Episode 257: Making Product Launches Work at Scale with Michael Dodsworth
In this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri is joined by Michael Dodsworth, the founder and CEO of Fanfare. Michael shares his insights on the importance of storytelling in product management and how it can drive product success.
He discusses his transition from engineering roles to leading innovative product launches that create immersive experiences and captivate audiences. Through his experiences, Michael emphasizes the significance of aligning strategic goals with customer engagement to elevate product performance.
Tune in to explore how Michael's approach to storytelling and strategic alignment can transform your product launches into unforgettable experiences.
You'll hear us talk about:
07:36 - The Power of Storytelling in Product Management
Michael Dodsworth explains the essential components of storytelling for product managers. He highlights the importance of simplifying stories to resonate with audiences and making them personal to leave a lasting impression.
23:39 - Turning Product Launches into Immersive Experiences
Melissa and Michael discuss how brands can create engaging and immersive experiences during product launches. Michael shares strategies to avoid negative aspects of product drops and ensure a memorable customer journey.
29:28 - Applying Launch Lessons to Software Products
Melissa asks Michael about translating product launch principles to software companies. Michael emphasizes the necessity of educating customers and having a clear narrative to drive the success of product launches in the tech industry. Episode Resources:
Episode resources:
Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dodsworth/
Fanfare: https://fanfare.io/
Check the localization report: https://lokalise.com/library/data-reports/localization-revenue-report-2025/
Check our courses: https://productinstitute.com/
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Dodsworth: we've definitely seen brands, who don't have a clear idea about who they're trying to reach. What they're trying to achieve with this, how to follow on from that. Like usually a launch is part of a longer journey with that customer. So not just that launch, but also how can I keep things going after the fact? People who are really successful are the ones who've really understood from the very beginning, this is the demographic that we're trying to reach. And here's the kind of feeling we want to evoke with our customers. Often, it's very much on feel. And if you destroy people's trust through a launch, you can really do damage to that feeling. So I think that's incredibly important.
Don't be dogmatic in anything you do. There's always things to learn. There's always things that are gonna, bring new insight into what you're doing. There's always a change in tooling or like a change in the world. means that there's a different way that you should build or there's a different products that you should build.
when you see incumbents get stuck and stopping innovating, like that's an enormous problem. And like I always wanna stay nimble. I always wanna stay able to move with whatever changes we see in the world. That's a really important thing for me.
[00:01:14] Intro
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[00:01:14] 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.
[00:01:52] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Michael Dodsworth, the founder and CEO of Fanfare. Michael is at the forefront of turning product launches into immersive experiences that captivate audiences and drive real time insights. His journey from engineering leadership roles to pioneering new ways of creating customer excitement is truly inspiring, and I'm thrilled to dive into his experiences and explore how storytelling and strategic alignment can elevate product success.
Welcome, Michael. It's great to have you here.
[00:02:19] Michael Dodsworth: That's great to be here. Thank you.
[00:02:21] How Engineering Leadership Led to Fanfare
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[00:02:21] Melissa Perri: So how did you transition from engineering leadership to fanfare? Tell us the journey.
[00:02:28] Michael Dodsworth: I think over time you realize as an engineer, like you start off in life, heads down kind of blinkers on focusing on one particular problem. And I think through my time at large companies like you can stay doing that for some amount of time. But then you realize if you really want to get anything done, you really have to bring people into that development.
You have to build something significant. You have to rally around a particular cause or rally around a particular group. And you realize to do that, you have to. You have to tell a story, right? You have to talk about the consumer experience. You have to sell that feature, that you know, motivation behind that particular thing that you wanna focus on to a larger audience and bring people in.
And then as you move up, the number of people that you want to sell to, the number of people that you wanna rally around that cause increases. So I feel like it naturally happens. That you have to, if you really wanna build something of merit, you really wanna make a difference, you really have to be able to bring people together around that cause.
So I think through my time at Salesforce and then into Optimizely, that absolutely happened. Like I found myself trying to solve particular problems that it was infeasible for me to do on my own, and I had to naturally, and like gravitate towards people that could help me do that. And seeing other people do that in their roles as an engineer, but maybe a product lead, maybe a CTO, seeing how the CTO brings people together to move the ship in a particular direction was really impressive at those places. And then through into rival, like we were solving a pain point that I feel like everyone. Feels trying to buy tickets to live events is an incredibly painful consumer experience, and solving it is incredibly tough.
