Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO at Confluent)

0:00

I love that you have very strong opinion  about this, which is just the state of the product management career and  how most PMs are not that great.

0:08

Why is it that product management is still  such a relatively undeveloped discipline?

0:12

We're like 15 to 20 years into this, and  so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't  getting at the truly important things, the truly value-added things.

0:19

If we were doctors,  you'd be like, "That's totally unacceptable."

0:24

What's the answer, Shaun?

0:24

How do we solve this problem?

0:26

In everything always talk from the customer's  perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective, the  very small number of PMs do that.

0:29

They get dragged into internal politics, they  get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery,  and you just can't win that way.

0:40

You kind of have this hot  take that the way AI will most impact product management is data management.

0:45

Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which  is this LLM thing that's going to help you do synthesis, but if it hasn't got all that data to  do synthesis on top of, it's got nothing.

0:49

And so that means that LLMs can only be as good as the  data they are given and how recent that data is.

0:58

In the future, if you can easily clone a  B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian, what happens to these businesses long-term?

1:02

Do they just become, are they all in trouble?

1:06

People really underestimate  where the value is created in these applications and they just  kind of get it completely wrong.

1:17

Today my guest is Shaun Clowes.

1:17

Shaun is chief  product officer at Confluent.

1:17

Previously he was chief product officer at MuleSoft, which is a  billion-dollar business within Salesforce.

1:22

Before that, he was chief product officer of Metromile,  a public auto insurance technology company.

1:27

And prior to that he spent six years at Atlassian  where he ran the Jira agile and also built the first ever B2B growth team.

1:37

He also created two of  the most popular Reforge courses, one on retention and engagement and one on data for product  managers.

1:43

Shaun is awesome because he's both very tactical in execution oriented, while also being  very philosophical and insightful about the craft of product and growth.

1:56

In our conversation,  Shaun shares why most PMs are not good, what it takes to become a good or great product  manager, how he thinks about his career, like a Bingo card and why he indexes towards finding very  different roles for every new job that he takes.

2:12

Why good data is the most important ingredient  in AI tools and for product managers working with AI.

2:18

Also, how to build a great B2B growth  team, what he's learned about doing B2B growth and his really interesting take on how AI will  and won't disrupt SaaS tools out in the wild.

2:30

If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to  subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

2:33

It's the best way to  avoid missing feature episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.

2:38

With that I bring you  Shaun Clowes.

2:38

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5:02

Shaun, thank you so  much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny.

5:12

It's really awesome to be here.

5:14

I've had you on my radar for a long time  and I am really excited to finally have you here and big bonus points for having a very  beautiful, sultry Australian accent that always helps with the ratings, I think.

5:24

I don't  know if it's causal, but it's correlative.

5:28

I'm glad to be a bit of a curiosity.

5:31

So I want to start with something I totally  believe and I love that you have very strong opinion about this, which is just the  state of the product management career and how most PMs are not that great  and how there's a big opportunity to level up.

5:46

You just talk about what you've  seen there and you're just thinking here.

5:51

Yeah, it's honestly a big conundrum for me.

5:51

I  think it's actually part of...

5:51

It's grandiose to say so, a bit of my life's work.

5:57

Why is  it that product management is still such a relatively undeveloped discipline?

6:02

We're 15 to  20 years into this thing.

6:02

You would've thought that it would be less random than it is.

6:08

The  outcomes are random, the behaviors are random, individual performance is random, seemingly.

6:13

And  so there's something about the current state of product management that isn't getting at the truly  important things, the truly value-added things, the right way to think about problems,  the right way to think through problems, the abstract reasoning that's needed, there's  something that isn't working about it.

6:27

I spent a long time trying to put my finger on it  and then be like, "How do you reproducibly reproduce that?"

6:34

Reproducibly produce people  who can really be really great product managers.

6:39

The thing is that if you think all the way back to  it, I spent a long time as an engineer and people always talk about 10 times engineers and I wanted  to be a 10 times engineer.

6:44

I'll leave it to others to decide to tell you whether or not I was or I  wasn't, but certainly I wanted to be and I tried to be a really great engineer.

6:52

And it must be  true that if there's 10 times engineers, and I would argue they definitely are, they must be 10  times product managers too.

6:57

But at the same time, those 10 times product managers, because product  management is ultimately about leverage, so it's about helping other people have dramatically more  impact than they would if they were unorganized that they didn't have somebody to organize  the goals and what we're trying to achieve, then that means that a 10 times product manager  has 100 times return or more because they're 10 timesing the return on 10 times resources.

7:20

So the outcomes are so wild, like wildly distributed and the benefits are so good that you  would've thought that it would've behooved us.

7:31

There would've been a way that this had evolved  and improved and really gotten way crisper than it has, but here we are.

7:35

I'm not saying that we  haven't gotten better, we 100% have, but I think we could all say that we're not reliably producing  10 times product managers every day of the week.

7:49

I love this point and it's especially  painful that when someone works with a PM that's not great.

7:53

There's just this  meme of why do I need PMs?

7:53

PMs are useless, PMs suck, and it just creates that no one's  ever like, "Engineers are useless or designers are useless."

8:04

But there's so many people  are like, "I don't need product managers on our team.

8:07

Never hire a PM," and it  just sets the whole profession back.

8:12

When I first started out in PM somebody, it's  obviously a chestnut, but he pointed out that realistically when you're a product manager, your  job is to say no to 90% of things that get brought your way.

8:21

And so that kind of makes you the bad  person pretty much from the start.

8:21

And so you're saying no to 90%, so you can say yes to 10% and  that kind of puts you behind the eight-ball right at the very beginning, and so you have to very  quickly get runs on the board.

8:31

You have to prove to have the right insights, to have the right  data, to make the right decisions or you don't get another go, you don't get another swing at  it.

8:41

So it makes sense that product managers are the easiest to single out and criticize, but  that is also what makes it the funnest thing.

8:52

If you think about why do we do this?

8:52

Somebody  once asked me, "Would you retire?

8:52

Why do people do what they do?"

8:58

Because certainly at some  point it isn't just about the money and at the end of the day product management is so damn fun  because it's about trying to figure out an edge.

9:09

It's like trying to look at the world, find the  portion of the chessboard that isn't occupied, but that is valuable and find a way to get into  it, invade it and destroy it.

9:14

It's decisions under uncertainty and that makes it unbelievably  fun.

9:21

Really, really painful and very frustrating and very hard to convince people, but very,  very fun.

9:27

So in equal measures basically.

9:33

What's the answer, Shaun?

9:33

How do we solve  this problem?

9:33

I know you said it's your life's work.

9:36

What do you find actually helps most  in helping PMs level up and become say 10 X PMs?

9:43

I think the most important thing and the chestnut  that I repeat to everybody is that at the end of the day, the time you spend looking inside  the building doesn't really benefit you very much at all.

9:53

And Steve Blanken, people used to  talk about you should be spending 80% of your time thinking about things going on outside the  building.

9:57

You might not be outside the building, but you should spend 80% of your time thinking  outside the building.

10:01

And I would say that very small number of PMs do that.

10:05

They get dragged  into internal politics, they get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product  delivery, like elements of the delivery thing and you just can't win that way.

10:17

You just  can't win that way.

10:17

You can never get an A because you're fundamentally not solving the  job.

10:21

The job is not about execution or anything, it's about finding reliable, differentiated value  that you can uniquely deliver into the market.

10:33

So I would say if there's one thing, two things  I would say actually that I generally guide product managers to do, one is to always start  from the point of view outside the building in every document in everything, always talk from  the customer's perspective, from the market's

10:46

perspective, from the competitor's perspective,  and the people who listen to me on that I would say get better almost immediately because  they're starting from a place that's easier to understand and then secondarily be data informed. They use all of that view of the world, but don't

10:54

They use all of that view of the world, but don't just make up a bunch of statements, support that  statements with anecdotes and bits of data.

11:01

It doesn't have to be a treatise, but convince  everybody of what the world really looks like and what the opportunities ahead of the company  looks like and good things happen to you.

11:13

And all of a sudden you go from a world where nobody wants  to help you get anything done to where everybody wants you to win.

11:22

They want you to win and they  may not give you everything you want, but they certainly will try because they're like, "Well, of  all the bets we could make, this is a good one."

11:30

I imagine many people listening  to this are thinking, "Oh, I am that person.

11:33

I talk to customers  all the time.

11:33

I'm always interacting, looking at research, putting data together."

11:36

And what you're saying is you're probably not doing that enough.

11:41

Is there anything that  you could help someone recognize of, "No, you're actually not doing this enough  and you think you are but you're not."

11:49

It's one thing to say you're spending a lot of  time looking outside the building.

11:49

It's a whole other thing to hear from the places you don't  normally hear from.

11:53

So avoid availability or confirmation bias.

12:00

Most of the time people go talk  to the people they always talk to and they learn nothing particularly new.

12:04

They don't synthesize  the results that they got from that conversation.

12:09

They don't seek out the counterfactual, they don't  seek out the proof that they're wrong.

12:09

They don't analyze what their competitors are doing and  figure out what that must tell you about the market.

12:17

They don't bring back the data of how  their product is actually being used versus how people say it's being used.

12:21

It's like all data and  no analysis is not very useful.

