Episode 229: Navigating Urgency and Strategy in Product Leadership with Oji and Ezinne Udezue
Join us on this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast as Oji and Ezinne, co-authors of "Building Rocketships: Product Management for High-Growth Companies”, discuss the pivotal role of Product Managers in the AI era. As they share insights from their experiences with innovation and product development, Oji and Ezinne explore how PMs must adapt to the rapidly evolving technological landscape to remain relevant.
In this episode, they delve into the balance between customer focus and business needs, highlighting the significance of people, execution, leadership, and communication. Oji and Ezinne emphasize the need for PMs to lead conversations, advocate for solutions that address customer issues, and stay attuned to industry shifts.
If you're eager to understand how to navigate the challenges and opportunities that AI presents to Product Management, don't miss out on these valuable insights!
You'll hear us talk about:
28:55 - Balancing Board Pressure and Long-Term Vision
Oji shares advice on managing the pressure from board members while maintaining the focus on long-term strategy and vision, a perennial challenge for product managers.
40:12 - AI at the Core vs. the Edge
Ezinne discusses the difference between companies that integrate AI at their core versus those that only sprinkle AI on top. Learn what it means to truly embed AI in your company's workflow and how to approach it strategically.
49:38 - The Evolving Role of Product Managers
They cover how the role of PMs is changing with AI's capabilities in areas like PRDs and data diagnostics, questioning whether AI will replace product managers or simply change the way they work.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Oji: there are three fundamental systems that have to work really well for you to be able to innovate consistently. One is people. You have to have hiring systems, motivation systems, and team design systems that really work well. Is your partnership between you and HR. The center is, well people call it strategy but is more than that.
It is where will the market be and our customers be one year, maybe even to three years out. And not only that. How do you distill it in such a way that everyone in the organization can know it and act on it all the time.
Then the third one is just execution. Like how do you actually get this stuff done? The shipyard is basically the people.
[00:00:34] Ezinne: In order to do AI at the core you have to be clear about a couple things. how do I compress the workflow? How do I disrupt this workflow? how do I jump all these steps and just get to the answer? That's fundamentally how you need to think about it. If the problem is a problem that we call, like the persistent problem, no matter what the technology is, it's always going to be a problem.
You need to get from destination A to destination B cab hailing, taxi, CS, whatever. That is a fundamental problem. You need a, you have a destination. You are here. You need to get there. That's fundamental. The way in which you'll get there will change as technology shows up. Right. So AI at the core requires that you get to the heart of what the true goal the customer has is, what the problem is, what their goal is, and then reexamine the workflow.
[00:01:17] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Intro
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[00:01:54] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to have back Oji Udezue and Ezinne Udezue as Principles at Product Mind and former leaders at companies like Calendly and Typeform, they bring a wealth of experience in innovation and product development. Did you know that between both of them, they have almost 20 patents? I'm thrilled to dive into their insights and discuss their new book Building Rocket Ships, which has been making waves in the product community.
But before we talk to them, it's time for Dear Melissa. This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them here every single week. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what's on your mind.
Hey, product people. I have some very exciting news. Our new mastering product strategy course is now live on Product Institute. I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to product institute.com and use code launch for $200 off at checkout.
Here is this week's question.
Dear Melissa
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[00:02:58] Melissa Perri: Dear Melissa, I work at a SaaS company that originated as outsourcing, custom software development business. A few years ago, the company acquired a product company but continued to manage it the same way, building whatever the client asked for, just using the new SaaS platform.
As a result, there was no real product thinking in place. After a year in my role, I've managed to organize a backlog and introduce a product vision. However, due to old habits, we still bring in dozens of new ideas and product variations each quarter. This makes it nearly impossible to maintain focus on a roadmap.
In fact, we don't really have a roadmap, just a feature compass that I map, along the user journey, to track what we're building. My question is, what is the best way to separate and prioritize features in backlogs in an ever-changing environment? Are there best practices for categorizing ideas under themes like vision, feedback, and tech debt?
So the short answer is yes, you need a classification system and OKRs. The way that I like to think about it is, what are things that are strategic? What are things that our customer requests? Maybe not strategic, but things that might help us either close a deal or it's a really big customer and they're in danger of churning things that we really just need to get done sometimes to save our business.
I call this sales debt. Stuff that the sales team, or your consultants, right? Former consultants. Are basically promising to customers that may not go towards a long-term vision. You also wanna think about what are bugs, what are tech debt, all of those different things in there. Now, once you have that, you're making a portfolio and part of your stuff is going to be strategic.
That goes along with the vision, helps you get there. It helps you reach these OKRs. Now, my question for you is on that strategic part, are people aligned with your vision? Did you do a lot of work to get them all aligned and say: Hey, here's the product vision. This is where we're going after, this is why we really have to double down on it and not just build whatever.
It sounds to me that if people are still pushing stuff in there and treating it like a consulting mindset, you might need to do that first. Make sure that people feel really comfortable with that vision. In addition to having a portion towards strategic, you do have a portion towards bugs. You do have a portion towards tech debt. And sometimes, let's be realistic, you do have a portion towards customer requests.
One of the most important things that you could do is really show people and break it down. What amount of money are we spending on each one of these now? When you're showing that to leaders, those customer requests and those sales debt things there's a high margin to actually being able to do that.
Maybe you take their approach to actually surface up how much money we're spending on that and what the margin is that we're actually going to return if it's one-offs for customers here or there, versus the strategic stuff that you're doing and what the growth potential is and what you can actually be able to return on that.
That's one approach that I like to show, and once people see that, they start going, oh, that's interesting. It might also be a mindset thing where they're not really understanding that by doing all of these customer requests, building a million different versions of your SaaS product, you're going to have tech debt on there.
Your margins are gonna be lower, and you're not really a SaaS business. It's gonna be harder to scale. You might wanna paint the picture and give them options and say, Hey, if we're still gonna go this way, this is what our business is gonna look like. Here's our roadmap, here's what we're doing.
That's okay. That if you choose to do that. If we go this way more on the product side with this product thinking, here's our potential for margins, here's our potential for business, here's our potential for growth, and then we're just building something once. Occasionally we might have to step in and do something custom, but we should charge extra for that.
So that's how I have gotten through to people who really get stuck in this mode. And it's a very common mode, especially when you're used to just doing custom software. But you wanna bring it back to why do you care about SaaS in the first place? And that's because of margins, scale and growth. So if you could put it into that context, you might have a little bit better of an approach and a little bit more let's say grace in convincing people that you just can't dump a bunch of requests onto your backlog.
I hope that helps, and again, I wish you the best of luck. If you have any questions for me, please send them to dearmelissa.com and I'll answer them next week. Now it's time to talk to Oji and Ezinne.
Building rocket ships motivation
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[00:06:54] Melissa Perri: Welcome to the show. It's great to have you both back.
[00:06:57] Ezinne: Hey. Good.
[00:06:58] Oji: Hanging out with
[00:06:59] Ezinne: Yes. Good to be back.
