'm curious just to hear what you've learned around how to communicate trade-offs and internal communication yeah one of the things i found especially during the pandemic at eventbrite where you know we weren't obviously hiring a lot of people and we had you know lots of various issues come up is that a lot of managers and leaders
would just try to deal with issues on their own and not raise them you know or escalate them with me in particular and some of these were like really tough situations so then you know later on i'd ask why something went wrong or why we didn't achieve a goal and i'd get you know some feedback from my team of like hey you don't understand the situation this is really impossible there's all these things going wrong and then i respond like
yeah of course i don't understand the situation because you haven't told me about it like how am i supposed to evaluate things fairly if you don't let me know what's really going on so you know these people on my team thought
that being a leader was you know handling it the best they could given the circumstances when you know in many cases the right way is to escalate the issue so that perhaps i could help them change the circumstances so the circumstances
aren't as dire and if i can't change the circumstances i'm at least aware of the circumstances and the explicit trade-off we've made to deal with you know that situation and then i can help communicate that better to others across the company and i can help evaluate the results with the proper context and do it more fairly so i find that in general people just way under communicate upward inside of companies and then they'll complain that
executives are out of touch you know when they aren't telling executives what the executives need to know so you know then when you know people inside a company do try to communicate you know upward a lot of times they're so in the weeds
that as an executive i just don't understand what they're saying and then when i ask questions it's like as an exec i'm asking a question in another language it's like uh i don't know if you've ever seen ocean's 12
but as a joke they invite matt damon to this business meeting and they just talk and code as a prank on him and you know that's what a lot of people on my team feel sometimes when they're talking to the executives like i don't even understand what these questions mean like it's like you're speaking you know another language so one of the ways i try to frame it to my team is like if you're not an executive you know whatever you're working on
you're basically writing and telling a story and when you talk to an exact about that story you have to start with chapter one which is you know what part of the company strategy are you working on what metrics are you trying to improve what
assumptions are you making that are guiding you know what you're building and i find that many times when non-executives are presenting to execs they'll start on like chapter six so you know even if that part of the
story is right it's like a good story you haven't earned the right to tell that part of the story yet because you skipped the first five chapters um i've definitely seen people with the opposite problem as well which i call like starting at the beginning of the time where you know you come into a meeting you know with the ceo or with the cfo or something and you basically spend like the first like 20 minutes re-explaining
the company strategy or who our customer is or something that everyone already knows and then by the time you get to explaining new information you've used up you know you're a lot of time so i try to coach my team to be in the middle right like don't start on chapter six of the story but also like don't start with a textbook on the english language either you want to you want to find the last point in your story that would be completely
obvious to the person you're telling the story to and then go from there to things that would be less obvious but that they can follow along with and it's it's a lot of work to really dial that in across different types of people you're trying to communicate that story to because of course upward communication isn't all that you're doing right you're trying to communicate that down to your team to individual engineers and designers and
they're going to need to hear some very different things than say the cpo the company or the ceo the company so it's a challenge i see quite frequently can you talk a bit about how you actually coach pms on this is this like you know
one-on-ones you revisit a presentation they gave that could have been better is it after a presentation you pull them aside and talk through what they could have done better how do you approach that well i think the best way to coach is
actually to do it before the meeting so i think there's a tendency in product management and product design to want to do meetings where there's kind of this big reveal and an aha to the audience and it's kind of the opposite of how you want to handle most of these situations you want to de-risk that meeting not like make it a big you know success or fail moment so there's a few things that i do one is if there is a big you know presentation
coming up or something like that i try to run through it with the team pretending to be the other members of the audience that are going to be there so i'll say okay well what the cfo is going to ask about here is x and you want to answer that question before it gets asked what julia our ceo is going to ask about is why so you want to weave that into the early story and not like wait for her to ask so you kind of role play the entire thing
based on the different people that they're going to be communicating with something i commonly say is that executive communication is actually executives communication you're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business or about the particular problem you're working on and you want to anticipate that and if you don't have enough experience say presenting to the cfo or the ceo