12:21

Everyone can bring back an omnibus edition of random stuff I heard  on a Tuesday, but the competitive advantage is extracted out of figuring out what other people  don't see, figuring out where we are wrong, figuring out where a well-placed bet could  have dramatically outlandish returns.

12:48

And so I think firstly, people often say that  they do a lot of this stuff, but they actually don't because they don't have any structured way  of doing it.

12:54

So what they really mean is every now and then I get in a customer call or every  now and then I get stuck into an escalation.

12:58

And so they're kind of conveniently bucketing it.

13:02

So  firstly they don't do it in a very structured way, then they don't bring back analysis, they get true  insights from that thing, so they don't really gain very much at all.

13:11

It's just more activity,  no outcomes.

13:11

People do far too much activity with not enough outcomes and there just isn't enough  time in the day to do that to be successful.

13:24

You as a product leader is at the Venn  diagram center of the sweet spot of where this podcast has been going recently,  which is product and growth and how AI helps you with all these things.

13:34

And so to  follow a thread there with synthesizing and understanding what people are saying, user  research and surveys and all these things, have you found any tools that you and your team  have found really useful to help you do this more efficiently versus traditionally just manually  going through all the stuff and finding patterns?

13:55

Yeah, so firstly, stepping back a little bit  just into the motherhood and apple pie portion of qualitative research or whatever, I find that  most people don't even understand or don't start with a rigorous foundation in what they're  going to need to do to get the answers that they want.

14:10

So for example, your listeners have  probably heard about the Nielsen number before, but basically the idea is that once you interview  between 7 and 14 people, you stop learning new things.

14:19

Less than 7, you don't learn enough, more  than 14, you start learning anything new.

14:19

And so if you interviewed two people, you probably  don't have enough data.

14:25

If you interviewed 22, you probably had too much, so they don't even  right size their efforts. So that's a problem.

14:33

So they don't start that way.

14:33

Then they go into  these conversations asking leading questions, which really are designed to get the customer to  say what they already want to be true, which is so they haven't done enough research or they've  done too much and then they've blown up all of the results before they've even heard anything.

14:46

If you don't right size your research and you don't set this up to learn, then you're going  to lose.

14:50

No amounts of applying LLMs or any type of kind of structured reasoning is going  to help you.

14:57

Because you just basically you're reading back what you want to hear or some  weird summarized version of what you want to hear.

15:04

But stepping back from all of that, what  I like to do specifically getting to LLMs is I think that we live in just the most amazing  time for product managers right now in terms of being able to analyze vast quantities of  information and see the common threads.

15:17

And so let me give you few examples of that.

15:24

One might  be you can do a bunch of customer interviews, you can put a bunch of customer interviews  into ChatGPT and you can say, "Hey, ChatGPT, this is my strategy.

15:34

Tell me where my strategy  does not fit what these customers talked about."

15:39

It's all about the not, not where it does,  where it does not.

15:39

People spend far too much time looking for what they're hoping to see,  not for what they're not looking to see.

15:43

So you can literally ask ChatGPT to help you find  where the customer is probing at the edges of what you're trying to do, where it's wrong, where  what you're saying is not what they believe.

15:53

And you can ask it questions like that.

15:57

You can ask  it what your customers are saying would better fit what your competitors are saying.

16:03

So you  can basically say, you can copy and paste one of your competitor's positioning documents into  ChatGPT and say, "Is this a better fit for what they have said than my thing?"

16:11

Which is you can  summarize your own strategy, you can take your competitors but public documents and you can ask  it to summarize what their strategy probably is.

16:22

And it's actually supposedly good at that because  mostly your public documents are actually a summary or at least they're derivative of what  your strategy is.

16:26

So it will give you crazy insights into what other people's, literally  their product strategy at times creepy like, "Oh, they will probably do this, they  will probably do that.

16:34

It's more likely they would do this than they would do that."

16:37

And  so normally that type of insight was hard one, it took a lot of sweat work.

16:45

You basically get  to read a lot of stuff.

16:45

You kind of had to use your brain as this big summarization machine  and eventually you knew what you felt about all the things you had read, but you couldn't  summarize why.

16:54

LLMs let you get to that really, really, really quickly in a very structured  way, but only if you push at the edges, provoke the answers you don't want to hear,  provoke the problems, try and prove to yourself that you are wrong, I think is the easiest way  to start trying to use some of these tools. I love that.

17:15

And it sounds like in your experience  you're just using straight-up OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, not any specific tool for user  research for this specific use case.

17:26

No, mostly I find that the straight-up LLMs  themselves are good enough and we do have some internal tooling that we built around, I don't  know if you've ever had Sachin Rekhi on the show, you may have.

17:39

He was a product leader  pretty well known in the gross community, and he was a leader at LinkedIn for a long time  and he used to call this concept a Feedback River, and he basically said that really smart  product managers are constantly swimming at a Feedback River.

17:55

They set out to  surround themselves by Feedback River and I really deeply believe in that.

18:01

It's like, "Okay, how can I surround myself with user interview data, with  direct customer feedback, with NPS data, with competitor information?"

18:10

Like I'm always  trying to wash myself over with information.

18:10

And where I'm going with this is that LLMs and tooling  based on it can be exceptionally good for this.

18:20

So for example, at Confluent we get a ton of  inbound customer requests, as you can imagine coming from the field or directly from customers.

18:24

We use LLMs to take in those asks to summarize what they're about, to find other asks that are  like that one, really in a compelling way, a real way, like a semantic way, not other words, exactly  the same, are these the same concept?

18:38

So that we can look across all of the inbound demand on us  and say, "Well, the most popular idea is this one and is getting more popular.

18:48

The least popular  idea is this one.

18:48

It is getting less popular."

18:48

In a really deep rich way, even across hundreds  or thousands of pieces of inbound feedback.

18:59

I think it's a really great time to be a product  manager if you can put these types of tools to work, but they don't do the job for you, they  just help you do these things that are intricate in that job of finding the gaps, finding the  opportunities, finding the common threads without necessarily having to do all of it just  inside your wear-wear, just inside your brain.

19:20

I'm going to stay in this AI river that we're  in right now and ask a couple more AI-related questions.

19:25

And this may be what you just said,  but I'm curious if there's more here.

19:25

You kind of have this hot take that the way AI will most  impact product management is data management and data versus models you're building or anything  else.

19:35

Can you talk about what you've seen there?

19:41

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two implications  for people as they're building products based on AI and as they're thinking about AI in their  workflow.

19:45

So let's start with the first one, because that's how product managers do product  management things.

19:49

You just asked this question of should it be specific tools built to make AI  easier for product managers to use?

19:53

Or is it in fact more general models being put to work?

19:59

At the end of the day, these models are very, very, very smart, but they're also insanely dumb  and everyone knows that, insanely dumb.

20:06

In other words, they really only know what they were  trained on or what you bring to them right at that moment.

20:16

In that millisecond, and then they  will forget it immediately.

20:16

And it's very easy to convince yourself that isn't true, but it is  actually what really matters.

20:20

And let me add one extra piece that makes that really important.

20:25

At the end of the day, information has a decay rate.

20:29

So think about customer feedback, it  has a decay rate or what your competitors are doing has a decay rate.

20:34

So any new piece of data  decays in its value to your decision-making very, very quickly, very, very quickly.

20:39

You can  plot your own decay chart if you want to, but the answer is very, very quickly.

20:43

And so when  you think about the job which is synthesizing all of this very complicated information to make  good decisions, what does that mean?

20:48

Well, you've got this synthesis machine, which is this  LLM thing that's going to help you do synthesis, but if it hasn't got all that data to do  synthesis on top of, it's got nothing.

20:58

And so that means that LLMs can only be as good as the  data they are given and how recent that data is.

21:09

They're ultimately like information shredders.

21:09

They are limitless information eaters.

21:09

You can never have enough information to give to an LLM to  truly gain its value.

21:17

The more things you give it, the better it gets.

21:23

Broadly speaking, that's  just not perfect, but that's close enough.

21:23

And so what that means is as an internal product  leader or putting LLMs to work, you need to figure out how to bring as much information about  customers or their asks or your competitors, all of it.

21:38

How much can you find all of it and  bring it together and give it to the LLM either in your tooling or even in just copying and  pasting or whatever your flow is going to be, that's one thing.

21:46

But then if you  take it beyond that and you go, "Okay, well now I'm a product leader and I'm  building an app and I want to put AI in my app, what will make my AI experience really great?"

21:54

It's definitely not going to be the models because these models are mostly going to be somewhat  replaceable.

21:59

And you could say, "Okay, well, is it going to be the prompts?"

22:03

Maybe, but  certainly good prompts are better than others, and that's kind of an ongoing investment you'd  probably want to make to ask better questions to get the LLM to deliver better answers.

22:12

But it's  obvious that the real answer is the context, all the context you're going to give it, all the  data you're going to copy and paste.

22:17

And so if you think about, let's say I'm building a, I have no  relationship to this, but let's say I was trying to build a human capital like a HCM bot, like an  AI bot.

22:27

Let's say I was working at Workday and I was trying to bring an AI bot.

22:32

It's pretty obvious  that the smarts of the bot would really be related to all of the employee information, but not just  that, it would be the benefit's information, it would be the legal situation in the country  where that person is currently working.