[00:07:02] Melissa Perri: I am excited because you have a new book out there called Building Rocket Ships, which I gotta read very early on, and I think it's just really helping a lot of organizations and a lot of product managers out there understand what it takes to be a great product manager, but build high performing teams.
So can you tell us a little bit about what motivated you to write this book?
[00:07:22] Ezinne: Given our career and, uh, some of the work we've done with startups as well as people internationally, one of the things we noticed was that we. Most people didn't have access to what we perceived as world-class product management. Many times it felt as though if we sent them to some website or asked them to read a book, they were starting from the middle of the plot, right?
There wasn't clarity on the why behind some of this. Like the Silicon Valley folks were just talking to themselves, right? 'cause they had the background and all of that. And we found ourselves repeating the same thing. Like, Hey, it's about finding a problem. Okay? Why then does it matter? Uh, how you build, and not take direction from others, it's because the customer should be at the heart of it. So these were fundamentals that we found ourselves repeating, repeating. And we felt, okay, it's time to just put it in a book and not assume that people understood the why behind some of the things we do, uh, as product managers.
That's the core thing we wanted to give back. Particularly, I mean, we're immigrants. We came from Nigeria. So we spend a lot of time mentoring and coaching people in the US as well as outside. And it just having something that they can reference and have available to them to understand some of the fundamentals was important to us. Oji, did I miss anything.
[00:08:38] Oji: No, no, I, I just, the thing I wanted to add was, Ezinne and I have been super fortunate to be at the heart of the last 20 years of, of product management, you know, T-Mobile, timing, our voice, Procore on her side, Microsoft on my side, Atlassian, and so on. And it sort of dismayed us that the diffusion rate of these really great companies and how they build suck in those zip codes. And you go around the world and you see people who
They don't just don't have access to like the experience you have the shortcuts, the nervous system of like, this is exactly how to build. it's sort of disappointing actually. 'cause we, we live in a world where you think the cost of information is zero. And we wanna see a world that's abundant for products. We wanna see people make great products, make a lot of money, happier humans basically, and more ethical, you know,
[00:09:33] Ezinne: yeah,
[00:09:33] Oji: that's what we did. We tried to pour that love into the book. You know, they say if you, if you don't want people to read anything, you just write a book.
[00:09:39] Ezinne: Put in a book.
[00:09:40] Oji: we don't know if we succeed, but we put it out there anyway. And you know, the good thing is we try to cut, like good product people, we try to cover the gamut. There's a regular book, Kindle, hard cover, self cover. There's a pure edition with, uh, Ezinne worked on it for so long. It has practical, downloadable templates content.
[00:09:58] Melissa Perri: Ooh.
[00:09:59] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:09:59] Oji: you can go on. If you get the pre edition, you go on Coda, the book is digital and there's like another book, like literally as much content as the book that you can download with your team immediately. And on the other side of it, we plan to make parts of the book open source and free for, especially for people outside the country who can afford it on Amazon because we, you know, we want people to actually read this.
[00:10:21] Melissa Perri: love that. And that's such a good mission. I feel like whenever I travel outside the United States, one of the first questions I always get is, do you really think we can do product management here? I got that in France. They were like, do you think French people and French companies can actually do product management well? And I'm like, yeah. And they're like, well, it's only like really for Silicon Valley. I'm go, well, there's, you know, there's parts of the United States that are not Silicon Valley, and you'll find fantastic companies there too. But there's beautiful companies all over the world, and I think that's such a great mission to try to bring that outside of just California there.
[00:10:54] Ezinne: Yeah. In New York,
[00:10:56] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:10:56] Ezinne: in Austin, maybe.
[00:10:57] Oji: percent.
[00:10:57] Ezinne: Yes.
[00:10:58] Melissa Perri: I know. And I try to remember that I, I remind people too when I first moved to New York, like there was no software
[00:11:03] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:11:04] Melissa Perri: in there
[00:11:04] Ezinne: Yes.
[00:11:04] Melissa Perri: And
[00:11:05] Ezinne: Yes.
[00:11:05] Melissa Perri: Now everybody goes, oh, New York is like a hub for software, but it wasn't always.
[00:11:09] Ezinne: It wasn't, that's when we met you. We were, we were out there in New York about the same time.
[00:11:14] Oji: product, uh, council days and so
[00:11:17] Ezinne: Yes.
[00:11:18] Oji: still trying to
[00:11:19] Ezinne: Figure, yeah.
[00:11:20] Melissa Perri: we were
[00:11:20] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:11:21] Melissa Perri: meetups and find people who
[00:11:22] Ezinne: Who?
[00:11:22] Melissa Perri: were talking about
[00:11:23] Ezinne: Yes.
[00:11:24] Melissa Perri: knew what a product manager was.
[00:11:26] Ezinne: Yes. Yeah.
[00:11:27] Melissa Perri: so
[00:11:28] Oji: why are you giving us like, uh, traumatic flashback? Stop it.
[00:11:32] Melissa Perri: It's the early days.
[00:11:34] Ezinne: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:35] Melissa Perri: in the book, uh, you really outlined this concept of a product operating system, and you talk about it as a shipyard. Can you tell us a little bit about how, you know, you came up with that concept and what that concept is?
The product operating system
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[00:11:46] Oji: With the experience we've seen and and also the way we've been very thoughtful of product management. It became clear to us that there's some rhythm to the madness. Sometimes product management just seems like fighting a fire, but if you've been in a lot of really good companies, you're like, look, I've seen the patterns behind these good companies and how they do things in a way so they don't become one hit wonders and they can actually make really valuable stuff all the time. And we thought about that for a few years, actually Ezinne and I first talked about product systems maybe four or five years ago, we started to distill, we started to take time to figure out and study and distill what people are doing well. And what we came up with is that innovation can't be a hodgepodge. It can't be just, you know, the last CPO. And then you come in, you add another layer to process, you don't even subtract anything and so on and so forth. You start out with a founder, the next product leader. Next product leader. And before you know, you have a Frankenstein process. And what we distilled was there are three fundamental systems that have to work really well for you to be able to innovate consistently. One is people. You have to have hiring systems, motivation systems, and team design systems that really work well. Is your partnership between you and HR. The center is, well people call it strategy but is more than that.
It is where are we gonna be or where will the market be and our customers be one year, maybe even to three years out. And not only that. How do you distill it in such a way that everyone in the organization can know it and act on it all the time.
Then the third one is just execution. Like how do you actually get this stuff done? The shipyard is basically the people. It is how the people operate within this product operating system, and how you lead them. And the book is really organized in that ways. The first part is fundamentals. So maybe like senior PM to principle PM, right?
What are the fundamentals in building a great product? And the last part is how do you run the shipyard? How do you do strategy? How do you keep people connected to the same goals? And this is more a resource for principal to director to CPOs, to CEOs, to CFOs, so that they can partner well with business function of leadership in the product system. So that's what it is, three things.
[00:14:03] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:14:03] Oji: You wanna add?