i as the chief product officer do so i can you know impersonate them and help you understand what they're gonna you know care most about the other thing that i push a lot of my team to do is have pre-meetings with some of those key individuals so that they're going to be less surprised in the meeting about what you're talking about that you've gotten any major concerns brought to your attention before you know the big meeting and that helps you
know de-risk you know how poorly a meeting like that can go but so definitely at the individual presentation level doing that pre-meeting what i'm working on a lot now is trying to be trying to have more of a scaled approach to training you know this type of upward communication and what types of frameworks you know what types of structure tend to work you know for eventbrite and making sure that everyone on my team is just really well versed in
that and comfortable in it because of course confidence projection is a key part of these types of meetings as well this is such important advice that i think a lot of pm's don't recognize how important it is to prepare for important meetings like this just to give folks context maybe that aren't doing this sort of thing when they're working at a larger company how much time do you spend or or an icpm should spend on preparing for these
things just to set a little bit of a reference point well you know it's an interesting question because i think different people have different styles on how they want to handle this i'd say the way my brain works in these situations which i
think is a little bit atypical is i'm actually a little bit better if i am free-forming a lot of elements and just speaking from confidence in areas i know versus specifically trying to lay out every exact bullet point i want to hit
i'm going to show up as more comfortable i'm going to show up as more dynamic and i'm going to be able to engage in a more thoughtful conversation so for me my approach to these sorts of things is i write a lot i write a lot of notes i write a lot of documents and then in general for any of these types of communications i am just pulling from things i know deeply because i've written them down i've thought i've thought a lot about them
for a lot of other people they really just need to spend a lot of time on prep to make sure they nail the communication they want they want to nail and i found it requires a different amount of investment for different people on my team so the the point is not as much how much time you spend it's how well do you really know the material and how well do you really know what your audience is going to care about with that material so that you are
prepared for every question you might get so i'll give an example from my pinterest days you know the primary way which which you interfaced uh on any like key strategic topic was product review right you'd go in and you talk to
you know ben or ceo and jack our head of product and you know ben and jack had very different styles of communication jack in particular would very early on ask a few different data questions to get context on the problem and if you
as a product leader or an individual pm or an individual designer didn't know the answers to any of those it casts doubt on the entire rest of that meeting because you know the team would be confident that you had all the right context to understand the problem so a lot of what i would coach my team on is okay i'm pretty confident jack's gonna ask this question then this question than this question based on the material i'm
seeing from you how well are you prepared you know to answer those questions you know different execs might be somewhat somewhat different in that regard but if you haven't thought through all the questions that might be asked
from the document that you're sharing or the presentation you're about to present you're not prepared enough right like you need to know the entire universe of how that meeting can go and that may take you dozens of hours it might take
you three hours but the most important thing is that you've you've asked what possible questions can be asked and am i prepared to answer all of those do i have all the data in front of me to answer all of those because if i don't the chances of like the meeting you're having a a negative outcome just increased dramatically imagine some people are listening to this and they're like holy i need to spend this much time on preparing for
meetings like this but in my experience that's exactly what you do need to do to be successful and so this is real good real talk about how long it takes to prepare for important meetings like the ones you're talking about absolutely i mean you know for better or worse um the way that a lot of key decisions are made inside companies are through these types of forums and meetings and it's an extremely high leverage piece of
time for a product manager or a product designer in terms of how much impact they can have and if you are under preparing for those sorts of things the chances of you being able to have the type of impact you want to have the type of career growth you want just go down dramatically and i'm sure you know you and i have definitely made mistakes in our career in important meetings you know in the past but i think you know one of the things that i
really try to do is learn from each one of those and make sure those types of issues wouldn't happen again and now i feel like i have a pulse on i know if i haven't done the work going into a meeting that's going to make it have a more negative result and now i'm pretty accurate you know and look sometimes you just didn't have enough time and it is what it is but now i know like okay i know i'm not quite prepared for this and it can go
it can go poorly as a result and i know also when i've done the right prep and i'm ready for anything whether it's a board meeting you know you know or a meeting with the executive team or a meeting with an external partner right and i think that's what you're trying to build you know as any sort of product leader or pm or a product designer or researcher it's that intuition of like i'm ready for this i know everything that's going to come at me