22:47

It would be the company's policies and procedures  that apply to it.

22:47

So you get what I mean, by about these kind of the jumps of logic and the jumps of  data and the way data is all linked together.

22:53

If you want to have a smart AI experience, you'll  convince yourself that all I really need to do is get a model and wire it in and I'll build a  little pipeline that will suck some data in and it will whack it into the LLM.

23:06

And if you think that  way, you're going to be very sad, very, very sad for a very long time because you are constantly  going to be wrestling with how do I get data to this thing?

23:15

How do I get good data to this thing?

23:15

How do we get timely data to this thing?

23:15

How do I get well-structured data to this thing?

23:19

And so it's a data management problem.

23:24

It's getting access to good data, getting  access to high quality data, getting access to timely data and getting it to the LLM to  get the LLM to make a smart decision.

23:28

That's where 90% of the calories go.

23:33

Maybe it's a bit  like Einstein's thing, "It's 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration." Nobody wants to hear it.

23:37

Everybody wants to just think about what these really cool models and how smart they are, and  the next one will be even smarter.

23:41

But really it's just the hard work of getting really good  data to the LLMs to get them to do good things.

23:51

It sounds really obvious as you make this case.

23:51

It makes me think about at the Lenny and Friends Summit, Mikey Krieger talked about how he had  the two types of PM groups within Anthropic.

24:03

One was focusing on user experience product and  the other was working on the model research side, and they realized that all of the success  came from the model research work, like making the model and the data they provided  the model was where all the value came from, not just optimizing the user experience  and they're just putting more and more of their product team on just that versus  tweaking UX and buttons and things like that. Yeah, exactly right.

24:29

Something sort of related, I'm just going  to ask one more AI question.

24:29

I don't want every talk to end up being just all AI, but  something that's kind of been a meme recently, and I know you have a perspective on this,  is that AI makes it really easy to build products.

24:41

So in the future, if you can easily  clone, say, a B2B SaaS app like Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever your favorite B2B  SaaS app, what happens to these businesses long-term?

24:54

Do they just become, are they all in  trouble?

24:54

Are there going to be 100 Salesforce competitors?

24:58

What's your sense and  prediction on what might happen there?

25:03

Yeah, I think it's really weird.

25:03

I think people  really underestimate where the value is created in these applications and they just kind of get  it completely wrong, and I'm not sure why that is. So if you think you bet.

25:13

So I spent a long  time at Atlassian, so I worked a lot on Jira, which many people know, and I spent a long time  at Salesforce, so I spent a lot of time in the CRM ecosystem, the marketing ecosystem and all the  rest of it.

25:21

If you want it to be not charitable, you'd step back and you'd look at all those  applications and you'd say, "They're all just forms on databases."

25:30

You'd say, "The Jira is a  form on a database, Workday is form on a database, so Salesforce."

25:36

They're all forms on databases,  all vertical SaaS or business SaaS is ultimately forms on databases.

25:41

And you're be like,  "Well, how hard can that be to replicate?"

25:45

And the answer is unbelievably hard, unbelievably  hard.

25:45

And people just think, "You totally get it wrong."

25:50

Because it's not actually just  about the data model.

25:50

So if you think about, if it formed some databases, it's these beautiful  user experiences that sit on top of data models.

26:01

So whatever the object is, it might be a customer  object or a campaign object or an employee object, you could say that, "Well, there's some elements  of lock-in in the object, the object itself, like the fields of the object."

26:11

I'm like, "Pretty  boring.

26:11

That's not very interesting." But sure, maybe.

26:15

Certainly there's some value in being  the system of record like the default that everybody uses.

26:19

There's definitely some  value in the UX.

26:19

Like, "Well, I want to be the best HR-facing applications for working  employee data."

26:23

Yeah, there's some value there, but the real thing just staring at everybody in  the face is it's all about the business rules.

26:35

That is what drives the lock-in because why  do you buy Workday?

26:35

You don't buy Workday for its out-of-the-box configuration.

26:40

You buy  Workday because you want to configure it to be Lenny Inc's HR processes.

26:44

It becomes Lenny  Inc's Workday.

26:44

It's not Shaun Inc's Workday, it's Lenny Inc's Workday.

26:52

And actually the longer  you have the software, the more it becomes that, the more it becomes less and less like Workday  and more and more like your specific company.

27:00

Which makes sense because it was built to be  configured to meet the needs of any specific company, and every company is their own  precious snowflake.

27:04

And as that happens, those configuration pieces, the bit that makes the  application native and a fit for your organization makes it a fit for nobody else's organization  and also makes it a black box to the point that you don't even understand how it works anymore.

27:18

If you went to, for example, Salesforce and you said, "Hey, could you define all of the processes  by which software was sold inside Salesforce?"

27:28

They couldn't tell you that without reading  the code of their Salesforce instance.

27:28

That's not a proprietary secret.

27:32

That's obviously true  because over time, that's literally how sales happened.

27:37

There is no other way to do a sale  other than through their internal tooling.

27:37

And so what that means is that it's not the UI that  matters and it's not the data model that matters, although those are both very useful.

27:48

It's  the years and years and years of evolution of the underlying workflows of the product to  support the customers, but also the customers evolving those workflows to make them work  the way they do.

27:58

And so how does that impact AI companies?

28:02

You could say, "It's easier than  ever to build forms on a database application."

28:09

And so I'm like, "Yeah, okay, that presumably  drives the incremental value of every new one of those to zero, right?"

28:14

So probably leads to more  power to the existing winning systems of record because there'll just be a gazillion competitors  who would just more form some databases.

28:19

So like, "How would you ever choose between them?

28:24

You may as well just go with the winner.

28:26

Nobody ever gets fired for buying Salesforce or  whatever.

28:26

You may as well start from the kind of the premier vendor." That's one element.

28:30

You could go the other way and you could say, "I've heard a few people mount this argument,"  which I think is really interesting that at the end of the day, agents are going to take  away most of the use of that user interface.

28:44

So let's say for example, your Salesforce  with Service Cloud, I've heard people say, "Well, a lot of those service agents might end  up being replaced with agentic workflows.

28:48

That will mean that there is no person operating  the UI.

28:54

If the UI doesn't even exist anymore, then why do you even need Salesforce?

28:59

We may as  well just have raw database tables on who even needs forms of databases, you can literally just  have databases."

29:03

But that also doesn't make any sense either because the agents have to operate  against the rules of the system and the rules are defined by the business processes.

29:13

So think about  Salesforce without a head.

29:13

Imagine Salesforce had no UI, it would still have those business rules  that I was talking about.

29:17

And those business rules are what define what the agent should do.

29:22

They're  almost telling the agent what it should do and how the world can operate, what is possible,  what is allowed.

29:25

And so from my perspective, this idea that this just completely  destroys the differentiation of these kind of business process SaaS applications  just seems like a fantasy, a crazy fantasy.

29:42

The only way I could really believe it is if you  said, "Well, you could have a new startup that introspected all of the rules that are configured  into a Salesforce to try and reverse engineer what your actual business processes are and then kind  of operate on top of that."

29:51

But the best place people to do that would be Salesforce themselves  or Atlassian in Atlassian's case or Workday in Workday's case.

30:02

I just can't see a world in which  this...

30:02

I think one of two things could happen.

30:09

All this moving to AI makes those applications  even better, even more unassailable, they basically get stronger.

30:17

It makes us stronger or it  could enable some new level of applications that come from a more platform based thing, so less  a domain specific thing like you ACM or ERP or engineering or less of the domain specific stuff.

30:33

It could enable a more platform like play where you have more business objects and business  objects have rules.

30:39

And you could imagine a world in which there's kind of a whole evolution  of new more platform like SaaS applications that do more than one business function worth of the  business rules and the way things move around in the enterprise, but that doesn't exist today.

30:53

So you could say that that could exist and it could say it could be way better than we've ever  thought of because of AI.

30:57

Or you could say that the rich are going to get richer.

31:02

The most likely  outcome is that the currently dominant companies are going to get more dominant, but I don't think  this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new apps that will more easily  challenge the incumbents makes any particularly, it's not straightforward to me  how that would happen basically.

31:18

Wow, that was extremely fascinating and there's so  much there.

31:18

I can go in so many directions.

31:18

One is I thought you would actually go in this direction,  which is distribution advantages become even more important if it's easy to...

31:30

Like today, I could  sit there and hire team clone.

31:30

Salesforce might take a while, but I could copy it, but by the  time I'm done, they've evolved, they're moving, they're adding features, they're ahead, right?

31:41

You're skating to where the puck was.

31:41

And so if that's the case, one of the advantages,  one of the ways to get anywhere is to have some kind of distribution advantage.

31:50

It's one  thing to have Salesforce as a product clone, another to get anyone to know about it, to adopt  it, to sell it, procurement, all that stuff.

31:53

Do you have a sense of distribution advantages  being even more valuable in that world?

32:05

Yeah, I mean, it certainly makes sense.

32:05

Ultimately, at the end of the day, distribution is always an advantage because the  hardest problem is to even be in the consideration set for any given problem.

32:12

The world is full of  problems.

32:12

It's just when people have that problem, they firstly don't think they're going to solve  it at all.

32:18

And when they do think of solving it, they don't think of you.

32:21

So distribution is  always an incredible advantage.