[00:14:04] Ezinne: Yeah. I think Melissa, the way to think about it is this, from our years of experience, and particularly as leaders, as became leaders, whenever you are building products or you're speaking to the board or working with your, the leadership team, and there is something broken. Most people are saying the product organization isn't delivering, et cetera, it usually comes down to they're either blaming the people they don't know how to solve problems, or they're saying, we don't have clarity in our strategy, or it's like, we just don't know how to execute.
So whether you like it or not. Whether intentional or not, there is this system. And when you think about it in engineering or computer science, just interacting components that produce an outcome. It's this component of humans and how they work together. This component of how we dec way finding like what you said, strategy, how do we make decisions, how do we make choices, how do we prioritize?
There's something about how a company chooses that they're either intentional or they're doing it haphazardly. And then the last part is how do they execute? How do they ensure that as they release their learning, that learning feeds into decisions that are made later? How do we ensure that engineering is speaking with design, et cetera?
So whether or not you like it, these are real living things in your organization and there needs to be some intention around that design. And that's really what we, we try to, to talk about. Because how you manage people is a thing. You can spend hours working on that. How you create strategy a thing as, as is execution. But the reality is that amazing products that scale come at to, to this like intersection between these three things. And that's really what it is that we do, which is speak to how you can optimize each of these three things to get something that is bigger than the sum of the parts.
[00:15:53] Melissa Perri: I love that. And I, I think it resonates a lot with where I see organizations struggle too. When a lot of CEOs come to me, they do what you just said and that, so when you said it, I like perked up. Or they go, I think it's my people. Right? Like, I don't think my product managers are doing what they're supposed to be doing. And I'll go in and I'm like, is it just your people? Is it, what about like the systems around it of how you reward those people, the strategy like, hey, you don't really have a strategy. And it's so interesting how sometimes the leaders just don't wanna hear that, right? They're like, no, no, no. It's, it's a, it's my people, right? It's just that they don't have skills.
[00:16:25] Oji: It is easier to point, it's easier to point at something else versus something that you have some control over that you're not doing properly. And actually some CEOs don't even understand. It's just like what's happening right now with ai, right? Everyone is uncertain. people don't know what they're gonna do next 'cause they smell blood in the water. They need to change something and not sure what to change. And so everyone is focused on near term earnings, when some people should be thinking about the future much and investing in the future. So like sometimes people actually don't know what product is like, and fundamentally we secure the future of companies, right?
We secure anywhere from three months to 24 months. And right now people are like, okay, let's just secure three to six months out. 'cause that's what we care about. So this is what do product people do? And not from a, they do PRDs, but how do they secure the future of returns for this company? I think people don't really like grok that all the time. It just feels so utilitarian.
[00:17:17] Ezinne: Yep.
[00:17:18] Melissa Perri: Totally agree and I, it's that it's the missing of that long-term thinking, right?
It's, it's for growth. I was actually talking to somebody earlier about, um, how their company, this very large company was not thinking about. Their products that they oversaw were very much like a growth play, right? Like investments. That have returns today. And their budgets kept getting slashed because they were trying to invest in the core, right? Where you get all those crazy returns. It wasn't really seeing that if we invest in these other products over here, right?
In five years, they could be completely disrupting what we have at our core. Or they could be adding to it, or just as big. When you're working with companies and trying to explain that model of how you need that long-term thinking for product, what do you find resonates?
[00:17:58] Ezinne: Because I've worked mostly in what I call transformative companies that are, that know that there's a, challenge that needs to be addressed. I would actually say that portfolio thinking is actually what has helped, portfolio and Horizon. So I'll just, I know Oji's story probably different.
[00:18:14] Oji: It is actually pretty much the same.
[00:18:14] Ezinne: Pretty much same?, okay. It, it is this idea that you have to pay for now, like a startup that would have to do . They're really trying to search and fine. So you really do have to pay the bills no matter what, but you also have to be ready skating where the puck is going to. And as an organization, I'm, I'm one of these people that really believe that you should serve the customer, but you should also be looking at your bottom line.
So as an organization, you have to be really crisp about: how much can we afford to invest in the portfolio for now while not trading out our future? So that often resonates when people say, okay, I get it. So, okay, we are in trouble, so we're going to shift 80 20. Okay. But if we're doing well, maybe it's 40, 60, 40 now 60 into the future, but that level that, that takes the conversation into what I call mature territory.
Um, because outside of that I've tried so many things. And then one, the other piece I talk about is tech depth and all the other things is changing it from that type of product language to more of assuring our future, right? Making sure we take care of the things that will cause us to stumble.
So just, we tend to want to use our language. To speak to executives and that we should actually be doing the opposite, um, because they don't wanna speak product ease, to speak to them in terms of business outcomes, what they understand and will always understand because that's the essence of how a company is run.
So that's, that's what worked for me.
[00:19:42] Oji: I do wanna say plus one, I think for younger companies, The one really good portfolio strategy and using portfolio language is like, you know, 70% on what's happening over the next 12 to 18 months. right now there's so much of a squeeze in the market. You probably wanna be closer, earlier, and maybe 20% for current the near future. And then 10% or less for moonshots things that could completely remake the entire business . the key isn't this, as I mentioned, this portfolio language 'cause that's a language of business, As a language of product. And this is something that CPOs should do more, especially today. In fact, even though we say this, a pragmatic advice or product leaders is actually like right now, you should be speaking even more like this. What actually should be biased into the present. There's so much uncertainty that if you start talking 18 months, some CEOs will see you as not urgent because they're afraid there'll be no company in 18 months. So what the hell are you talking about? So you better be talking about the company in six months because if you can't secure six months, there might be nothing to secure. You have a down round, you'll be out of business.
[00:20:54] Ezinne: Yeah,
[00:20:55] Oji: make sense?
[00:20:55] Ezinne: so important.
[00:20:56] Melissa Perri: And do you see that shift that's happening right now?
Urgency in today’s market
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[00:20:58] Melissa Perri: I think that's really important because it's like with the AI boom, with the economy, with everything. Do you see that as a, as a pressure from like the AI parts or the economy parts that are putting that pressure on now? What's the signal of we have to be looking. This far out. And I guess I'm kind of getting at too is that six months might be very transformative for a company as well, right? Like it might be that vision that we would've done in 18 months, but like, we gotta do it now. How
[00:21:23] Oji: Yeah.
[00:21:24] Melissa Perri: that and bring it in?
[00:21:25] Oji: So let me, let me attempt, I think as has also this, but I'll say this it's complicated. You know, most tech companies aren't profitable. so you're not profitable, what, what are you thinking about? Well, first of all, you're talking about your investors, who you're backbone in your existence. And two, you're thinking about the market because you want to scale so that eventually you start making profit and you don't need the investors so much, or you just get a loan, uh, to keep going. And so if you're particularly unprofitable, you've had an up round in 2020, right? Where money was free and cheap. You're getting a lot of pressure from investors and investors that are basically at the board meeting are saying, what are you doing to AI? Your revenue is flatlined. You're not losing money, but you're not growing. And so we don't see a determin value of investments going up, as you'll see, seeing a lot of pressure. And then the production people, people thinking about the three to six months are like. my God, that, uh, activation rate isn't going up, and so on and so forth. So that's what's happening across a thousands of tech businesses right now, right? CEOs who are afraid that they'll have to raise money soon and they're gonna run out and they'll do it at a much lower valuation, which means they'll get fired. And they have to think of the short term. And AI is a driver of even more worry than the business cycle because then they're afraid on top of that, that someone else is gonna wake up in the valley, create something over six month vibe code it out, and then they'll be out of business.