i'm prepared for any eventual outcome and if you're not then probably the answer is spend more time to get ready speaking of spending more time another topic that you shared with me that you're thinking about thinking a lot about as a cpo is keeping the eventbrite product simple while adding more and more functionality to make it more usable by more people more use cases and so i'd love to hear how you're approaching that because i know that's
something every single product faces eventually assuming they keep growing and surviving keep adding more power yeah you know scott belski who's the chief product officer of adobe he has this concept of the product life cycle you know you're probably familiar with but i'll explain it you know to your listeners which is yeah users flock to a simple product the product takes users for granted and adds more features for power users and then
users flock to the next simple product as a result and you know i've done a lot of you know research and and work on this problem and i found that there are a few different design hacks essentially that companies use to try to
avoid this cycle you know one is okay if you build out more complex functionality unbundle it over time like facebook messenger uber eats have done right you know at pinterest we were heavy we did a heavy investment in progressive
disclosure which is you know let's hide a lot of the more complex functionality until we make sure our users learn the really critical functionality and then we can kind of open up more of the full suite of the product then there's just you know proactive training right like you can get on a video call with your customers or you know a phone call much more common in enterprise obviously or you might have a custom ui that goes away over time
that's giving you the training meals um you can also segment experiences based on different user types so certain users might get a very simple user experience and then some users might get the more complex one and there's different packages and you know interfaces that cleanly separate the two maybe that more complex experience also bundles in you know training so what i found is that just none of these really work that well for the
eventbrite um scenario because we have different types of event creators across every possible level of complexity and sophistication we have people that are putting on their first event and they expect five people to show up yep you
know people putting on 100 events per year that like really know what they're doing and then users also shift from one of those categories to another time they can get more sophisticated as they build up their business so segmentation
doesn't really work that well you know progressive disclosure doesn't work that well either because in many of these cases we never want certain types of users to find the more advanced stuff it's just going to confuse them so we strive for this concept of what we call perceived simplicity which is there are advanced features in the product and they are easily discoverable when you look for them but they're effectively hidden if you're
not looking for them and of course the majority of users aren't going to ever look for them so the advanced more complex areas of the product don't make the product harder to use for the majority who will never need
that level of complexity and you know there are areas where we do this well in areas where we're still you know working on getting better but that's really our aspiration the company that i feel like has always done the best job of this is
whatsapp where you know at its core it's a chat app and it's really good at being a chat app but i remember when i went to brazil all of a sudden i started receiving like voice messages and it was really easy to figure out how
to use them and how to do them myself when i needed to learn how to do video calls or phone calls like it would take like less than a second to figure out how to use the more advanced stuff but if it's effectively kind of hidden if
you're not looking for it that's you know what we aspire to at eventbrite and uh you know in some cases we're doing well in some cases we definitely have some work to do is there an example of a win in that direction in the eventbrite product that you're proud of using this model or even something that's like oh man this is really broken yeah um we've definitely had some wins here on the marketing side of our products so one of the bigger
investments we've made recently is you know our creators do a lot of their own marketing to try to get people to come to their events and you know transact on eventbrite in the process but our event creators you know they're not professional marketers right they're they try to figure these tools out so we built a product that allows them to automate their you know facebook advertising to get better results you know supercharged by our
data and the product's working really well but what we found is that there are certain segments that want to geek out on this a little bit right they want to figure out all the different target segments and you know optimize their creative and then there are many uh creators who just kind of want it done for them so we've been able to build some interfaces where the default is like super simple we'll handle the targeting for you we'll
handle the creative and then hey here's an on-ramp if you want to get a little bit more sophisticated and and do more of this yourself so that's an area where i wouldn't say we've like perfected it but we've now really understood those
different types of users and have easy pass for both of them to be successful so i'm really happy with that awesome another topic that you wrote about that kind of touches on the stuff we were just talking about is is justifying
non-sexy product improvements things like stability performance developer velocity things that as a pm leader you're just like no no let's just use the default is let's do that later we gotta hit our freaking metrics we gotta drive growth
and you had some really interesting insights on how to how you think about justifying these sorts of things and so i'd love to hear that from you you know the idea is that some of the most impactful projects that