32:21

But again, in the world of AI, it seems like distribution  is more likely to get hard than easy.

32:26

So if you think about, for example, diminishing returns on  cold email because cold email is getting easier and easier to send even worse spam, it sounds  better, but it's effectively causing everybody to become desensitized to everything.

32:42

I don't  know if you've noticed, half the LinkedIn charts now are all basically clearly LLM generated spam.

32:47

I mean, to some degree it's actually worsening the signal-to-noise ratio.

32:53

And so I think that a lot  of the breakthrough distribution mechanisms that startups often use seem to be getting more crowded  just in general and more expensive.

33:00

That doesn't bode well for, "I'm the not as good Salesforce,"  "I'm the not as good Salesforce, but I'm cheaper."

33:13

It has to be something different.

33:13

There has  to be some angle upon which you are materially better.

33:17

And what I saw happening and what I've  been seeing happening, and I think it's been really interesting is a lot of modern next-gen  applications bringing data as a first-class citizen into the workflow.

33:27

And I think that  that's pretty compelling.

33:27

So if you look at the next-generation of applicant management products  that deal with inbound job applicants, a lot of them now like the latest core ones, they include  your time to fill data, they include outcome data of who's got the best hiring outcomes, who over  what period of time has the worst attrition, literally all the way back to the interviewers and  where the interviews were in the interview cycle.

33:58

So basically embeds data into the whole life  cycle.

33:58

So I think that there are these ways in which startups can bring these experience benefits  by just bringing a different approach to the world that does enable them to capitalize on traditional  disruptive innovation.

34:12

At the end of the day, this is just disruptive innovation.

34:17

It means that  most companies have overshot the utility like the average utility, so you can win by meeting  the average utility and being different, meet the bar and be different.

34:28

Meet the  bar and be different is the way to cut through.

34:31

So that makes sense if that's a half  decent playbook.

34:31

But even for those companies, now they're going to have all these AI  competitors who are using AI to engineer faster, to build a competitor just like them as  quickly as possible and start jamming it into the channel.

34:46

And it's going to be interesting to  see how this whole thing evolves.

34:46

It kind of got race to the bottom characteristics around  it.

34:51

You're probably right, the distribution is still the hardest part in software,  particularly when you're getting started.

34:59

So if you have some kind of clever and fair  advantage, it feels like that becomes even more powerful.

35:04

Say have a platform of  an audience or something like that.

35:04

You mentioned this ATS product they really  like.

35:09

Is there one you want to give some love to that you think is really cool that  you like or you want to keep it anonymous? Yeah, it's Ashby.

35:16

It's the one all the cool kids  are talking about now.

35:16

And it's funny because people literally talk about it in comparison to  all, even the last generation of modern SaaS ATSs or whatever, and they talk about it in glowing  ways because of the way they put data inside the actual workflow.

35:31

So the actions and its  outcomes are directly tieable to each other in the application you're doing the work in.

35:37

I  think that's a pretty compelling user experience.

35:41

So just to maybe close this thread  before I move in a different direction, this point you're making about how valuable  data is and how that's at the core of being successful and differentiating in the future,  especially with AI tooling and products, any advice you'd give to someone that wants  to do that?

35:54

Is it just make sure you have a, is it half proprietary data?

35:59

Is it like  make it a first-class citizen?

35:59

What's the advice you'd give to founders who are  trying to do this, which you're suggesting?

36:08

Yeah, I, think at the end of the day, it's  kind of all of those things, isn't it?

36:08

If you have first-party data but you can't bring it  to bear, then it's not very much use.

36:12

If you have third-party data and you bring it to bear  in interesting ways, the problem with data is we're all surrounded by data all the time.

36:21

So  the data's everywhere.

36:21

What really matters is the right data at the right time in the right  place because we're all humans.

36:25

And so to me, there are obviously data advantages and there  are even data network effects if you can end up in a situation where you have very valuable  first-party data.

36:35

But in any case, it's still about being able to bring the right data at the  right place, at the right time for those users, for them to be able to get advantage from it.

36:44

A little kind of segue I guess on that one is I know I spent a lot of my career, weirdly, actually  I've been a product person for a long time, but weirdly I've ended up inheriting data  teams.

36:58

So I've actually run data teams at a lot of different companies, which is weird because  product managers don't normally own data teams.

37:02

I think I have just a really massive affinity  for data.

37:07

I used to call myself data-driven, it was kind of my jam.

37:14

And in hindsight, I  look back and I think data is the opposite.

37:24

Data is more like a compass than a GPS.

37:24

If you  look at data as a way of giving you the answer, you're always wrong.

37:31

You're always wrong or  you're slow.

37:31

Wrong or slow or sometimes both, because mostly data doesn't give you the answer.

37:37

It just tells you if what you just said is ridiculous or there's potentially something there.

37:41

So it's more like about disproving whatever you think and you end up being slow because if you  try and use data for everything, your brain is ultimately a data sifter or whatever.

37:51

So the  reason your intuition tells you something is because you've seen a ton of data that tells you  that this is the most likely answer.

37:55

And so being data-driven, being data obsessed is it's something  you can easily overdo very, very easily overdo.

38:00

So it's about right-sizing data, having the right  data at your fingertips, having the right kind of view on data rather than trying to expect data  to give you the answer or trying to use data as a weapon or trying to use data as a way to force  people to believe you or to go in your direction.

38:25

But data is kind of at the center of everything  and about how to influence and be successful in products you're building and arguments you're  mounting internally and everything else.

38:35

I love that you went there.

38:35

I definitely wanted to  spend time on here.

38:35

It's interesting you say that, there used to be data-driven, [inaudible 00:38:44]  data-driven.

38:40

You created the Reforge course, data for product managers and also retention,  engagement course and Reforge.

38:46

And by the way, we'll link to these.

38:51

You're still  helping with these courses.

38:51

By the way, they're still running. They're  awesome. People love them. Yeah. Great.

38:56

So we'll point people to those.

38:56

I  love that you're also saying you're like, I think the way you described it to me before,  this is your reform data-driven PM.

39:00

A lot of people say this, they're like, "Don't just do  what data tells you to do.

39:05

Use your intuition, use it as a guide."

39:10

It's hard on the ground to  operationalize that advice.

39:10

Say to your PMs and your teams when they have data telling them, "Hey,  this experiment is a huge success, or there's a huge onboarding conversion opportunity here."

39:25

I guess just like what's your tactical advice to folks that have data telling them one thing and  maybe something else telling them something else?

39:35

I think the first thing I always encourage people  to do is to look at a piece of data.

39:35

If you're looking at a piece of data and the result tells  you something that your intuition tells you is insanely wrong, like they probably not right.

39:44

First, believe your intuition and go and prove yourself right.

39:50

Don't just take it at first glance  because most of the time it's like Occam's razor.

39:55

The most likely explanation for something that is  insanely not intuitive is that it's just wrong, that there's a problem somewhere.

40:01

Now,  occasionally, sometimes you actually will be right.

40:04

Now those will be paid dirt moments.

40:04

Those are the moments that make it all worth it.

40:09

There are times when you do find the negative  goal, you're like, you're staring at it and like, "This is it. This was the problem.

40:14

This was  the thing we were looking for this whole time."

40:18

But you have to be very diligent about following  it through, really understanding what you're looking at.

40:22

Is this data representative?

40:22

Is this data a good sample of the audience we care about?

40:28

Is it already subject to some  sort of selection bias?

40:28

Oftentimes when I see analysis from different product leaders or even  data teams, you can drive a truck through it, literally drive a truck through it.

40:38

And if you  present data with authority and that data is ridiculous or the analysis is just full of holes,  you don't just not get benefit for that.

40:47

You lose a whole bunch of brownie points.

40:54

It would be  better not to show up with an analysis that isn't clear than it would be to show up with an analysis  that's dumb.

40:59

And I see people self emulate on this actually relatively regularly because they just  bring a knife to a gunfight or whatever, they did bring in an analysis that is just not, it doesn't  hold water and they present it and then get shot down live, which is nobody's idea of a good time.

41:17

So if I give you a little bit of additional tactical things about that, it'd be okay if I'm  looking at a piece of data, what was upstream of this piece of data and does that look normal?

41:29

So this thing happened or whatever, which you're very, very excited about, what happened before  that?

41:34

And does that match what you think should have been right?

41:38

So what happened before this  momentous situation?

41:38

And then, okay, for that thing that you're looking at, what happened after?

41:43

If you have an idea of what happened before and after, that gives you some idea of whether or not  this thing, is it all worth interesting to talk about?

41:52

And then go one click above this data that  you're looking at.

41:52

So it's like, these things, let's say I'm looking at onboarding success.

41:58

Let's say I'm looking at onboarding success to second week retention or something like that.

42:03

I'm like, "I have found this thing that totally crushes it.

42:07

This intervention crushes it."

42:07

If you go upstream and you find out that this intervention only applies to 2% of the inbound  onboarding stream, it's meaningless.

42:12

It's most likely just a random aberration.

42:17

But even if it  was not a random aberration, it's not a useful tool.

42:21

And so you've got to go up and then  you might go downstream and you might find, yep, they last for two in the second week, but in  the third week they all churn.

42:25

They're basically pointless.

42:29

Why are we even talking about this?