[00:22:41] Melissa Perri: It's.
[00:22:41] Oji: So that's what's happening.
So it's, again, it's portfolio meaning that you really have to focus on the short term. You run outta money, you have to fire everybody. But then some people in the company crack team and know Typeform. I was fortunate we had. Type from labs, which was bound by the former CEO and the co-founder David. And so we have a small group of people, like three or four people who are building the future, who are thinking, if we got disrupted today, what will we use to save ourselves and have that urgent mindset?
But you can be, when you're talking to a board right now, you can't be saying, oh, we, we are securing two
[00:23:13] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:23:14] Oji: years out. They don't know. They'll be two years out.
[00:23:16] Ezinne: Yeah. So let me, let me say this. I think that if somebody took a soundbite and said, focus on the short term, they may misunderstand our goal. It's really around urgency, right? It is. There is a huge, like, it's a confluence of so many things, right? Just last year, everybody was talking about profitability.
The fact that, um, the markets were struggling with capital. There was so much pressure to drive efficiency and productivity. And then AI too, right? So all of a sudden you're trying to be profitable, being as efficient as possible, people are squeezing costs out, and at the same time with AI, vibe coding and all the things, the barriers to entry into your market is happening right here, right now.
And then the other thing is, in the past you were trying to protect your, Your revenue not really shake things up, but everybody is shook right now, so it doesn't really matter. Code base is changing. So with all of that, there is this idea of urgency. So I still think your vision, your strategy, your story of who you wanna serve, how you wanna serve them, how you'll be, how you'll make money in the process still has to be generally long term.
You need to have a, a compelling story of an ICP that is going to generate income, but the way in which you attack their problem has to be extremely urgent. And it's before that urgency didn't exist for many companies. They would take six months to maybe sort of, can't do that. Because other people have seen that problem and wanna solve that problem and take your customers to from you tomorrow.
So that's what we're seeing.
[00:24:46] Oji: And worse than that, you now have 10 million lines of code is essentially like a baggage to you, and people are going to generate the 1 million lines of code that can do exactly the same thing super fast.
Now you're stuck with
[00:24:58] Melissa Perri: You iterate on top of it faster too.
[00:24:59] Oji: Yeah. Yeah. You can't iterate on top of the thing. They can. And you know, access to the market is lower and lower. Basically, people can make a $20 million company with like 200 grand now versus a million bucks. And so it is a trying time. It's not as easy as it sounds actually, like it's still hard for startups to make it into the market, but people are worried as if they're gonna lose their lunch tomorrow.
And so that's all the pressure.
[00:25:24] Melissa Perri: Yeah. What, do you think that is a, like a healthy pressure for these companies? Do you think people are reacting to it in a good way?
[00:25:31] Oji: No, I don't think it's a healthy pressure 'cause I think it's causing... A healthy pressure is when your sense of what will happen is actually true. Meaning that you apprehend reality and maybe in terms of timelines, you apprehend the right timelines. But I think people are seeing much more compressed thinking of what will actually happen.
Like we talked about absorption rate, there are things that have been in market for 15 years, haven't made it to insurance companies, haven't made it to manufacturing companies and so on and so forth. So, the real economy moves. There's an absorption rate thing here, but CEOs right now in early stage, mid stage series C, series D are under a lot of pressure.
You know, the money, the cost of money going up really puts a lot of investor pressure, you have to show up every quarter at the board meeting and take a beating. And so, I think there's a misperception of reality.
[00:26:22] Ezinne: It is. Hundred percent.
[00:26:24] Oji: I'm just saying like, even vibe, you know, with people who believe in vibe coding in total, have never built anything important either. Like, how easy is it to build a company that serves a hundred thousand customers reliably without security holds respecting privacy and GDPR. On the basis of a very slight weekend binge, weekend coating. It's not as easy as it sounds. It's not at all. so what we would prefer is that people have a right size sense of pressure. They have a right size sense of what it is, and they don't prevent themselves from investing in the future, prefer. 'cause I think that we see that happening in a bad way.
[00:27:00] Ezinne: And to underscore actually build trap and all the feature factory thing with the amount of pressure people are feeling and basic question, is this good? We don't think it's a little it's a little much, it, it's not necessarily gonna net out. And which is also why we believe that if people step back and really go back to what are the fundamentals of what we're trying to do.
So in the book we talk about the fundamentals of product. The next thing we talk about is actually how do you actually create a winning long-term strategy? Like really understanding economies of scale, economies of scope why platform matters. So if you want to, if you can look at the problem space and step back and really, truly intentionally design, like intentionally put together your solution, you end up winning.
But people are in such a hurry to just build. And in the end, I talked about you about this a lot, gonna be a graveyard of tons of apps and tons of things. And I was telling him it's like the fast fashion of code
[00:27:53] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:27:53] Ezinne: us. It's like just all these things will be, we'll be literally with a whole lot of people's content, content in all these apps that don't survive because they weren't built right or long. But people will make money. So let's not get, let's not get it twisted. They will make money. But if you want that enduring company and a product that will scale, just, you've gotta slow down just a bit, think about it, but work, still work with some sense of urgency.
We're burning our people out with some of the fretting that's occurring.
[00:28:22] Melissa Perri: I think it's very hard, like you were saying, to be a VC-backed or PE-backed company right now. 'cause I, I've, I've heard from them, like I've sat in board meetings where about we should be cutting our workforce X amount because like, AI is just gonna replace this percentage.
And then I've heard other investors talking about like, how fast do we think we can get to. Delivery and it should be tomorrow, instead of that just like ship it. So I, I think there's so much like noise to filter through as product managers these days and that's like a burden.
Balancing board pressure and long-term vision
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[00:28:55] Melissa Perri: What's your like, advice for trying to keep, you know, the pressure from the board members, like the founders the CEO how do you get that space to focus on that vision? Right? I think that's always been like a product management issue, but like what's your advice for people to say, if you do wanna craft a greater long-term strategy, let's say, or a something that will last, like should you be doing to approach that and then how do you communicate that's what you're doing in a way where people aren't going to chew your head off?