product teams can work on at scale you know not early stage startups per se but at scale are the hardest to measure and because of that they just get chronically underfunded you know it's that old adage what gets measured gets managed right so for things like user experience or performance or developer velocity or just a product area that's deemed unsexy like growth used to be back in the day you know i walked through some examples
of a few tactics that work to get around this problem building custom metrics to show the value being able to run small tests that prove the worthwhileness of the investment creating some team principles that make sure
you don't ever kind of forget about these important elements that can hurt you in the long run and also just how to use experiments to build buy-in at the broader level and you know one of the the main takeaways besides some of those
tactics in in being successful here is that you have to get a team to buy in to this you can't really do a lot of this work alone right so if you're a pm like you want to be approaching this from uh well my engineering manager and my design
leader also bought in that we need to you know uh work on performance or you know we've all aligned that the user experience is not going in quite the direction we want and we want to you know head some problems off that
may not you know improve metrics today but you know could certainly decline metrics you know tomorrow and if you can get a like a small team you know what two three people aligned on the importance of something that's deemed unsexy it's it's a lot easier to start to build this game plan around you know metrics or running small tests or you know structuring okrs to not only prioritize this work but to show some really massive impact
which could then get the rest of the company much more excited to make investments themselves so what i'm hearing is step one is just get your kind of lead peer leaders aligned behind something that may not obviously be something your lead your
leaders uh want you to do is that right absolutely yeah this episode is brought to you by whimsical when i asked product managers and designers on twitter what software they use most whimsical is always one of
the most mentioned products and the users are fanatical whimsical is built for collaborative thinking combining visual text and data canvases into one fluid medium distributed teams use whimsical for workshops whiteboarding wireframes user flows and even feature specs and that includes thousands of built-in icons and a rich library of templates see why product teams at leading companies call whimsical a game changer visit
whimsical.com lenny to have my own templates added to your account when you sign up that's whimsical.com lenny is there anything else that you think is really valuable powerful effective in just getting folks to getting your leaders to basically go along with something that maybe isn't going to move metrics or is that the core of it well yeah i mean definitely it's hard when you can't create a metric that they can understand i think the the other
area to think about is when when you're an early stage company everything you're doing is trying to drive upside like trying to drive growth in some way it could be short term or long term but you're trying to drive real growth for the business but then when you've actually built a real business a lot of times people are still in that same mode which is everything is trying to add more growth on top of what we've already got but
when you're at scale you can actually lose what you've built so trying to help whether it's you know executives or just your manager understand that this thing we've got whether it's you know a high conversion rate or you know good
engagement on this feature it could go away if we don't do these other things and here's what it would look like if that goes away that can be you know incredibly powerful you know i think we were fortunate at pinterest in this
regard in that we were a fast-growing startup that stopped growing due to some changes in in the market related to facebook and then actually once we had switched to growing primarily through seo there was an algorithm change that severely impacted our growth at one point in time so that helped the company build more intuition of like we're not guaranteed you know the gains from all the things we've built in the past we need to do
things to protect them and protecting what we've got actually is increasingly important once you build scale because now you've built something really valuable already and yes we want to make it more valuable of course but
it's hard to make it more valuable if you're eroding some of the gains you've already built so that's that's another element that i think can be pretty impactful in your post on this topic you have an awesome chart of product market
fit over time illustrating the point you just made that it doesn't last and you have to kind of keep iterating to keep your product market fit like you're by default falling behind if you're not continuing to push there yeah i think the the concept is you know user expectations just continue to go up every day right in terms of their expectations on user experience the value that they expect your product provide but also the competitive
landscape you know in the market right continues to get better so yeah if you're not continually pushing to make you know your product better your user experience better your you know latency better then you're
eventually not necessarily tomorrow but maybe in a year maybe in five years you might find yourself fall out of product market fit entirely and that's a really dangerous place to be because then it's going to take a long time to figure that out
and make adjustments and then you probably have more technical debt to clean up to be able to get back to where you need to be where the the market has reached in terms of expectations so just doing work to make sure you never get in that situation is extremely valuable in my opinion it's something that i think a lot of teams forget about i think you're gonna create nightmares for a lot of founders listening to this right now