42:29

Or then you might step all the way back and go, "Okay, yes, those people do get retained for  longer, but their average ASP is smaller."

42:39

Because what we really care about, we do care  about engagement and we care about more customers, but we want to keep the customers at a  high ASP to reach a certain revenue goal.

42:46

The final goal is happy customers paying us money.

42:46

So that's what I mean about going a click up.

42:46

If you go a click to the left, a click to the right,  so before and after and then a click up and you still see the thing that tells you the story that  you want to tell, then now you've got something that's very compelling because people want to  hear about that.

43:02

They want to hear, "Well, what did happen before? What did happen after?

43:06

And why is that outcome happening?"

43:06

But you have to really do your homework and really be  rigorous about it to avoid fighting fool's gold. I love that advice.

43:15

ASP, what  does that stand for by the way?

43:19

Oh, average sale press, [inaudible  00:43:22] MRR or some other revenue metric. Got it.

43:25

This point you made about how a lot  of times experiments show positive and then they end up not being anything, I had the  head of growth from Shopify on the podcast, and they do this really cool thing where they keep  holdouts for years of cohorts and then it auto emails them I think a year or two later, "Hey,  check this and see if these cohorts, this is still higher or not."

43:44

And 40% of the time, it turns out  neutral after a positive experiment long term. Interesting.

43:50

It's really funny because the last  time we did something similar, we had a global holdout group actually that was held out of all  experiments.

43:53

The experiment platform couldn't target that group at all.

43:58

So 10% of all people  never saw anything ever.

43:58

So that's be really, really helpful because you can always compare  them against whatever the experience was for any of the same vintage of cohort. I agree with  you.

44:07

But the other thing is I don't really love some of that thinking process just in general.

44:12

It's like, "Hey, let's say an experiment does show a temporary benefit.

44:16

If an experiment shows  a temporary benefit, but that benefit does not persist forever, does that mean the temporary  benefit was never worth it?

44:21

Or does that just mean the temporary benefit was an opportunity to reach  another level you just didn't capitalize on?"

44:25

I don't think there's a perfect answer, is what  I'm trying to say.

44:30

I don't think that the fact that a benefit doesn't last forever means that  you failed.

44:33

But I agree with you that not trying to understand, well, what has the net benefit  been, what has the net lift been is also really important too.

44:43

That's why growth is so hard.

44:43

Growth is part of product is so especially hard.

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45:46

So you built the first B2B  growth team when you were Atlassian, correct? Yes.

45:56

Yeah, it makes me feel like an old  person, but yes, it was a very long time ago.

46:00

Slash maybe it's a new thing. Yeah.

46:04

It's either a long time ago or  it's just recently figured out this is a thing that you could  do in a B2B is focus on growth. Yeah, it is.

46:10

So that was around about 2012,  and at that time growth hacking was a thing.

46:18

People don't really use that term anymore,  but in B2C it was a very big deal because people could see Facebook doing their 10  friends in seven days and they could see this kind of thing that was working for people.

46:27

And they're like, "Man, that's amazing."

46:27

And at Atlassian we set out to go, "Okay, well,  do those techniques work in B2B?"

46:31

And also, it's kind of obvious now that a lot of them do and  that it's worth doing.

46:37

But at the time it wasn't that obvious because for a lot of B2B companies,  I mean, you summarized it earlier, Lenny, distribution covers all faults.

46:45

Almost all ills  can be filled in by really great distribution.

46:52

If you have a really good marketing, a really  good ground game, and you're kind of jamming your product into the channel, you're jamming  your product in front of people and you're papering over the ugly parts with customer success  people and services and consulting and whatever, that people will buy almost any software or  you can certainly be successful with a lot of different software.

47:13

But back in 2012, it wasn't  clear of like, okay, which instead you went at this differently and you've heard them in software  that sell itself, is the juice worth the squeeze?

47:24

And now I would say that it's pretty clear that  the juice is worth the squeeze to the point that lots of think about this all the time, but it  was a bit of an interesting time at that time.

47:34

And that was essentially the beginnings of product-led growth.

47:35

Is that a  simple way to think about it?

47:37

Basically it's now called PLG, but yeah, at that  time we didn't even know what to call it exactly. Just growth.

47:42

So based on that experience, a  lot of B2B companies now have growth teams through investing in growth, what makes  a great growth team in B2B?

47:47

Any pitfalls you often find folks fall into that  you think they should try to avoid?

47:57

Ultimately, a lot of these types of endeavors  are a matter of balance.

47:57

So what I mean by that is growth teams tend to go through a set  of phases.

48:03

Their first phase is proving their value at all.

48:08

So call that the gold rush phase.

48:08

This thing's probably not worth even doing.

48:08

Why are we doing this, merry band of people out  there trying to prove that there's some growth effect somewhere?

48:20

So that's the proof of phase.

48:20

And so the advantage of that phase is life's good because there's usually a lot of growths to  be found because nobody's gone looking before, so life's good.

48:29

But it's pretty random because  you're just literally searching across a random search phase going, "Have we tried X? Have we  tried Y? Have we tried Z?"

48:34

Then once you get that model going, then it starts to be, "Okay,  how do we scale this thing?

48:39

Is this just a flash in the pan?

48:44

Do we just find a little bit of low  hanging fruit and there's nothing else here, there?

48:48

Is this just a project we should  have done rather than an ongoing thing?"

48:52

So you have to make it a system.

48:52

You  have to prove that it can be repeated, and then you have to scale it.

48:57

It has to become  a thing.

48:57

It has to become part of your DNA.

48:57

You have to be taking a PLG lens to everything you do,  all the way from paid acquisition to activation, retention, engagement, cross product expansion,  upsells, I mean, you name it, all the different ways you can grow a product by revenue or  engagement.

49:14

There's many different ways to go about that.

49:18

And so you end up having to scale out  and be able to do all of those different things.

49:21

And then you have to figure out how you fit in  with the rest of the organization because there's other people who build products all day every day.

49:25

There's other people who sell that product all day, all day.

49:28

There's other people  who market that product all day, all day.

49:31

And so growth organizations are in this  interesting space, they're in between everybody else.

49:37

They're in everybody else's sandpit in a  little bit, in a little way, and they're kind of at the edge of everybody's full-time job  and they are very valuable, but they can be complicated because of all those relationships,  and because of the way they sit amongst all of the other parts of the organization.

49:52

So many  organizations fail because they don't really find much the wins or when they do find wins, it just  seems totally random.

49:56

Or they do find a lot of wins, but they all can't understand them because  they seem like they're just a random walk through a bunch of potential opportunities.

50:05

There's  many different ways to fail to fit as you go through your growth phase from trying the ideas  to success, to scaling, to operationalizing.

50:18

One of the biggest memes along these lines is  a lot of companies claim there's like just PLG rarely ever works.

50:24

You always, either you try it  and it just doesn't work or it eventually just peters out, I guess.

50:30

Any thoughts on just what  are signs that your product has a chance to work, peel product-led growth versus just go straight to  sales immediately and don't even worry about this?

50:44

First let's examine the counterfactual, right?

50:44

So let's start with the opposite of your question and say, "Hey, how would the world be sadder  if we all just gave up on PLG?"

50:48

We just said, "Hey, there's no point in doing it in B2B SaaS."

50:53

The problem is that there is not a natural force that pulls companies towards thinking about the  end user's enjoyment and success early in their journey.

51:12

There is no natural force, there's no  natural kind of a link force. Why is that?

51:12

I mean, 101, the buyer is the most important person.

51:17

The  economic bar is the most economic person.

51:17

Their needs are the number one thing.

51:22

They're usually  the person driving the RFP.

51:22

They're usually the person dealing with the sales organization.

51:26

So the  needs of the person who you hear are usually all feature-driven and they're not from the end users.

51:31

And so you're kind of sowing a seed of your own demise if you don't think about that end user.

51:35

But  it's one thing to say that you should think about the end user, it's a whole other thing to have  a system by which you do that because people pay lip service to all sorts of things.

51:46

But I'm sure  you've heard this one before, but in economics, people only do what their incentives told them  to do.

51:52

Broadly speaking, that is what they do, that is what happens.

51:55

You get what you set out to  measure.

51:55

You get what you give people incentives to do.

51:59

If there is nobody in the organization  whose true incentive is to measure their end user success, their enjoyment, their happiness,  their retention, their engagement early on, it will not happen.

52:09

Or at best it will be a hobby.

52:09

And so then by extension, if I start from there, then I say, "Okay, let's say it doesn't  exist, PLG doesn't exist and therefore it's a hobby and therefore there will be a  bunch of hobby people who care about this."

52:23

Then you ask yourself, "Okay, will that mean  that there will be many products for which those experiences really suck?

52:27

And does that mean that  that will be an opportunity for competitors of those products to be better at that?

52:32

And is that  a differentiated competitive advantage?" Yeah, I'd say it is. I'd say it is.

52:37

And so  I just work my way backwards and I go, "Okay, you can say that your PLG investment  might be too high."

52:42

You could be like, "Well, if I invest more, I won't get any more juice.

52:46

I can't spend my life just experimenting in the onboarding.

52:52

That's not the only thing that  matters."

52:52

And that's very, very true, but it's very hard to argue it should be turned to zero.

52:57

And so to me, therefore it's about the balance.