[00:29:23] Oji: This is the hard part of product leadership. Maybe the hardest part. PMs talk a about PRDs and specs and running teams, at least at the senior. But this is the part that few actual people like, I guess the people who think about this are in the thousands, not millions of people in the world. and so because our profession is mostly apprenticeships. Is actually hard to get right because you don't have any people to mentor you. Like you have like a CEO of very good leadership succession engineer at a company that's a decent size. here's what I'm only gonna say some of the things that I've learned, even have learned that are similar and different. I'd say the, you know, the, the thing you gotta do is, if you are a leader and you get into an organization that has these worries, the first thing you have to do is put points on the board. So be urgent and find the biggest problem you can solve in the shortest amount of time. Because the currency here is trust and communication. You need to have people be able to trust you. And one way to trust you is to act right? And then that doesn't get rid of, you know, shipping does not total communication, right? Because people very quickly get used to this, the new rate of movement that you've achieved with your engineering partner and say, now go twice as fast, which sometimes is not possible. So the next thing is you have to communicate and set expectations. Here's what we will do. Here's what we think it will yield, and here's how much time it'll take. and actually you should sandbag that because again, there's a lot of pressure. And then, one of the things that we've learned through hard experiences, don't just talk to your CEO, you should, should be his best friend, talk to the board.
You know, do one-on-ones with the board every couple of months with, the, you know, there's seven board membership that are like two or three that are most influential. Make sure you have one-on-ones with them. And again, set expectations. It doesn't always work. 'cause some people are crazy and they don't want you to set expectations.
They want what they want because, you know, they have bankers knocking on their door and they're not, that is. But I think these are some of the things we've learned about how to ride that wheel.
[00:31:27] Ezinne: I'll add something and it's very specific, but it's because as I've looked back on my career, it just has been this drumbeat, which is really making sure that we are aligned on what problem we're trying to solve as a board, as a leadership organization, and then if we are aligned, what are the options that we have?
Most times I think people think they have to go off somewhere and ta-da, solution, and the board misses them. They don't quite know how to talk. So to Oji's point of communication is like really getting everybody on the same page. I call this an alignment, context setting. This is the context within which I'm working.
This is how I understand the industry, here's how I understand the customer. Like really, really be clear on what problem are we trying to solve. We're trying to be profitable. Get to rule of 40. Okay, by what time? Just really make sure that's clear, right? And then present, what are the options that we have before us, right?
Because people tend to forget that strategy is really about choice. It's about decision making. Like your PMs make decisions down the path, but strategy is what decision are you making about how we will win, right? So then lay before everybody, if this is our goal, this objects we're all on the same page, here are the choices we have and based like choices.
[00:32:41] Oji: key.
[00:32:42] Ezinne: Yeah. So given that. Here's what I, chief product Officer, is saying we go and do. There can be debates, then it's constructive. There may be something you didn't quite get. Some other board member has seen something happen in another industry. Then we can have true, truly constructive conversation. And then maybe we can't pick one, maybe we only have three.
We take some bets and then we go down. So as I look back on the things I learned, the things I did poorly, the things that I did extremely well, it really comes down to that context setting. Getting on the same damn page on what the hell are we trying to solve for and what are the options we have in front of us?
And just keep beating that drum. And when people go off left, right center, like are we even working on the same problem? Like really continue to hit on that. That to me is how you get rid of some of that noise and get people on the same page and moving forward.
AI toolkit mindset
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[00:33:31] Melissa Perri: When you're trying to bring people back to that context too, I've seen, especially with AI out there, a lot of people are just turning to, but what are we doing with ai? What are we doing with ai? What are we doing here? How? How have you been seeing people incorporate those stories? Well, and also how have you been seeing people not use AI?
[00:33:49] Ezinne: has a lot more on this, but I will say this, um, a belief I had from the very beginning as I, as I, I wrapped up my time at WP Engine. The thing we kept saying is, it is a, AI is a bunch of toolkits. Let's be very, it is technology. It is technology that makes us amazing, 'cause it helps in our productivity, but it also helps rethink the workflow and how things are solved.
So it is a, like a whole bunch of tools, but we have to break it down to its core capabilities. What does it provide for us? So when you say, what about ai, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean how we work with ai? Or what aspect of ai? How does that influence the workflows that we're trying to solve for in this B2B company?
So just breaking it down and saying, what do you mean when you say ai? Right? So that we're talking about the same thing. That was always helpful and important. And I think that I, I feel really lucky that the board that I worked with and, uh, the private equity firm that I work with.
Really got it. They would come into the room and we would actually work through stuff and say, well, not this part, not this capability within ai, we mean this other one. It's like, oh, okay, good. Let's come back to you tomorrow. Now that we understand. So I think breaking it down to what exactly do you mean when you say AI?
It's more of a toolkit of tons of capabilities. So let's break it down first. Oji?
[00:35:11] Oji: Yeah. No, I, I agree. I, the thing that people of all, in all sort of levels of the organization is, it's sort of two things happening with AI. One is a lot of excitement because there's a gold rush. You can't ignore it. You can't make it cerebral, right? You have to sort of mind that excitement.
So, simple things. You know, we create AI channels in Slack, have people contribute ideas, experiment. You have to capture that energy and you have to turn that into real things in the product. The only thing you have to make sure is not like magic AI, pixie does, it doesn't matter. It has to be, it has to be real. And then for the adults in the room, you have to do what is that talked about? Which is you sort of talk 'em down. What exactly right? What capability, how does it serve workflows of our target customers in creative ways? Because this is more careful crafting versus spending six months building something that no one will ever use, which will reduce people's trust, again trust in your ability to do anything. So you have to play the inside and outside game of the frothiness and the excitement, but inside game of like closer to the business and investment and return on capital. I'll give you an analogy. When the internet came out I, I shouldn't say that.
[00:36:25] Ezinne: But we were there. No, you're aging yourself. I, I was just a, when internet out.
[00:36:29] Oji: I was a, we, okay. When the internet came out, Microsoft, I wasn't there yet, but they came up with a browser. They actually, and reason worked on Mosaic Public project. He left, they found an escape. Microsoft bought Mosaic and that became the core. This is in internet history, Arcana bought Mosaic and turn into an Explorer. Like Bill Gates had this seminal moment, the internet is everything. This is what we're gonna do now. And he bought a browser and instead of working on it and the browser took over the internet, it was 90% market share. It turned out that the browser wasn't where the action was, the action was Facebook, Google. Twitter, Salesforce, these things that didn't think about the presentation layer of the internet, but like used it at the core, right?
[00:37:14] Ezinne: Uh, the core of human need,
[00:37:16] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:37:17] Ezinne: the thing that, that is the human need.
[00:37:18] Oji: need, but also the core of the application, they use it as transport, to exchange API calls faster than RPC and all, and the people who are engineers will understand what I'm talking about, right? They, they dug it deep into their app. It went into the DNA, it wasn't just like on
[00:37:34] Ezinne: the gooey, yeah.
[00:37:35] Oji: We were obsessed with, we were stuck with browsers and fighting Chrome and all this stuff. That's, that was like, it's like Napoleon, right? He doesn't fight near the port where people have been fighting for 500 years in Europe.
He fights somewhere else so he can win. And so this is exactly what happened. So why am I saying that? There'll be excitement, but the most thoughtful part of the years where people will say, how does this serve our customers? Exactly this. And it's a capability. It's just a tool. It's like AWS who taught things about AWS now.
But before everyone was like cloud, Gartner, oh cloud, this cloud. But now it's just like we use this thing to build a better thing.
[00:38:09] Melissa Perri: Mm-hmm.