that's not the intention but it's a no it's a it's a kick in the butt another post that i definitely wanted to chat about maybe your spiciest post maybe i'm curious if there are others is around operations team our product ops and generally ops people and yes point that you made that ops is often a sign of inefficiency on a product team because in theory a lot of the roles should be done by software eventually i'd love to
unpack this and hear your take on this i think the the i originally got the idea for the post in that i had written another essay on martech and how martech to be really successful it's really got to target engineers more so
than marketers and that a lot of martech businesses just aren't very good businesses um and i think i got an invite to speak at a martech conference to a bunch of marketers about this post and it's like well that sounds like a terrible idea
i'm basically telling a bunch of marketers that um you know what they're investing in isn't that important and that they're not the most important target customer and i remember reading something about the conference that was like a conference
for the growth of the marketing operations professional and then i was like oh no that's that's not what i want in the industry at all like having marketing ops means you suck at marketing and obviously that's a bit
of hyperbole i'm not against the the concept of a marketing ops role or a product ops role we have a product ops team you know at eventbrite but as someone who ran a double digit million marketing budget at grubhub without marketing ops because we invested in automation and we invested in process it scares me when the first tactic people to go to is to add people to help scale there's nothing wrong with people obviously
there's nothing wrong with operations people the the thing i have a problem with is normalizing ops as a distinct stable function where operations rules are amazing and how we utilize them at eventbrite is their their explicit job is to go find
inefficiencies and build process or software to root out that inefficiency so then they can go find other places to be more valuable when you say oh their job is to do this manual process long term that's where i
get super concerned because you're not rooting out efficiency and how you build your company and that's where i feel like a lot of this can go if you're not careful intercom has a really good blog post on this from a while back around their business operations team and they basically up front in that post say the goal of business operations did not exist and that's i i definitely very much agree with that so i think in general
functional ops roles whether it's product ops or marketing ops or you know whatever they're a hack to deal with some sort of functional issue on your team and it's totally okay to have functional issues you know startups are
gonna have functional issues all over the place but the way they deal with that functional issue is by building larger and larger operations teams and roles that's basically exacerbating you know an efficiency issue a functional issue
it's not fixing it it's like it's a form of empire building and in general empire building something i don't have a lot of tolerance for so you're you're making more of a function unable to operate without human invention by saying the
goal is to scale up marketing ops or product ops whereas what the goal should be is let's use our brains to run experiments to make us more functional with less people we're more efficient we can add more value to the customer
and to the business and if that means you know i don't actually need to have this product operations job in a year that's awesome and guess what if you've shown you've done a really great job at rooting out inefficiencies every part of the company is going to want you to do some other job if that job is no longer valuable because you've done such a good job eliminating the need for it so there isn't this real concern that i'm gonna lose my job by
being too effective at it it's like no you're gonna show that you're just awesome at many types of jobs that you know product leaders or marketing leaders care about so that's my perspective i love that and this happened a lot at airbnb a lot of amazing ops people ended up moving into other roles once the role was not necessary or they just wanted to do something else and clearly people wanted them on their team because they were
killing it indeed one last question about the cpr role and then i want to shift a bit to just like product management and growth what is the job of a cpo for folks that are just like what the heck what is this thing what do you do all day yeah then what does it take to get there just like what should people work on most if they're trying to get to cpo someday so you know first off when you think about what's the job you know the way i
think about it is i'm responsible for leading and facilitating the development of products and features that deliver value for eventbrite's customers that will translate into value for the business and each of those words were chosen
pretty carefully now in terms of the scope of the function a cpu role can lead a few different sub-functions you know in my case i lead product management product design research and growth marketing but you know different
roles have kind of some or not as many of those um it can be pretty custom depending on the size of the company and what the what the leaders skill sets are to talk a little bit more depth about like the role i i think it's my job to make
sure eventbrite chooses the best possible product strategy based on the information we have that we can adjust that strategy as we learn and continue to build you know that feedback loop it's also my job to define
and consistently improve the process through which we set our product strategy how we prioritize projects how we execute on them to make sure we're delivering you know that value to our customers we're delivering those
tangible business results and to do that in a way where the rest of the company understands it and is able to participate in it as well so this is things like identifying bottlenecks that prevent us from delivering you know value or