53:02

It's about, "Okay, how does PLG fit with the other  different ways that I grow in my business?"

53:02

At Confluent, for example, we have a PLG function.

53:06

We do grow with self-serve signups.

53:06

People who sign up, literally their credit card, lots of  them sign up and they're very successful, never speak to us.

53:16

We also have an enterprise sales  team that sells directly to very big companies, some of the biggest banks in the world, the  people you would definitely know of.

53:23

I don't think it has to be one or the other.

53:26

I think  that it's about a balance.

53:26

It's about getting the motions to work and for really sophisticated  companies, the people who really nail this, it's about making both motions work together.

53:36

If you can get a PLG motion work to feed your sales team and a sales team motion work to feed  your PLG funnel when the sales leads aren't ready yet and you can get those motions into playing  with each other, you can make a lot of money.

53:52

It can be an extremely successful way to  go to build a very resilient business. Why?

53:56

Because you get a lot of customers and you  get a lot of revenue.

53:56

You can't be that successful as a company if you have a lot of revenue, but a  small number of customers because you're captive, everyone knows that.

54:05

You can't be that successful  as a company if you have a lot of customers, but not enough revenue because you shouldn't  have enough money to sustain operations.

54:09

So the magic is in having both, a very large number  of customers and a very large amount of revenue, it's very hard to knock over a company like  that.

54:17

If I look back on my time at Atlassian, and I think that they shared their most recent  numbers, I can't remember what it was, but it was in the public data or whatever, something  80,000 or 100,000 customers, something like that.

54:30

That's a lot of customers.

54:30

That's a lot of  customers.

54:30

Let's say you're going up against Jira and you're like, "Yeah, man, I'm going  to pick off 1,000 customers from Atlassian." That's a lot, right? That's a lot.

54:41

Obviously  1,000 customers is a lot.

54:41

You only have 19, sorry, it's going to be 89,000 to go or 79,000  to go, or however many it is to go.

54:45

I can't remember their exact number of customers, but  it's very hard to assail a company which has a very large number of customers and a very  large amount of revenue.

54:58

And so that's why I think that PLG as a mechanism is incredibly  important for almost any type of company, if you can make the motion work.

55:09

Obviously there  are companies for whom the motion just isn't relevant, but for those where it does matter,  it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze.

55:18

That was an awesome answer.

55:18

I looked up  last year and they have 300,000 customers. Oh man, I'm so far off.

55:23

When I left  it must have been 80,000 customers.

55:28

They've done good work since then.

55:28

Also,  you're talking about incentives and how the power of incentives.

55:32

Charlie Munger  has this great quote I looked up just to make sure I get it right.

55:35

"Show me the  incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Yeah, exactly right.

55:40

I've seen cases where a sales  team was people trying to get a sales team to do a PLG motion, and you can beat them over the head as  much as you like, you can get into a meeting and tell them that you really, really want them to do  this, but at the end of the day, they're not going to do it.

55:57

And the same is true for every other  kind of function.

55:57

It's just the nature of things.

56:02

I have some newsletter posts around the stuff of  folks want to dig deeper.

56:02

Also, Elena Verna had an awesome podcast episode talking about product-led  sales and kind of the combination of these two things that we'll point to..

56:11

Just a whole other  topic we can go deep, deep on, but we're not going to do that in this episode.

56:14

Maybe just one  more question.

56:14

So you mentioned all the companies you worked at, so you've been at Salesforce,  chief product officer, MuleSoft, specifically within Salesforce, Metromile,  Atlassian, Confluent now, a lot of really interesting and different  roles.

56:32

How do you choose where to go work and how do you choose which opportunities  to take?

56:37

I imagine you have many options.

56:41

I have to think of my career.

56:41

So in  hindsight, looking at it this way, Lenny, so I don't know if forward-looking  was obvious to me this way.

56:44

But looking back, my career has been a little bit like a bingo card.

56:50

I've always been looking to fill in boxes I didn't have filled because I felt like that would make  me a better professional.

56:57

It's like if I didn't know anything about that specific type of sales  model or that type of marketing or that type of product management or that type of product or that  layer in the stack or that kind of thing is like, well, if I learn about that thing, I will become  more versatile.

57:12

So actually two things, it's fun, it's fun to learn something new.

57:18

It's fun to  prove to yourself that you can do those new things and then it makes you more versatile because it  means that any given problem you go up against, you've seen something that pattern matches to it.

57:26

It kind of feels like you end up bringing a gun to a knife fight in a way because every problem you  look at, you're like, "Oh, I have seen this from the other side.

57:36

I've seen this from some other  angle, and so I know that this is likely to work and this is unlikely to work."

57:41

And so when I  joined early on in my career, I was working for a big enterprise software company, sorry,  small enterprise software company that sold to the Fortune 100.

57:50

When I joined Atlassian, and  like I shared with you, we had no sales force at all actually at all.

57:55

Literally nobody to sell  the software.

57:55

It sold itself or it didn't get sold at all.

57:59

And we grew to have 80,000 customers.

57:59

It  was just pure product.

57:59

They had growth and just an incredible company.

58:04

Then it was at Metromile,  which was a consumer company that got acquired, made an insurance product for end consumers.

58:10

So they got nothing to do with technology products, like literally a complicated Internet  of things device you installed in your car, but ultimately it's an insurance product that  you'd sell to grandmothers in Florida as much as you would ever millennials.

58:25

And then at MuleSoft  to totally back end software that's used by IT organizations and a consulate infrastructure  that's used by developers everywhere to build really interesting data-driven applications, data  powered applications to do all sorts of things in real-time.

58:39

And you look at across all that and  you go, "It's all a bit random."

58:39

But I didn't see it that way because I learned, I actually was in  sales for a bit, so I ran a pre-sales engineering group, went around the world selling software.

58:51

So when I joined Atlassian, I wanted to kind of understand what it was to sell software at massive  scale with no sales team, can it even be done?

59:01

And so I learned a lot in my time at Atlassian.

59:01

When I went to Metromile, I'm like, "Well, I've never built a consumer product before."

59:05

I can say that I've actually built a product that's touched many millions of people because  Jira has, so I felt pretty good about that, but I'd never built one that I could say, "Yep,  a consumer, your average consumer can use this thing. It's so simple.

59:16

Even my grandma can  use it."

59:16

I'd never built a product like that.

59:19

So I got that experience at Metromile,  which is really fun.

59:19

I'd never worked inside an organization as big as Salesforce or an  organization with as good a sales motion.

59:24

You talked about distribution earlier.

59:29

Salesforce  is an absolutely insane distribution machine, just an incredible company with just an amazing  distribution network and a fantastic marketing approach that it's like a PhD in marketing.

59:41

When you spend your time at Salesforce, you're like, "This company is just one of  a kind.

59:46

It's a one of kind, and it's so outlandishly good at one specific thing."

59:50

And  so looking back, all of these jobs have been, when I say bingo card, I've just got an outlandish  education in these areas that are not obvious at all.

1:00:03

And once you've seen them, they're like  superpowers.

1:00:03

They're superpowers to be able to bring that same experience to bear on things.

1:00:07

And so one thing that I really I'm trying to figure out is why often people don't do that.

1:00:12

And  oftentimes people stay in a very specific domain.

1:00:20

They prefer to stay in a domain or they prefer to  stay in a specific kind of type of company or a role that works in a certain way, like companies  that have the same operating model or they plan the same way or they try to stay with things that  are pretty similar.

1:00:31

But it seems obvious that the most likely way to really grow is the opposite.

1:00:37

It's to constantly be choosing things that are either outside that, not totally outside the  lines.

1:00:43

Don't jump out of a plane if you've never parachuted before.

1:00:48

Obviously you want them to be  in some way and adjacency, that you want them to have something in common with what you know, but  you want them to stretch you and change you.

1:00:53

I had a really transformative experience many, many  years ago when I was at Atlassian and a guy called Tom Kennedy, he was our general counsel, so chief  legal officer basically, and a lifelong lawyer, very smart guy.

1:01:14

I liked him very, very much. But  just a lawyer.

1:01:14

Just a lawyer, corporate lawyer, corporate counsel, I'm sure you know what they're  like. And really great guy.

1:01:19

And I remember, so mostly in our meetings he didn't talk that much  except about legal things.

1:01:24

But I remember in one meeting we were having this vigorous debate about  a product strategy question about what we should do.

1:01:36

Should we go left or should we go right?

1:01:36

And as usual, he's there and he's mostly just staying silent.

1:01:41

And then eventually the  conversation's been going on for 15 minutes and he is like, "Hey, everybody, a year ago we talked  about X, Y and Z," and he proceeds to lay out our product strategy at that time, and he's like,  "Just recently we said the following things, and that was a product strategy, whatever.

1:01:54

Now  you are saying this.

1:01:54

Isn't it obvious that isn't this?

1:01:58

What you guys are saying is not congruent  with that, and if you really meant what you said back then we should be doing X."

1:02:02

And again, the  room went silent, everybody kind of turned to him, kind of nodded, and then everyone went,  "Yeah, okay, I guess we probably should be doing it differently."

1:02:12

And so the meeting  stopped when the GCE randomly mentioned that he deeply understood our product strategy and he  knew enough to be able to contribute in that way.