[00:38:10] Oji: And so that's how people have to think about it. And you have to urge leadership, including boards to think of it this way. Otherwise you'll be a casualty.
[00:38:20] Ezinne: The other one I wanna mention real quick, Oji, we talked about this in the other, uh, session we did, is not just how does it change serve our customers, but how is it going to change the industry? When you say you are truly an advocate for the customer, you have to be looking around corners. So if you are serving the construction industry, for example, what is it that AI is going to do that will fundamentally disrupt the construction industry as a product leader working on a product and construction?
You should be thinking about that. You really need to be doing that.
[00:38:48] Oji: Ezinne is always an encouraging me to use examples 'cause sometimes we don't want to speak like we're from an ivory tower, but let's give a couple of early examples. They're now outdated. But I remember the first time I used AI feature in notion, I'm like, this is bullshit. Like, I could do this with a right click much faster like this.
Why am I using the magic uh, button that those things super slow, I hate it. And obsessed with that. I like so in, in Typeform, we knew that people make a very complicated, brand aligned form that plugs into their website to maybe 30 minutes. Right? If you did, if it did a qualification. So we set out to do it in two or three minutes by telling just you do a small wizard. You, we don't, you don't ask, we don't even ask for your brand. We go fetch it you tell us exactly what you wanna do. And the thing you could do in 30 minutes, you do in two minutes. And which illustrates something about what AI does. What it can do is essentially AI is media lines of code just ready for you to plug into. So the thing that they can do the best amongst other capabilities is speed up to value, for example. And so we always look for places where time to value became super magical that created net demand.
'cause people will be like, look, your stuff I saw uses this thing and I want it. And the other guys didn't say anything about that and we don't want it. So super practical things. If you don't do 5x acceleration, why using AI at all?
[00:40:05] Melissa Perri: I think that is super core and it, it gets into that whole concept, right, that we were just talking about, like AI at the core versus the edge.
[00:40:12] Ezinne: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:12] Melissa Perri: I'm seeing this rush of, I'm sure you two are, but like the rush of people sprinkling, right? Like let's talk a little bit about like what does it mean when, like how is a company set itself up to be AI at its core, right?
AI at the core vs the edge
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[00:40:24] Melissa Perri: And which companies are right for that as well versus what does it mean to just sprinkle AI on the top?
[00:40:30] Ezinne: Let me kick off with this. In order to do AI at the core you have to be clear about a couple things. What is the goal the customer has and what is the mapped workflow for them achieving that goal? And then you ask yourself, how can I do this? How can I turn this on its head?
That is fundamentally where you go when you're really thinking of AI at the core, you're asking yourself, how do I compress the workflow? How do I disrupt this workflow? How do I get to the, how do I jump all these steps and just get to the answer? That's fundamentally how you need to think about it. If the problem is a problem that we call, like the persistent problem, no matter what the technology is, it's always going to be a problem.
You need to get from destination A to destination B cab hailing, taxi, CS, whatever. That is a fundamental problem. You need a, you have a destination. You are here. You need to get there. That's fundamental. The way in which you'll get there will change as technology shows up. Right. So AI at the core requires that you get to the heart of what the true goal the customer has is. What the problem is, what their goal is, and then reexamine the workflow.
AI at, uh, at the edge often is looking at the existing workflow as it sits, right? And it, whether it's the workflow within your application or the, the actual living workflow, right? You first, you pick up the phone, call the taxi, et cetera, et cetera, and you are going to just continue to increment and say, okay, how can I also call a taxi?
Right? Press the buttons a few times, so you're not thinking about it differently. You're instead saying, I'm going to AI this step, then I'll AI the next step. So that's the difference in how we, when we're coaching or talking in our workshops, that's the fundamental change that the PM has to have.
It's, I understand the customer, I understand their problem, and I understand their goal. If I had a magic wand, how can I jump all the steps and really rethink it? So that's one approach in core. The other is fundamentally understand the core capabilities. There are two ways to go about it. Break down what, what is ai? Like, oh, okay, there's some of it that's imaging. There's some of it that's this. And then ask yourself, how do you make these problems that are your ICP have disappear completely. So those are the two ways we coach people in driving towards ai at the core, the whole, we have our app, we have the software, we're gonna figure out how we plug stuff in and make it AI ish.
That is AI at the edge, and that's what we're seeing a lot of people do. And you should do that if you don't have an AI story or haven't had time, just do that just so that you can at least stay in the game as long as it's not costing you the investment necessary for your AI at the core.
[00:43:11] Oji: Yeah, and that's a good point. You should do both because one is an inside game and one is an outside, outside game. That's where you start, because otherwise your team doesn't even have the capability to think from, to upend the whole thing. Like when I talked about five X brand, whatever, that's AI at the edge. this is, whatever million dollar business, we want to make more money 20% this year. How do we make it more compelling? We don't believe that true AI at the core companies will use a lot of legacy code. We don't think so. I think there'll be more than 50% based code and they'll be brand new. And this is the dilemma that companies face today, that if they don't do that, other people will do it and do it faster. And they might catch up, they might disrupt them. Like how does gong, I don't mean to pick on it. How does Gong make money in an AI age when it's like a hundred grand to get started? And when some of their functionality, I mean, Siri was disrupted in a weekend. OpenAI released something and you could hack Siri together after spending a billion dollars on this thing, This is what we are facing. I'm gonna go back up to the business level. There's gonna be a great replacement. Old code bases have to be either junked made a lot more model, is very traumatic for engineers, right? Or the new things that are coming up, the Twitters of this era will come and replace them just like they did to Microsoft's businesses. so there's gonna be a great replacement.
Some people will evolve out of it, some people will purchase and acquire into it, and some people will die. And that's what's gonna happen. And what we coach is how do you knock that? How do you go fundamental first? In, in, in Typeform we actually like, okay, I have this whatever million dollar business. And we were sprinkling AI into it in ways that mattered. 'cause you can do it in ways that don't matter. then we created formless, which was like, if someone's gonna kill us, they'll probably make this. And so let's make it first so that the, so that we own it, if that makes sense. And over time you have to shift to this, innovator's dilemma. And the question is, how do you navigate that shift? And the next 10 years is really gonna be about this story repeated thousands times.
[00:45:19] Melissa Perri: I think that's so key and it, it, we had a conversation about that at a conference I was at, not last weekend, the weekend before, Friday. And I was using this example of a company that I, I've been exploring out there called Digits and it's like AI accounting and I, they're still working on some stuff, but the idea is like, you don't have to go put all of your things in, like in QuickBooks and categorize it. You, it just plugs it all in. It plugs into Gusto, it plugs into all your bank accounts, and then it does all that. It reconciles it automatically. It knows where things are coming from. So it can label it very smartly. And then you just can come in and manage your business and then you have to, if you go and you, you tweak stuff here or there, right?
They take care of all the stuff on the backend. Like you don't have to be a bookkeeper to do it. Whereas QuickBooks, you have to like be a bookkeeper to fix stuff. and that drives me nuts. 'cause I'm like, I'm not a bookkeeper, but I would like to, I know what I spent money on and I just wanna categorize it, like, that's all I wanna do and then
[00:46:10] Oji: All you did was bring it in and then you did nothing
[00:46:12] Melissa Perri: nothing. So
[00:46:13] Oji: like why?