There's all kinds of things on the consumer side. There's incredible challenges on the vendor side, and you have to then reach out to teams, vendors, venue owners to try and understand exactly what pain they're feeling. So that you can build the right product. It's pretty easy to be heads down and focus on some technical challenge that doesn't solve their problems at all.
So I think in service of building the right products, you have to be good at telling that story and listening to people tell their story.
[00:04:56] Melissa Perri: Storytelling is a critical skill in product management that we talk about. Can you tell us a little bit about how you view storytelling as a skill in product development? What made you, realize hey, this is the thing I need to hone in on, and how do you see people use it?
[00:05:12] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think it's been around people who I saw being exceptional at something. Like I was always that heads down engineer, and when I saw people use that skill. I saw how capable they were at doing something that, again, felt completely alien to me. I was kind of in awe of people who could do that. And our CEO at Rival uh, Nathan Hubbard, he was CEO of Ticketmaster for a time.
He is just such an exceptional threader of a story, in everything he does and it's incredible to watch and like seeing behind the scenes of how he structured it and how he thought about it. It wasn't just, it felt natural when you saw him do it, but realizing there was clear intent. There was a clear, like weaving together of something that was cohesive and seeing what the effects of that were and how successful he was at that.
I think it made me wanna pursue that, made me wanna understand the the ins and outs of how he did that. And then through into starting my own thing, like I realized that was always gonna be a critical component and through from the early stages of pitching your idea. Selling people on the technical merits.
Unless you're doing something in deep tech, and even if you're probably doing something in deep tech, you're never gonna get there. You have to tell a story about the problem that you're solving, why it's important, why this could be a bigger thing. And if you're not successful at doing that, like you, it's a non-starter.
You're not gonna get this thing off the ground. And then talking to customers. Is something that I definitely had to learn quickly. I'm still learning for sure, but it's something that you can, again, if you're from an engineering background, it's easy to get focused on the technical aspects of what you do.
And again, you just have to listen to someone else tell their story. You have to understand how you can weave a narrative together to pitch. To sell your product to you can see in their eyes where you hit on something that really resonates with them, and then you're off to the races. So you just have to find the right way of structuring things and just rinse, repeat was my kind of way of going about that.
But it's a real skill that, it's incredibly powerful once you can really figure out how to do this.
[00:07:36] Melissa Perri: What do you think you, you mentioned too that you watched your CEO do it and then you studied, how do we get to a great story? What do you think are some essential components of storytelling that product managers need to nail?
[00:07:48] Michael Dodsworth: Simplify. I think just finding the two or three points that really gonna get attention or really gonna resonate with the people is really important. I think making it a personal story too, really helped, like finding examples from your life that are gonna resonate, especially with life ticketing.
That wasn't all that hard, but like finding the little nuggets that are really gonna stick with people. Where they're gonna leave that meeting and they're gonna tell their friends, their colleagues. That little bit is gonna be such a repeatable, memorable moment in that narrative that it's gonna be something that kind of lives beyond that meeting, I think was really important. I saw Nathan do that time and time again. He would just find the three elements, like the three pithy mentions that he would do, and then he would keep saying them like repeatedly and he would keep coming back to them. And then that was the thing that really stuck.
So I think simplify and try and make it something that, resonates with people. Has some, uh, grounding with people.
[00:08:51] Finding What Resonates With Customers
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[00:08:51] Melissa Perri: How do you find like those components where you go, oh, this is the thing that resonates?
[00:08:56] Michael Dodsworth: I mean, some trial and error for me, Sure. Talking with people and the more you do it, I think the better you get at listening to people. I think it's the listening, especially in the early stages you are really just trying to prod and poke. To find the common elements that people share with you, and it's a real challenge to, to ask questions properly. There's a book called The Mom Test, that was helpful for me that I recommend, but you can often ask questions just to reaffirm something that you believe or just prop something up, that you believe, and I think that's not what you want. You really want to try and tease out what their pain points are and what they're after and what they're going through.