quality or you know doing that at the detriment of speed working with people across the company to remove those bottlenecks making sure people outside of development are aware of what we're building participating in the development and feedback of what we're building as well as in helping deliver that you know for like a gtm perspective and and last but not least and we've talked a little bit about this earlier you know training the team or
what it means to be an effective product manager product designer user research etc add eventbrite and then of course hiring people who can augment our existing team you know on everything i just mentioned
so you know i'm accountable for what we build driving value for the business and there's of course going to be many times where we build doesn't end up driving value you know it's hard to predict sometimes but it's my job to kind of improve that
conversion rate and the magnitude of impact over time you know might might not be that everything we build delivers value but i want most of it to and i want the impact of of that value to be higher and higher over time so you also asked about what it takes to get to the cpu role um and i think my journey's been more irregular than most the people you probably talked to you know product management when i started my career you know it was it was
all waterfall it was built around massive releases it's a totally different job from what we do now um marketing was a lot more you know agile in the lowercase sense of agile and it mapped to my mind better as someone
who's like really influenced you know by the book the goal so i think the tangible pieces of advice to get to this level that may be helpful is i always focused on where i thought there was leverage i wanted to learn everything i could and
focus on the things that had a big impact regardless of the org structure or the career path that meant i wanted to really have a deep understanding of the entire business so i knew just what was worth focusing on to help the business i think one of the things that's different about being a cheap product officer versus you know other product roles is how much of a company leadership role it is versus a functional leadership role
you're expected in this role to optimize for the entire company even at the expense of what's good for your team so you really have to learn how to optimize for company first that's like a key thing to learn that i think
new executives can struggle with and one advantage i think i had is i've basically been working with executives since my first job at apartments.com so i learned to speak their language and understood what they cared about pretty early in my career
and you know this is a really important element assume that questions from them are them trying to learn versus them assuming you don't know something and testing you about it i find that a lot of people get intimidated by executive questions when the executive's just trying to understand things and then that changes the interaction you can have the the other element that served me well was just refusing to specialize i
thought if i could learn all the skills that would allow me to combine them to work on the most important things versus only work on the thing i knew how to work on and that definitely led to slower visible progress in terms of career growth or titles there was a much faster path to the true executive role because i could speak better with ceos about more topics than most of my peers obviously this is all my individual experience there are many
paths to get to to this type of level but those are some things that work for me that was such an incredible definition and so much good advice there and this is a good segue to another area that you have a really interesting insight on around the spectrum of product people i when i think of you i think of two by twos and this is i think just a spectrum which is unusual for a pc framework i'd love to hear your take on how you think
about the spectrum and around upskilling pms to move along the spectrum the idea is and this is something you know i was inspired from talking with omar who who runs product at cambly and he used to run a core product at pinterest
it's this idea of you know uh any product team is like a gang of misfits right they all come from different backgrounds you know most people didn't start as a you know a product manager their first job right they might have been in sales or in
marketing or analytics or engineering right so everyone's bringing kind of these different skill sets to the table but the the main spectrum that you know i've observed in product teams of any decent size is that you
have two extreme types of you know product managers per se um you know on perhaps the left side of the spectrum you have the crazy innovator types they have so many different ideas they pay attention to you know every single change in the
industry they all know all about the latest you know apple api or snapchat's latest product feature right those people are gonna have ideas all the time actually probably most of those ideas are gonna be bad but like one out of ten is gonna be just a game changer and they're generally not super great at turning that idea into action and then you know on the rights on the extreme right side of the spectrum will be your
typical executional focused pm and they can do a really good job of taking a strong strategy and turning it into action that creates value for the customer but they generally don't know what's going on in the industry they can't think of a totally new product idea themselves they're gonna need support from above to be able to push them in the right direction and then they got it from there so the when you think about recruiting
what we all want as like cpos in terms of people we bring into our team is we want people in the middle we want people who are strategic they understand what's going on in the industry they can generate some good ideas but they can also turn it into
something real that delivers value you know for the customer and the company and there just aren't a ton of those people um you know in the world not as many as as we would like to recruit so you know as a product leader