[00:46:14] Melissa Perri: yeah. So somebody asked me, and I, I want your, I want your opinion on this because it feels Intuit has been talking about AI and I do not work with Intuit, so I have no idea what's going on there. But somebody challenged me when I was talking about this and they said of the things that they are doing in QuickBooks is they have tried AI on the categorization where they try to automate it. It's not very good and doesn't happen all the time, but they're saying, well, what if that's like a test into further AI automation. Like what if we're sprinkling it in there then trying to go elsewhere? And to me, like my answer was, okay, like it could be a test bar. Are we testing on like the most important thing? Right? Like it, like what's the, like what's the pain For me as not being a bookkeeper, I can categorize anything, but it's the reconciling, it's all these other things that, don't, I'm not an accountant, so like I, but you can, there are rules, right? Like if you follow the rules, you should know how to do that on the backend and all of those things.
[00:47:06] Oji: Especially with accounting. Look, so we come from an era where software is so hard to make you picked a small sliver of a problem to solve because that's the problem you could solve really well. You're Calendly and you're like scheduling, okay, if we try to take on the whole calendar, someone will kill us.
So we're gonna do this, it's gonna take us 10 years to turn it into a 300 million business. If that makes any sense. We actually, we are in a world now with, development velocity can maybe go from two to 10 x over
[00:47:35] Ezinne: 10 x.
[00:47:36] Oji: while. So if you are good, if you know exactly what your customers want, you can actually be more ambitious.
Give you an example of full story and all these clickstream products. They brought in the clickstream so that you could understand the clickstream. they said there's a problem in this clickstream. Well, you don't know what problem. You don't know how many people maybe experienced it. Once you know the problem, you don't know how to fix it.
Someone has to go analyze and how to fix it, right? And that's just the analysis level. And then the next level is, okay, now we sort of understand the root cause. How do we create A PRD to solve the root cause? And of the 10 problems, which one is the most important? So prioritization. But the thing is, the capabilities, like Ezinne was talking about of ai, is that it can actually do all these things very fast.
It can even write a PRD based on the data from the clickstream and check in the code. So people are gonna get more ambitious and people who are incremental that don't matter, like QuickBooks are gonna see challenge. Now obviously install base. Brand strength. These are all important things, but honestly, open AI is trying to kill Google.
It's trying to kill Microsoft eventually. and this is the ambition that people who are native AI companies are having, and some of them will succeed. So it's not enough to be cautious. You can't be, and you can't be cautious on unimportant things. Like if I were QuickBooks, I would focus on sort of like an assistant that helped you with your real issue is, I don't wanna worry about this.
[00:49:05] Melissa Perri: wanna make sure it's done right so I don't churn.
[00:49:07] Oji: Yeah. And then if I break that down into like, what is the top two things you worry about, that's where I, I'll point AI at and it's not categorized in a column that's not that.
[00:49:17] Melissa Perri: that part is very easy for me to do. I think that's a great way to put
[00:49:20] Ezinne: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:49:20] Melissa Perri: So when
[00:49:21] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:49:21] Melissa Perri: at, um, the future of product management, we talked about it a little bit. AI's very good at stuff like PRDs, um, being able to diagnose things in our, in our data, there's a lot of talk about does it replace the product manager? do we just get rid of everybody? do you think is gonna change about product management in the next five years?
The evolving role of product managers
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[00:49:38] Ezinne: This is a topic I love. I dunno that it'll answer. I don't know that it answers your question, but I, I think it really, when people were sky is falling, uh, last year it really pissed me off because I think it pointed out that most people did not understand what product managers do and the why.
Okay. I think that, and we open up, like, I think it's in the pro edition quite frankly. I poured my heart out and said, I think when I look at small companies, big companies, enterprise B2B, B2C, and then I also look at, companies that are more, maybe media that are working with product managers.
Ultimately, PMs have to do three things. One is create a solution based for the problem that you are solving for your customer, like really solution, right? And that's where most people spend their time. 80%. It's the solutioning piece, right? But then there's a part of your job that is about getting that solution in the hands of the customers or being the advocate for that solution within your organization and making sure you take away all the heartburn. So think about this. Whenever customer support or customer success or sales has a problem, who do they come to? The best pm. Your organization is usually the one that they come to, and it's because they know the product, they know how customers want to buy it. They just know so much and customer success, customer support, all know this person, right?
So that is hardly ever said or discussed, but it's a really important part of our jobs as product managers. Like what is the way to remove any roadblocks from customers experiencing and getting access to your solution. And the third is evolving, right? We keep talking about you should know your customer.
It's what is going on in this industry? What is going on in our customer's world that I need to be made aware of so that I can anticipate and build the product? So it's the product evolution aspect. Quite frankly, if you are at a startup, you are doing all three, right? If you're in a huge company, you're probably doing mostly at the first piece.
If you're an executive, you're probably doing all three. You are like, or working on the other. So it's, we need to step back and ask ourselves. While majority of the, the PMs may be working on the solutioning piece, that is not the only job the be like if you go to any company and figure out who's that best pm everybody talks about they're really doing all three of these or have some credibility across these three areas.
On the solutioning piece and the communication of the solutioning piece. AI has come and is going to do some really interesting things, so we're no longer working on a document of requirements. You're working on software, right? The, the space within which you are brainstorming, designing, et cetera, is no longer a document to be translated.
Actually, software you're looking at software and clicking around and that's really good. It takes away the, but I said that, and you read this, it just really takes the refinement process, the backlog refinement. It changes it.
[00:52:27] Oji: Code becomes spec because code is basically language.
[00:52:31] Ezinne: Language. Exactly. Exactly. You don't have to write.
[00:52:34] Oji: not the production code, but at least the thing that you idea around. Sorry.
[00:52:38] Ezinne: No, please. It's that you, before you had to take English language on a document and translate it into code. You don't really need to do that anymore. You could actually be working with it with code, and that becomes your core prototype and then we move on. So things have changed there no argument, but how the organization experiences that, how you influence the rest of the organization.
I remember one PM saying, oh darn it, our CRO and our CEO billed some code the other day. Now they wanna sell it and put it on the website and blah, blah blah. That's now a major problem. They buy coded over the weekend.
[00:53:14] Oji: product,
[00:53:14] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:53:15] Oji: and then the CO says let's sell it.
[00:53:17] Ezinne: Let's tell it. So A, as the pm, your job is to figure, is this in conflict? Is this not in conflict?
[00:53:23] Oji: You're like, do I have a job right now?
[00:53:25] Melissa Perri: Yeah. And it's also like if the, if the CRO and the CEO are going around you and doing that, so what, what are you, what are your interactions with them? Like? Are you plugged into the conversation and
[00:53:36] Ezinne: You?
[00:53:36] Oji: because they think you're gonna slow 'em down. So they're
[00:53:39] Ezinne: Yes,
[00:53:39] Oji: right now you are. You are on the sidelines and you are alarmed,
[00:53:42] Ezinne: yes.