Like the pain that they're going through day to day, the pain that they go through Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Like how does it affect them, how does it affect their team? All of those things. So I think it's asking questions and listening properly in the early stages, and then being able to weave those things into a story.
[00:09:53] Melissa Perri: When you're thinking about moments for storytelling in product development and for product managers, which parts of the product lifecycle we should be really focusing on storytelling like here, like which parts are critical?
[00:10:06] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think in the early stages especially, I think that's when you know you are designing a system or you are thinking about whether you should take something on, whether you should rule something out, you are coined to like quickly come together on something that you can build upon. I think it's most important then, because I think that's the point that you can rule out the mistakes, that you can find the problems in your thesis, that you can like really get groundswell behind your idea.
I think once you have that and you are off to the races and I think it's a little easier. So I think in those early stages, especially like rallying people towards a cause is really important.
[00:10:48] Melissa Perri: Some of the things that we talk about storytelling with, in product too, is around messaging, and I guess it's around product launch too. So Hey, we're gonna put this out to the customers. We have to really make sure we have a story down. If you're thinking about putting a good story together for a product launch and a good product launch together in general.
What are key components or what are the, what's the anatomy of a product launch, let's say, to make sure that you really nail it?
[00:11:13] Michael Dodsworth: I think being, like understanding why you are doing it and what you are going after we've definitely seen brands, retailers, vendors who don't have a clear idea about who they're trying to reach. What they're trying to achieve with this, how to follow on from that. Like usually a launch is part of a longer journey with that customer.
So not just that launch, but also how can I keep things going after the fact? And I think the people who are really successful are the ones who've really understood from the very beginning, this is the demographic that we're trying to reach. Here is what we're trying to achieve with this particular product and this particular product launch.
And here's the kind of feeling we want to evoke with our customers. Often, especially with these kinds of products that are scarce, luxury products, collectibles, it's very much on feel. And if you destroy people's trust through a launch, if you aren't successful, if you don't live up to the hype in that moment, you can really do damage to that feeling.
So I think that's incredibly important too. Like really think about why you are doing it. How you're structuring it and then just making sure you deliver on it.
[00:12:26] Melissa Perri: With the product launches too, i've seen people not involving the right teams, let's say, inside an organization, right? When you are a product manager. There's always the question of am I responsible for the launch of the product? Is it product marketing's job? Is it marketing? Like how do we think about bringing all of those teams together around it and what does product own versus what does product marketing own?
Especially when it comes around telling that story and reaching the right people too.
[00:12:54] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think, again, the best teams I've seen, like they, they don't treat it as a kick over the fence to product marketing to try and market this thing. Like you can build hype and then once the launch comes along, we'll manage that process. And then after the facts, then it's customer success who are managing what happens, good or bad.
Like you really have to bring people together to understand exactly what it is we're going after. How are we gonna manage this event? And making sure that all of those bits fit together well. It's actually one of the problems that we found with product launches is people are often just grabbing bits and pieces and kind of smushing them together to try and create an experience. And often those are from different worlds. So you have something from the marketing world that you're smushing together with a Google form, and like all of that together just does not work. You don't capture the information that you want.
It's not the experience that you want. It's it's not cohesive. I feel like when you create these launches, like the whole thing needs to feel cohesive, like from the marketing, from the very first announcement that you make all the way through. And it has to be cohesive with the brand too.
Often like you are trying to create some feeling around not just that product but the larger brand. And if you have something where you know, you've offloaded to another group. That's never gonna be successful. So you definitely need to try and bring people together. And I think having tools that allow you to work together is helpful.
This is a humble plug, but I feel like, again, having your customer success team work in a different silo, from your marketing team, from the product team means that they're seeing different things. They're looking at different metrics, and they're not really bringing those together to try and form something that's a cohesive experience. Like here is the group that we want to go after, here are the metrics that we're looking at for our advertising, for our product launch, and then for the success after that. Like how do people feel on X? How are people posting about this on Instagram? Like, all of those should be tied together to, to understand whether you were successful in that experience.
[00:15:07] Execution and Performance in Product Launches
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[00:15:07] Melissa Perri: When you're thinking about how do we communicate and how do we collaborate around that launch too, is there. Is there like a template that you love or like a meeting or do you form a little group? Like what do people do practically to make sure all those things are aligned and we're doing it the right time to ensure the success of this launch?