1:02:24

And so the life-changing part for me about that  was just this realization that if I'm going to be a really great professional, the type of  professional I want to be is that type of person.

1:02:34

The type of person who can contribute  to the whole company in all sorts of ways, doesn't spend all of their time in everybody  else's business, but understands the business and has the mental horsepower and the experience  to be dangerous in all sorts of, and I mean, that in a compliment way.

1:02:51

I don't mean that in a  negative way, but to be dangerous in all sorts of situations.

1:02:54

I think that when you have leaders  like that behind you and with you, then you're just unstoppable.

1:02:59

You're an unstoppable force  in business when you have that motion happening.

1:03:06

Wow, that was an awesome story and an awesome  perspective.

1:03:06

It's similar to the advice I always give PMs of people always wondering, "Should I  go deep on a specific subject?

1:03:12

Should I just try different things?"

1:03:18

And I find just variety,  especially earlier in your career is really powerful, not just to help you discover the thing  you like, but also to your point, just using insights from all these different parts of the  product and internal tools and trust and safety and platform and consumer product side and growth  and just core stuff.

1:03:32

The more of that you have, the stronger you get.

1:03:39

And I feel like another  benefit of your approach is if you work at just B2B SaaS companies, if you have too many of that  on your resume, it's very hard to get hired a consumer company.

1:03:50

And so just having it creates a  huge optionality for you if you do, which you did.

1:03:57

Yeah, it's interesting because people used to  talk about people who are T-shaped or whatever, and I've never really loved the analogy because  it's more like people are scribble shaped.

1:04:02

I mean, there's the really best people you've worked with,  they're more like scribbles than they are T-shaped because of course you want to be horizontally  capable, so you want to be broad and you do want to be deep, but you actually want to be deep  in way more than one thing.

1:04:18

Now obviously when I say deep, I don't mean I'm not able to do the  job of our finance function all day every day, but I'm 100% good enough to go three clicks  below the simple financial analysis.

1:04:29

I can go reasonably deep in our financials because I  want to and because it's partly it matters.

1:04:41

It's important to be able to do that.

1:04:41

And  so maybe a different way to think about that bingo card is I've rarely regretted going  deep in something that isn't quite my job.

1:04:51

I've rarely regretted it.

1:04:51

The worst case scenario  is I've learned something new that I will never use, which I guess at least that made my  brain slightly more agile.

1:04:55

I don't know, there must be some potential benefit of that.

1:05:00

But the very best case scenario is that when I least suspect it at some point in the future it  will turn out to be the thing that matters.

1:05:05

It will be the tool that I need, but I'm facing  some important problem and I will be like, "Oh my god, this was worth every cent."

1:05:14

And  so if you think about it on an ROI basis, doing things that aren't in your wheelhouse,  that aren't the things directly in front of you, the ROI can really be outlandish.

1:05:22

It can be off the charts great, but I guess it's speculative.

1:05:26

Because you  don't know you're going to need it tomorrow.

1:05:29

You don't know if it's going to be something  that's going to be a regular tool you use.

1:05:33

What's interesting is the bingo  card is the analogy.

1:05:33

Is there a bingo moment at the end of  this? Is there retirement?

1:05:41

Oh, you mean you've got everything.

1:05:41

You've got the collectible Pokemon?

1:05:44

Yeah, you collect them all.

1:05:46

Yeah, I was working with somebody at Salesforce  and he'd been there a long time, very, very, very successful person.

1:05:56

Honestly didn't  need to work anymore.

1:05:56

And he said something that I found really useful.

1:06:02

He's like, "Well,  now I'm at the point of my life where I want to work at the intersection of things that I  am good at and things that will be valuable to the company to do."

1:06:11

So basically it  feels like the reward of completing your Bingo card is actually to just get to spend  more time doing things that are leverage, that you enjoy and that are high leverage.

1:06:19

And so that seems like a good outcome to me.

1:06:26

I don't think most people are going to work  and hopefully have some sort of great financial outcome and then go, "Well, that's it.

1:06:29

I'm picking  up stumps, I'm retiring."

1:06:29

I think for most people, achieving some sort of financial outcome or some  sort of independence or whatever is really just another stage.

1:06:43

At that point it will be, "Okay,  well now what do I do?

1:06:43

What do I do with my life?"

1:06:49

And so that was why I said earlier that at the  end of the day, product management is at times the worst job in the world and at times easily  the best.

1:06:55

And it's both and it can be both.

1:06:55

And so it's hard for me to think about if I think  about the things that are the intersection of what I'm good at and are valuable to the world,  product management is a pretty fun one to do and it's different every day.

1:07:13

So I think we're  pretty privileged.

1:07:13

For those of you who listen, I mean, obviously your podcast reaches a lot of  product people.

1:07:17

I think we're pretty privileged to be able to operate at that intersection, but  it's not easy because you got to show value.

1:07:21

It's a very complicated job to show value in and  to demonstrate value to the world, and it's constantly being attacked, like you mentioned,  but it's still amazing when it all goes right.

1:07:40

When a product is very successful in the market,  it's hard to describe the joy you get from that.

1:07:45

Kind of along those lines to close out our  conversation before a very exciting lightning round, I want to take us to failure corner.

1:07:49

People listen to these podcast episodes and everyone's always just sharing all these wins,  everything's always going great.

1:07:55

The CPO of this, CPO of that, just moving on up and people  will want to hear times when things didn't go right.

1:08:05

Because those are stories  people don't share as often.

1:08:05

Can you share a story when something didn't go right,  when you maybe had a failure in the course of your career?

1:08:13

And if you learned something  from that experience, what you learned.

1:08:17

I mean, there's a lot of things that didn't  go exactly to plan, Lenny.

1:08:17

Very early on in my career, I was still a developer and  I accidentally deleted one of the core systems of the company that I was working  at.

1:08:31

So that's going to go down in infamy, but luckily that one's far in  the rear-view mirror.

1:08:36

That- That wasn't Atlassian?

1:08:40

No, that was far pre-Atlassian, but very  bad.

1:08:40

Yeah, the one I like to talk about, I wasn't directly responsible for it, but I feel  responsible for it.

1:08:46

I was at a company and we launched a product.

1:08:52

That was one of those products  that in hindsight should have been really obvious it was going to fail, but for some reason we were  all blinded by the potential.

1:08:58

It was a product that was about, it was basically to measure the  environmental impact of your company and to help you reduce the environmental impact of your  company by doing, think about it as a power management, building power management, managing  the power drawer of computers, managing the power drawer of AC and all of that stuff.

1:09:20

That was  the vision basically.

1:09:20

It's like a manage your environmental impact of your business.

1:09:26

The idea  was pretty cool at the time, and also it was the right time for that, and it's still a thing.

1:09:31

It's still an area of active research and investment or whatever, but it was one of those  things, talk about the wrong company, wrong place, wrong time, wrong distribution.

1:09:41

We had literally  no right to win, no right to play, just absolutely no business in hindsight being in that business.

1:09:48

And I feel really bad because I, again, good idea, wrong company.

1:09:54

And at the end of the day, we  launched the product.

1:09:54

We actually kept the product in market for two years, and the final straw  was weird.

1:10:00

The final straw was actually when a customer finally wanted to pay for it.

1:10:07

It had been  in market for two years, and we found ourselves with a customer who wanted to pay millions of  dollars for it.

1:10:12

They were ready to sign on the dotted line, and that was actually the moment we  decided to kill the product because we were like, "If this person signs this piece of paper, we are  stuck with this forever.

1:10:20

This one customer will be bound by contracts for however long or whatever."

1:10:26

So we actually ended up killing it.

1:10:26

At the moment after two years of failure when somebody wanted  to pay his money for it.

1:10:31

And I look back on that and I'm just like, "Man, that was a really  big..."

1:10:37

I feel really bad because I'm like, "It should have been obvious.

1:10:41

It was obvious  and we should have been able to call a spade a spade and I guess speak truth to power."

1:10:47

But  instead it kind of got through to the keeper and turned out to be a real accidental drain on  resources for years and just a big mistake.

1:10:58

So is the lesson there, just be real  with yourself?

1:10:58

I like that you have this forcing function of like, "Okay, this  is getting for real now."

1:11:04

Is it like, "I wish we had an earlier forcing  function to force us to make a decision?" Yeah.

1:11:11

I think if I could do it differently, I  might not have necessarily been able to 100% change the decision, but I should have tried.

1:11:18

I mean, it was pretty obvious after six months, this thing was a bit of a zombie product  walking, and the least I could have done is said, "This thing is dead."

1:11:29

We could have called it dead  way earlier, but instead we proceeded for another year and a half investing in it.

1:11:33

And so that's the  bit that makes me feel like real bummer about it.

1:11:39

It reminds me a recent episode with Raaz  who is the CMO at Wiz, and she joined us the first PM and a few weeks into it with  doing tons of calls with customers she's like, "I think I need a quick...

1:11:50

Because I don't really  understand what we were building. I don't get it."

1:11:55

And everyone's like, "I don't either."

1:11:55

And it  just, yeah, the founders just had a vague idea what they're doing, but they didn't really have  an idea.

1:12:04

And that just sparked a, "Okay, wait, no one actually does.

1:12:09

Let's actually get more  concrete."

1:12:09

And it helped them pivot.