if i'm airing on the side of like which side of the spectrum i want people from i generally will take people who are good at execution over people who are good at generating ideas because of course there's always too
many good ideas that a company need to focus and and execute well on the best ones whereas if i were a vc i would probably bias to the people on the left because i don't need every company to work if i invest in 10 different entrepreneurs who
have crazy ideas and one of them works and becomes the next airbnb turns out i've done incredibly well you know as a venture capitalist so the challenge you practically deal with as a product leader is you end up recruiting and managing and growing a lot of executional people who can get stuff done but if they want to get to the director level or if they want to get to my level they need to get more strategic and we don't have good ways
to kind of turn great executors into great strategists you know as as in general like a product you know uh function so i've started investing in a lot of different things here obviously i built some programs for reforge around product strategy a lot of my team goes to those to try to learn i've also been doing a lot of you know mentorship with the team to try to teach them what it looks like to do that well i've had you know people come in to
speak with the team like you and many other great product folks to show you know my team what great looks like and how people like you developed your skills and i'm trying lots of different things to try to move you know more of
the team to the middle where they can be that you know optimal strategist that still retains that ability to deliver great value on top of the strategy versus just have ideas that can't be executed on and it's definitely a work
in progress it's it's a lot of a lot of different tactics to try to build that skill set inside the team and scale it and you know definitely something i feel like i'm still working on what i'm hearing is a lot of the the kind of the biggest upside for pms to develop is basically to become more strategic and all the things you've shared are just ways a lot of ways to just become better at strategies it's interesting that that's like what you
found to be the most essential piece for pms to often level up at like i said it depends on the level right so early on in your career as a pm you're gonna get the most value by showing that you can ship real things to customers and that the customers like them like that's by far the most important thing but if you want to start managing groups of pms if you want to start running a business unit or a pillar or a theme
i'm going i as a chief product officer i'm going to expect you to be able to write that strategy doc without me and you know what i found in you know whether it's through the advising roles or through coming into eventbrite
it's just a lot of people couldn't do that step and that means when you try to become a product leader at the company and you know the ceo expects that from you and you can't do it you're going to set yourself up to like really cap hard on
on how fast your career can grow and you'll get stuck you know whether it's at the senior product manager level or at the group pm level because you can't show that you can drive decision making on your own and that you can push forward new ideas that are gonna help the company so that's definitely where i've seen the biggest bottleneck in terms of skill sets obviously there's lots of important skill sets you want to build as a pm but
that one to get to the top is the great filter that's awesome advice for folks listening that are trying to figure out what should i work on it's kind of simple a lot of times just get better at strategy and it feels like it elevates you in so many other ways yeah and of course we could talk for you know hours about what it means to get better at strategy and some of the tactics there could be a follow-up i know some pm's follow-up struggle with
that yeah okay podcast number two podcast number two let's book it okay so i can't let you go without talking about growth everyone's always trying to figure out how do we grow our company what can we do to accelerate growth i know you're modest but i think you're one of the smartest people in the world on this stuff and so i just want to touch on a couple things in the time that we have here one is with thing with paid growth becoming
increasingly more expensive and difficult especially with apple's recent changes seo forever becoming more crowded sales being always expensive it's just like tough out there for a lot of startups to grow are you seeing any interesting or new growth channels or tactics that folks can explore or consider that maybe work for companies that you're looking at it's not that there are new channels per se unless you include you know
tokens from like web3 which which i do not it's more that there are ways to get leverage on your channels through better flows or lifetime value that companies are figuring out so for example you know eventbrite we unified what were
separate direct response and lead generation flows in our performance marketing to acquire creators and now it just takes less effort we're getting better cpas and sales now has the opportunity to pick up you know any product qualified
lead you know from a direct response customer who need who may need a little bit more help and they have the data to now determine if there's high enough value to justify it so you know this concept is being dubbed product led and it's this idea that you can unify self-service loops in a b2b business which are typically driven by product and your sales loops into one more complex giant loop that operates more efficiently and breaks down the silos
and i think you're going to see an explosion in b2b companies that learn how to unlock that and get sales and product and marketing to be working as one larger cross-functional team and building an engine that optimizes all of their skill sets so that's something i'm pretty excited about but we're definitely in the early days there that's that's awesome i was gonna ask you if there's any trends you're seeing around growth and clearly that's one