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[00:16:08] Michael Dodsworth: Okay, So yeah, the way we do this at Fanfare is to really understand their customer pain first. important that we understand what research we need to gather, what kind of insights that we wanna pull, who we want to reach out to all of those things and what are we trying to verify, what are we trying to validate?
And if there's anything on the engineering side that we can help. that story, is there something that we can help putting in front of customers? 'cause often it's a very visual thing, like we have brands and retailers who maybe don't think in terms of workflow diagrams and things like that.
So actually seeing what the experience looks like, maybe a valuable thing just to, to vet things out and then we gather, we get together and we talk about the feasibility, the challenges the roadmap and how this fits. What else is competing for our time and attention, we have to stay focused.
From my perspective, like who we focused on right now? Like we started life focusing on people who already struggle with drops, like people who are launching products and are having failures around those launches. So that was street wear, footwear. There are obviously a lot of people who fall into the bucket of scarce products who are struggling to launch those products, but we have to stay focused.
So this may be someone we want to, a problem we want to solve, but maybe not now. Maybe this is something for like, when we reach out to restaurants or hotels or like those kind of things, we'll have to, you know, have in a timeline and understand where we are, not just in terms of product roadmap, but also like fundraising roadmap and all of that stuff.
[00:17:59] Melissa Perri: What's one of the product launches you guys did that you're most excited about?
[00:18:04] Michael Dodsworth: We did a product launch. It was actually an in real life launch that we did with Denim Tears and Levi this is one of the early ones and it definitely sticks with me, holds a place in my heart. There's definitely some scar tissue around it too. But it was, it was definitely we didn't have an enormous amount of time, denim Tears is an incredible brand with an incredible narrative. They had all kinds of issues with, their drops in the press just around security, like incredibly sought after products, lines around the block, and they wanted to have a smooth experience. They wanted to create some feeling of scarcity and excitement, but not the crazy chaos that they saw previously.
So we got together, we talked it through, and then in that moment, going to the conference with them and helping them set up and being with customers as they use the product, being with the vendor as they're using the product was really an amazing experience. So that definitely lives with me. I definitely have some damage on my feet from wearing very uncomfortable sneakers because they looked cool. But standing for 14 hours on the conference floor was not comfortable. So that definitely I remember very well.
[00:19:19] Melissa Perri: Cool. And when you built fanfare, what, you talked a little bit about the problems that you're trying to solve with making sure these brand launches go off without a hitch and people are struggling to get the attention, how do you use technology to help with those things too? What does fanfare do on the back end to make sure that these product launches are successful?
[00:19:38] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think coming from my time at Salesforce, I worked in search, which is like one of the most trafficked areas of Salesforce. So anything we rolled out had to deal with enormous traffic on launch day. If we made a change to how Global Search worked, every single Salesforce customer is gonna land on that page monday morning, so it has to be ready for that. And then through into Optimizely, I worked for a couple of years, we would often get paged in the middle of the night because there was some newsworthy event that caused the New York Times to get this huge surge in traffic. So again, like having to build systems that deal with that kind of scale is not a simple thing. It's absolutely not something that you can tack on after the fact. You have to weave it in through the product from the very beginning or really pay attention to it as you're going. I think that set me up for this because through Rival we were targeting the Taylor Swift's of the world.
[00:20:36] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Michael Dodsworth: We were working with the Kroenkes on SoFi Stadium and we were thinking about three, 4 million people coming into a process. What does that look like technically? It looks like a DDoS attack. Like it looks like you are like enormous spike in traffic that just comes from nowhere and if you fall down in that moment, you cause enormous frustration.
So we had to stay up. We again, with fanfare we're targeting those kind of events too. And like I say, it's not something that you can just tack on afterwards, which is I think why you see vendors like Ticketmaster.
[00:21:13] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:21:14] Michael Dodsworth: Try and get their arms around this problem. Taylor Swift's presale goes badly.
[00:21:17] Melissa Perri: Yeah. A mess.
[00:21:19] Michael Dodsworth: Oasis. Yeah, they have Oasis coming up. So surely they would get on top of it for that. Nope. Then Ariana Grande. Same thing. So it's not something that you can just address with a small team, just, it's not a small problem. It's a huge problem.