1:12:09

And now, I don't know if you know about Wiz, but they ended  up being the fastest growing startup in history. Yes.

1:12:19

Isn't that amazing, right?

1:12:19

It  doesn't mean it's permanently fatal, but asking that question and going through that  reckoning turns out that came out stronger.

1:12:29

Scary, but it turns out it's for the best often.

1:12:29

Before we get to very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to mention  or leave listeners with maybe a last nugget, something that you think might  be helpful before we wrap?

1:12:43

Maybe a couple of different things that I think  are sometimes well understood, but just repeating them I guess because they're very valuable to me.

1:12:48

One is that if you let your calendar rule you, then nothing good will happen.

1:12:54

I know people talk  about that a lot, but it's surprisingly common in product management in particular that people end  up ruled by their calendar.

1:12:59

And so it's related to that whole look at spend 80% of your time thinking  about things going on outside the business.

1:13:03

Easy said, very hard to do, and if you don't do it, no  one's going to do it for you.

1:13:08

And so it is really hard to be successful unless you find a way to  force that to happen.

1:13:13

So to repeat that, also, somebody said this to me, I never looked up the  quote, but apparently Colin Powell said that if you're making a decision with less than 30% of  the available data, you're making a big mistake.

1:13:32

If you're making a decision only after  you have 70%, either the 70% or 77%, I can't remember the exact number, when you have  77% of all the available data, you have waited far too long.

1:13:40

And I've always found that very  insightful and it relates a little bit to what we're talking about about data earlier, but at the  end of the day, we get paid in product management to make decisions, good decisions, paid to make  good decisions that will deliver business benefit.

1:13:56

And a decision with too little data  is fatal.

1:13:56

A decision that takes too long and collects too much data is also  fatal.

1:14:00

So everything, it's about trying to find the balance of all of these different  things to try and deliver business advantage.

1:14:08

A great way to circle back to all the  things we've been talking about.

1:14:08

With that, we've reached our very exciting  lightning round. Are you ready? Yes. Let's do it. Let's do it.

1:14:17

What are two or three books that  you have recommended most to other people?

1:14:23

Yeah, they oldies but goodies, is probably going  to be The Lean Startup that I still find actually really good.

1:14:29

And the key lessons in there I still  think are very applicable to a lot of people, particularly the cohort analysis bit, which  for some reason I still don't see people do anywhere near enough cohort analysis.

1:14:37

So there  you go, that's my little tip.

1:14:37

And then INSPIRED: How to build products that people love  by Marty Kagan and the Silicon Valley product group.

1:14:46

That's an oldie but  a goodie.

1:14:46

I think it's got a lot of the key lessons of product management in it,  even though it's been around for a long time. Those are some classics. Very cool.

1:14:55

Do you have a favorite recent movie  or TV show you really enjoyed? I'm watching a program.

1:14:58

I don't  get to watch very much TV, mostly at night.

1:15:03

I like to watch things that  are extremely light, that just don't at all inspire any element of stress and that are  very short.

1:15:09

So basically short and funny is basically my thing.

1:15:13

And there's a new program  on Netflix, I think it's called Detroiters.

1:15:18

Oh, I've been watching that. Yeah, it's really funny. I really like that.

1:15:20

It's  so ridiculous, but very funny. So I like that.

1:15:24

The main guy, he's so funny. I forget his  name.

1:15:24

Tim Sweeney or something like that. Yeah, he's so good. Good one.

1:15:28

I've been watching  that, I'm loving it. It's very quirky.

1:15:28

I think the New York Times quote on  there is "Very weird," the quote. It's so weird.

1:15:36

In the first episode  I'm like, "What is this show?"

1:15:36

It's not even clear what time it set in,  and it's very weird. It's really cool. Yes.

1:15:44

Well, good way to describe it.

1:15:44

Next question, do you have a favorite product you've  recently discovered that you really love?

1:15:50

Yeah, this one, some of your listeners  might be using it, but Glean, it's a pretty well-known startup now.

1:15:55

They recently  raised a ton of money.

1:15:55

We've been using Glean at Confluent for a long time and it's  just amazing. It's just amazing.

1:15:59

I can't describe how good it is.

1:16:07

And I don't say this  lightly because I think search, like business search is probably one of the hardest problems  in computing.

1:16:13

Actually getting it right is one of the hardest problems in computing. Amazing.

1:16:16

It's not often I use a product and I'm like, "This thing is 10 times better than anything  that's come before it."

1:16:20

It's one of those for me.

1:16:25

What's the simplest way to  understand what it does for you?

1:16:28

It searches all of our organization's knowledge.

1:16:28

So the thing you were just saying before, you're like, "What does AST mean?"

1:16:33

If I had  that in a meeting, I just open my new tab, it'll automatically take over my new tab or  just like, "What does AST mean?"

1:16:40

And it will summarize back to me what AST means and it'll  give me a link to all the documents inside our company that just grab what AST means and then  it will tell me who the expert in AST at our company is.

1:16:51

It's like having a second brain.

1:16:51

It's an insanely cool organization searching. Great tip.

1:16:59

Okay, two more questions.

1:16:59

Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to share with folks,  find useful and work during life?

1:17:07

I think about this one a lot.

1:17:07

When I started  off in my career, I was an engineer's engineer.

1:17:12

I used to very much about technical  correctness and what computers were capable of, and technical righteousness, the right  answer rather than there is only one right answer and whatever.

1:17:23

It's a long-winded way of  saying that I often think about this phrase, which is people don't care what you know until  they know that you care.

1:17:27

And so I've realized that really being able to influence people,  it doesn't matter about whether or not you're right or whether or not you're wrong.

1:17:37

And at  the end of the day, it's first about trust and about relationships and caring about what each  other's outcomes are, what their incentives are, and all good things sit on top of that.

1:17:46

Once you have those kind of foundations, then you can build really good partnerships  and that's where good progress comes from. Wow, that is so good.

1:17:55

It connects with Radical  Candor, similar in theory of just caring.

1:17:55

People need to feel like you care deeply about  them before they take your advice.

1:18:02

And it also connects with this parenting book I'm reading  called Listen, that a previous guest recommended, which is all about how your kids have problems  when they feel like your connection to them is weak.

1:18:17

And so the solution is to build a  stronger connection for them to know that you cared deeply about them.

1:18:21

So this is really,  connected so much of what I've been reading. Yeah, exactly. Great one. Final question.

1:18:26

You were born in Sydney, folks can maybe guess by your accent.

1:18:30

If  someone were to visit Sydney, any tips, anything you think they should  check out, favorite thing in Sydney?

1:18:38

Yeah, Sydney is a really beautiful city and it's  kind of famous for its beaches and it's basically a metropolitan city.

1:18:43

People probably be very  surprised when you visit it.

1:18:43

It's a very big city, very metropolitan, a little bit like New York,  but New York with really beautiful beaches, if you want to think about it that way, it's kind  of crazy.

1:18:52

But there's actually a ton of really cool nature and beautiful things all around  Sydney.

1:18:56

And so if you want to do something like off the beaten path, you can actually go  to, there's an area called the Blue Mountains, which is like an hour and a half drive from  Sydney, and you can abseil down a waterfall, which is, well actually firstly you go  canyoning through a canyon full of water, and then you abseil off a waterfall at the end.

1:19:15

And if you're looking for just a really beautiful, fun kind of adventure like thing, an hour and a  bit away from a massive metropolitan city, that's my sort of happy place.

1:19:26

Really beautiful outdoors  stuff while also next to a beautiful city.

1:19:31

And you said you sail, what  sort of sail off a waterfall? Abseil.

1:19:34

You might think of it as  rappelling. Rappelling, I think.

1:19:34

Yeah, lowering yourself down on a rope or... Got it.

1:19:41

Because when I hear sail, I'm thinking  a boat just jumps through over the waterfall.

1:19:47

Oh, no, abseiling which is also, I think  in the States you guys call it rappelling. Rappelling, yeah. Wow. Very cool. Shaun,  you're awesome. This was extremely cool.

1:19:56

Thank you so much for being here. Two final  questions.

1:19:56

Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out?

1:19:59

Also point  folks to your Reforge courses that you created.

1:20:02

And final question, how  can listeners be useful to you? Sure.

1:20:07

Yeah, so my Reforge courses, you can check  them all out at reforge.

1:20:07

com, as you mentioned, the retention, engagement course and the data  for product managers course, so love to see folks get some value from that.

1:20:17

Lots of people  have been through those courses already and I really get a lot of value from it because like  I said, one of my goals is to help all of us be better product people.

1:20:26

I think our leverage could  be massive.

1:20:26

Where you can get in touch with me, obviously on LinkedIn, but also ShaunMClowes on  X, if you want to get in touch.

1:20:30

And in terms of being useful to me, I mean, broadly speaking,  I'm always open to new ideas.

1:20:37

If people have ideas about how to do better B2B, PLG, better B2B  product-led sales, for example, better ways of going about distribution and product-led sales and  product-led growth inside enterprise companies, hey, I'm open to learn myself.

1:20:56

We're all in  one big journey learning how to do this better. So true.

1:21:01

Shaun, thank you so much for being here.

1:21:05

Awesome, thank you very much, Lenny. It was great. Bye, everyone.

1:21:07

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1:21:07

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1:21:13

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1:21:19

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1:21:24

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