are there are there any other trends just things happening in the growth world yeah sure i think there was you know this conventional wisdom to just focus on building until you found product market fit and then you can worry about growth and of course there's there's some truth in that statement but now as i'm talking with more and more founders and i'm sure you're seeing this yourself is we're seeing founders who are thinking about
building growth loops into their product before they find product market fit and it's not so that they can prematurely scale before they have product market fit it's so that when they find product market fit they have that built-in distribution advantage to grow once they're ready and founders are starting to intuit you know what i've written about a bit as well as you which is that scalable acquisition or what we call an acquisition loop
is a requirement for product market fit like if you've got a product that retains well and you can't find more users for it i don't think that's product market fit so it's really exciting to see that evolution and to see founders think about like it's not about getting a bunch of users before you have a product that works it's about thinking strategically about how this product's gonna grow itself when it's ready to do so so i'm really excited to
see the next generation of founders you know build that muscle early on and and also you know leverage it when they're ready instead of just like oh i'm gonna throw a bunch of paid ads at it and it's gonna work um so that's
something i'm really excited about on that topic when should companies focus on growth and the second question when do you think they should hire a head of growth or someone full-time focused on growth like i mentioned uh well you
don't want to focus on growth before a product works fit you want to be thinking about how your product can grow scalably you know pretty early on so you know early growth definitely needs to be done by the founders i tend to separate growth into two phases i call the first phase kindle strategies these are those non-scalable hacks to get your early users and i think those are generally done by founders maybe some early team members
fire strategies are the ones that drive scale that's you know what you're mentioning content loops sales loops viral loops paid acquisition and to me the goal of your kindle strategies these like non-scalable hacks they only exist to unlock the fire
strategies to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users and it's once you unlock a fire strategy that's when i think you think about hiring someone full time on growth to fully harness that new growth loop
you've built that could be a sales person if it's sales it could be you know growth pm if it's viral or egc content or it could be a performance market or if it's ads but it's once it's like okay we've sequenced to a growth strategy that actually scales let's go find someone who's awesome at that who can make it you know 10x better that's how i think about it maybe a last question is there is there kind of an under appreciated or
underinvested in growth strategy growth tactic thinks that you're just like oh wow this seems to be working better than people may think um yeah well i i still think data network effects are underrated i think a lot of people confused the
idea of data network effects with data as a product you can charge people for especially like businesses and i get it like a lot of businesses like you can't charge them for data because they don't know how to use data
super well especially smbs but what data network effects are is leveraging product usage data to make the product value stronger and stronger over time you know that could be personalized results you know in the case of
pinterest or in the case of eventbrite better targeting data for advertising to find people who are more likely to be interested in your event and i think especially with facebook and apple's platform changes your product being able to generate its
own data versus just relying on the big platforms to do all the work for you that's a real edge that companies are starting to wake up to and it's obviously something that's worked well for me in the past you know pinterest and certainly now at eventbrite so there's a couple questions that i had at the top that i skipped that i thought i'd come back to i know that you're a big video game guy and i love that at the bottom of your post you
always share the music that you're listening to so i was just gonna ask what's the game you're playing these days anything you recommend and then what are you listening to yeah i'm currently playing cyberpunk 2077 on the ps5 which is fun but i recently finished horizon forbidden west and that was excellent really great science fiction game um you know on the music side one of my favorite bands this band called broadcast and
they never really played live a whole lot and um their their singer died a few years ago but they recently came out with a recording of a bunch of their live sessions that they recorded on the bbc and it's it's like
it's like getting this time capsule from the past of some of their you know early live sessions that's been really great so i've been i've been enjoying that record quite a lot lately awesome casey's picks get him here get him here now casey i
feel like i was successful in extracting many nuggets in our hours together i really appreciate your time where can folks find you online and how can people that are listening be helpful to you blog caseyaccidental.com i'm semi active on twitter uh at onecaseman and you know always i focus on paying it forward like help the next generation of companies of pms of marketers get better at their craft and build better businesses you know and
if uh if you're searching for a cool event check out the eventbrite app of course we always would appreciate that love it uh amazing casey what a great way to end it uh thank you again for being here thanks so much that was awesome thank you for listening if you enjoyed the chat don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and even better leave a review which helps a lot you can also learn more at lennyspodcast.com i'll see you in the next episode