[00:21:34] Melissa Perri: This is so interesting too, because I feel like normal places would look at the problem of scale or traffic spikes as like tech debt or infrastructure work that's not related to like core value proposition for a customer. And you're almost flipping it and saying like it is an infrastructure problem, but it's more because it solves this problem for our customers and like this is the nature of their business. So this is the core reason why we have to do this now. It's not just a infrastructure tech problem.
[00:22:04] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, like performance is one of our primary features. Like it has to be, it has to be in everything we do. We have to make sure that whatever it is we build on the platform should be able to scale to several million people showing up all at once. And if we don't, then some of the other bells and whistles, they don't matter, like your service is down. No one can use those bells and whistles. So it's a real, it's a real challenge. So those for sure are technical challenges. Brands have issues with bots and bad actors coming in to these experiences, you've created an incentive for people to show up because they can sell whatever it is on the secondary market for 10 x the price.
So now you have a real issue, not just of real people coming in on launch day, but bots and like artificial traffic causing you enormous pain. So again, it's a, it's an arms race that you're getting into as a brand. And again, even someone well resourced, like Ticketmaster can't get their arms around this, what chance have you got if
[00:23:06] Melissa Perri: Yeah,
[00:23:07] Michael Dodsworth: you're a small up and coming brand? So that's where we come in and deal with those issues for you.
[00:23:11] Melissa Perri: that's cool. When you're thinking about some of the problems that you're addressing, they are core to engineering, but they also are, core to your customers on the side too. I think there's a lot of product managers out there who struggle with explaining that to stakeholders, right?
Like even though this is a technical issue, engineers as well, let's put it that way. Even though this is technical issue, it's actually core, you might not see it on the front end, but it's gonna be experience driven.
[00:23:37] Turning Launches into Immersive Experiences
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[00:23:39] Melissa Perri: How do you help them, tell that story or how would you advise them to tell that story to help resonate with those stakeholders and get buy-in for these types of things?
[00:23:46] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah. I think that's the reason that our ICP was the brands that had already experienced drops and the negative aspects of drops because they were already sold in on it. They understood how powerful the model was. They understood that when they launched things in this way enormous audiences showed up, and they also know what happens when it goes badly. And like that was a, an easier sell I think for us because they're immediately there.
You can point to a drop that they did and you can see on their face, like they remember what happened, like denim tears. They remembered what happened. They reached out because they wanted to avoid it. So that was for sure an easier sell for those brands. I think for other people, like understanding the power of the model again, pointing to people who've been successful at this, like it's not just streetwear and footwear.
If you're a Stanley, for example, like you've tripled your revenue over the last three years because you went after this model of scarcity and trying to create moments and viral moments around your brand, but collectibles, luxury items, I think this is a model that they see, people using collaborations to drive an audience more and more.
If you are a Kardashian led brand, there's enormous value in being able to drive an audience to your product clearly. And we see more and more brands coming around to it, and I think it's on us give them those case studies to, to make them understand what it is those brands did. It wasn't just happenstance, they absolutely went after this model like Stanley did what it is to be successful in doing that and helping them do that. Like I say, a lot of these brands are just throwing things together and just hoping for the best, like crossing their fingers is the model they're going after and making them realize like we can help them set up their announcements.
We can help them understand whether they've been successful in the channels that they're using, the people that they're reaching. Making them understand like this is how people are gonna come into the experience. We're gonna strip out the bad actors, the bots, and then we're gonna let you do all of these interesting things after the fact to try and keep people engaged with the brand, like that's really helpful to them.
[00:26:00] Melissa Perri: So one of the things you talk about at fanfare is building these immersive experiences for the product launches. What does it mean to be like an immersive experience there? What's that concept?
[00:26:10] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think you have of these people show up, right? Like you have, you are launching your tickets to Taylor Swift and what is the experience for that? We've all been there. It's a very flat, dull experience, right? You're staring at a spinner, you have multiple tabs open, and you're just sat there for multiple hours.
[00:26:30] Melissa Perri: And in line. Yeah.
[00:26:32] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, exactly. What does that even mean?