[00:53:43] Oji: and dev leads are like, holy
[00:53:45] Ezinne: What the heck is going on?
[00:53:46] Oji: for security risks. GDTR issues.
[00:53:49] Ezinne: So in, in the past, right, the PM had the design resources, the engineering resources, well now we've got Chad, GPT, and lovable. We don't need you guys. Anybody can build code now. So it's, it's a wild, wild west. So I do not think that the job is eliminated. I do think it evolves. It is, how do you get all those people in the sales organization that are now actually vibe coding and building all sorts of prototypes that you are like, oh crap.
What the hell is going on? How do you curate that? How do you get them to the table? How do you help take that energy and use it towards good? That's part of the orchestration that we used to say PMs have to do. That is now part of the job. So it's just evolving.
[00:54:31] Oji: How do you build what is the right thing?
[00:54:34] Ezinne: to build.
[00:54:34] Oji: Build it, get
[00:54:36] Ezinne: Good.
[00:54:36] Oji: to market in the best way that creates demand and love.
The build part is going to be subsumed. There's gonna be a lot more competition there,
[00:54:44] Ezinne: Yes
[00:54:44] Oji: but the right
[00:54:46] Ezinne: thing.
[00:54:46] Oji: which ultimately in the end is what matters.
' cause it's not. The right solution. The right thing. It's like in the end, what you want is to shift the right thing, ship it the way that matters. That is the job. The part of divining the right thing is going to remain super important because doing it is still gonna be arcane, soft, sophistry and wizardry, right? mean that. It's gonna be customer listening. The middle will be lot. There's gonna be a lot of creativity. There's gonna transform and someone will write a new agile manifesto. The end will still be hard to do, and PMs will spend more time in those places because it'll uniquely differentiate them in the workplace.
[00:55:21] Ezinne: Yep. Yeah.
[00:55:21] Melissa Perri: That's a great way to look at it. And so if you're advising the PMs who are listening to this right now, what skills to work on? What would you say?
[00:55:30] Oji: Of the five or six things that we hire for in our career for a good pm maybe like a fifth is related to the middle thing. the middle thing is building. The PRD, it's the running, the meetings. It's like herding the cats. It's like making sure all the inputs are balanced into a thing that is prioritized and shipped. And so what does that map to in the skillset? We call it basically execution, right? Shipping chops, if that makes sense. besides that is leadership. 'cause you have to gain the confidence of these people is communication and over communication. Right. It is not necessarily in that thing, although some of it is creativity, being able to work in white space, being able to perceive the synthesis of market problems and all issues.
We don't know what to do here. And coming up with something that actually works. It is the customer listening skills that help you do that creativity in the direction of the customer. Because you can have creativity eight 90 degrees away from the customer. 'cause you're like, I have a brilliant idea. That's some type of creativity. But if it's not on the customer, it is a waste of money. And so those are the other skills. So what we tell PMs, you have the shipping skills, these are the skills that are gonna be more important because they correlates to finding the right thing and getting into market in the right way. Those are the things. And also communication in a world where there's a lot of Hurley burly, right in the build, your ability to lead, your ability to communicate has to be even higher, right? You have to walk into a room and people are like, okay, what he said, no matter how young he is, makes so much sense. The CEO is like, salute. We're gonna do it. That kind thing.
[00:57:09] Ezinne: I wrote an article end of the year and I think it kind of encapsulates what it is that I tell people I mentor and coach. The first thing that needed to happen was PMs needed to wake up. I just had this sense that people were just going through the motions, just on autopilot. That's the word. Yes. And the second was, so there are about five things I said. Second was, be curious. Sometimes we get so into our product and knowing our product, but we forget the person using it and the problem we're trying to solve and we're so in where we're experts at the pro, the product itself, but not the problem, right?
And how the problem is evolving with now that our product is there, right? Um, so just that curiosity is really critical. And then being bold, right? Taking risk is critical. And then last but not least, and this is where I spend time, is speaking the language, and this is gonna sound really weird, but technology, customer, business, and AI now. It is your job to figure out how to translate. I always say be a polyglot, right? Translate this and like speak it clearly as much as possible. That's what I really think people should focus. There's a lot of noise, et cetera. Just be alert, be curious, be bold, and then be ready to be that person that is bringing all the parties together and ensuring that there's clarity, because you can speak all these languages and bring those people to the table towards a very clear goal.
That's the, when I talking to somebody that I mentor, that's what I'm asking of them, so that they can stand out.
[00:58:48] Melissa Perri: I think that is fantastic advice and it's kind of bringing me back to almost like my first day as a product manager. I remember my boss telling me like, your job is basically to communicate what the business and customer needs are back to tech and figure out how to be the bridge between. Now that sounds that's more important than ever.
[00:59:07] Ezinne: Yeah.
[00:59:08] Oji: In the last 10 years, we reduced products to more customer discovery, more clear PRDs, just like the middle and the edges of those are gonna become more important because we have competition in the middle.
[00:59:20] Melissa Perri: I think it's going to be a wild ride for the next couple years.
[00:59:24] Ezinne: Yeah, it will be. It will be. There's a lot, lots that's gonna change.
[00:59:28] Oji: encourage people though, like, the thing is this, right? It was always what your boss said, it was always dual mission. Make customers happy, make us money, right? That's always been the core of it. I think we've gotten less lost in the process of how to do that.
[00:59:45] Melissa Perri: big time.
[00:59:45] Oji: Every digital business, every tech business still needs this. Because there's a lot of developers, but they don't have time to be as customer centric as we are and that we are mandated to do, and they're not asked to do that. And so what that means is one of our partners, Ted says, the rocket ship is accelerating to warp speed, but if you're point in the wrong direction, it goes away from the mission faster, right? You vibe code, let's not call vibe code because this sounds terrible, but you, 10 x developers in the wrong direction is terrible for returning capital. And so the rendering of what a PM does, a good PM does is still super
[01:00:29] Ezinne: So critical. Yeah.
[01:00:30] Melissa Perri: I think that's so
[01:00:31] Ezinne: Yeah.
[01:00:31] Melissa Perri: important for people to remember. Oji and Ezinne, it's been so good having you here. If people wanted to go read your book, where should they go?
[01:00:38] Oji: You go to Amazon and search for Building rocket ships: a blueprint for high growth companies in the age of AI, and you will find it, uh, you should go to Shopify and search for the same thing, and you can get the Pro edition.
[01:00:52] Melissa Perri: Oh.
[01:00:53] Oji: and you will get like 60 plus tools you can share with your team immediately.
So turn into a weapon, not just a book to read on the weekend. You can follow us on substack all the different places where for free we try to help the PMs around the world build amazing things.
[01:01:08] Ezinne: ProductMind.Co. So you can find us consulting, you can find us coaching, and you can find our thoughts in our book there. Okay. And Amazon, obviously you can buy it there.
[01:01:20] Melissa Perri: Amazing. And we will put all of the links to where you can find them on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.