[00:26:33] Melissa Perri: There's 20 thousand
[00:26:34] Michael Dodsworth: there are 10 thousand
[00:26:34] Melissa Perri: in line. Yeah.
[00:26:35] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah. Is that a good thing? Is
[00:26:37] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:26:37] Michael Dodsworth: that a bad thing? Am I gonna get through? When am I gonna get through? Disney, actually, for their season pass sale here in LA, they have this process where, says there's a big banner that says you may be in this line for 24 hours.
What does that mean? I can't leave my desk for 24h?
[00:26:52] Melissa Perri: Four hours. Yeah.
[00:26:53] Michael Dodsworth: That's not, gonna work. These are people spending thousands of dollars on Disney season passes, and there's nothing that you want to do for these people? For your most loyal swifties, you could come into a live stream.
Have the artist actually be there with the community and provide an experience. So even if you don't get through, you feel like you, you are valued through that experience. So I think that's a part of it. Having some community aspect where people are coming together and maybe a cosmetics brand can do a how-to, here is how I recommend you use my product.
Here is a celebrity that can come in for your subscribers to actually meet with the people and talk with the community. Like it creates more of a feeling of engagement with your customers instead of just staring at nothing like it's such a missed opportunity. You have a captive audience and you deliver nothing to them.
Seems like a huge miss. So I think it's that. And it's also just the things before and after. the event. So you want to create like a whole advertising campaign that engages people not just flat magazine ads. Like you want to create something that's more of a living, breathing thing on Instagram and TikTok and have people collaborate with you and get things out into the world.
And then after the fact, like you can deliver recommendations to people. You can, we had a brand that had an L club. So if you fail to get your sneakers five times in a row, you've got exclusive access to the next drop.
[00:28:25] Melissa Perri: That's cool.
[00:28:26] Michael Dodsworth: That's an amazing experience. Like you feel valued in that moment, right?
You're just unlucky. You tried, you spent hours with the brand and just pure luck, you ended up not getting your product. So we'll bring you into an exclusive job. So that, I think, creates more of a community feel. I think creating loyalty means creating that feeling of community with your brands fans, with your teams fans, and you, I just see a lot of people having squandered an opportunity there and there's so much opportunity in that moment.
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[00:29:28] Applying Launch Lessons to Software and Staying Nimble
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[00:29:28] Melissa Perri: How do you think some of these principles to translate to either software or like software companies doing launches or things like that, or even enterprise companies like banks launch new credit cards like to Sapphire Reserve, right? Like these. These luxury type items. What should they keep in mind and maybe what's similar or different about some of these principles too?
[00:29:48] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think it's the same like you don't just launch the product and expect people to find it and expect people to know how to use it and expect people to understand it. They won't, It's on you to educate them, to show them the value and to sell them on the product. So that's definitely a, an early learning is you, it doesn't matter how good your product is technically, if you don't have the right narrative around it, if you don't launch it properly and have all of those things in place, it won't be successful. I think that means, finding people who you can point to as case studies, having clear, a clear value prop for the things that you are launching. and for me, like having walkthroughs, like I say, a lot of our customers and me personally, very visual.
Making sure that you are talking in the language of your customers, right? It may be the most detailed product spec in the world, if no one reads it, then it didn't solve the problem. No one's gonna pay attention to it. So find the thing that, the way of talking to their customers that makes sense to them.
[00:30:58] Melissa Perri: Yeah, sounds don't be. Dogmatic about this too. Like it's highly experimental.
[00:31:05] Michael Dodsworth: It is. I think that's we see that from our brands too. Is one of the great things of this model is you can run experiments at a rapid pace, because you don't have to fill a warehouse with a product. You can have 10 of a product. How does this sell? What was the price point? What marketing worked, what didn't work? And then you can move on to the next and move on to the next. So I think, yeah, experimentation, especially in the early stages is really critical. Like staying nimble and not been too dogmatic, like not been too invested in a particular direction, I think really helps with that.
So you can move and as you find out more from your customers, you can adjust. That's really important.
[00:31:44] Melissa Perri: How does your team at fanfare weave experimentation and discovery into your process for building out, your products and working with these brands?
[00:31:55] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, I think it's actually changed in the last 12 months actually. I think the tooling that's available now means that the product team, the engineering team, can build out proofs of concept. Way easier and to a higher level than they were be would be able to before. So instead of spending weeks on something, they can draft something up, having just spoken to a customer and get that in their hands in a day or two.
I think that's been really amazing. It's amazing to see how quickly the pace of development has gone with this tooling and what it's allowing us to do. But that's for sure one of the clearest ways that we can get feedback from our customers because when they see it, they're like, that's not exactly what, like even though we were like diligent in answering questions when they see it.
They think of their customers going through that experience, they can give us like very direct feedback. So that's been ,
[00:32:52] Melissa Perri: Nice. And then when you're thinking about different tooling and thing things out there today, we're talking a lot about AI. How are you incorporating AI into your product development practices and what trends do you see emerging?
[00:33:07] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah, it's really been like through my career a couple of decades doing this. Like I've never seen such a, a quick and important shift in how I work and how the engineers work. How the product team work too. So it's really amazing. Like we, it's an incredible tool and we've used it as a tool.
Like it, it's, we're not been dogmatic about our use of it too. If you find use in a particular area, then you should actually like double down on that. But for me personally, development changed for me, been heads down, focused on a problem for a few hours to like skipping around multiple problems and actually being more like a product or technical lead and using these things to like draft code for me that I would review.
So it's sped us up, but also allowed us to do things that we wouldn't normally do. So tooling, internal tooling, um, something where, you know, if something was causing you pain, maybe four or five times you would spend some time building a tool to do it. That's now come down to if I feel like I'm gonna do this twice, I'm gonna get AI to create me a script to do this for me. 'Cause it's just so easy.
[00:34:20] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:34:22] Michael Dodsworth: So that's, I think, been really interesting. I've definitely seen a few interesting things come out of Anthropic in they had this they have an artifacts tool where you can just go in there and draft things and create whole experiences through that. That's been really interesting to see.
And they had this whole experimentation thing they launched as a beta, which is, I think, a, an interesting direction, which is building an experience on top of the data just from a single prompt. And The idea that these experiences, these kind of products, are ephemeral and you can lead with a description of the feature set and the functionality that you want, and it will go and try and in the background, build all of that stuff, is really interesting. Especially as the models are getting faster. I see that as maybe an interesting direction that we'll move in the next two years.
[00:35:14] Melissa Perri: Yeah. Michael, it's been so good talking to you. I've got one last question for you. What advice would you give your younger self starting out in, product management or engineering, beginning of your career?
[00:35:25] Michael Dodsworth: I'm, I ascribe to process, like stick with the process, break the problem down into smaller chunks just tackle that. I think. When I realized that's the most effective way of solving any problem, like technical or non-technical, like some things feel insurmountable, like starting a company seems insurmountable.
It seems like something that you would never take on. Like all of the things you don't know, all of the things that you're gonna have to do, it seems insurmountable, but you can break that problem down into tiny steps and then just keep going and believing that you'll get there. I think that's a really important lesson through that.
I think we, it's come up a bunch of times, but don't be dogmatic in anything you do. There's always things to learn. There's always things that are gonna, bring new insight into what you're doing. There's always a change in tooling or like a change in the world. means that there's a different way that you should build or there's a different products that you should build.
I think when you see large incumbents get stuck, Ticketmaster, for example, like when you see incumbents get stuck and stopping innovating, like that's an enormous problem. And like I always wanna stay nimble. I always wanna stay able to move with whatever changes we see in the world. That's a really important thing for me.
[00:36:56] Melissa Perri: when they get stuck. It's a problem, but it's also an opportunity for you right, to come in there and solve that problem.
[00:37:02] Closing Remarks
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[00:37:02] Michael Dodsworth: Yeah. That's one of the biggest things with AI tooling is there are so many of those problems where the big incumbent is stuck. It's easier than ever to get up and running and build something with a small team like you should go after those incumbents 'cause they really can't move very quickly.
There's all kinds of issues, bureaucratic, technical that they aren't able to move in any particular direction and it's a real opportunity, especially now.
[00:37:31] Melissa Perri: I agree. Thank you so much Michael for being with us. If people wanna learn more about you and fanfare where can they go?
[00:37:37] Michael Dodsworth: You can find me on LinkedIn for my sins. I'm there all day, so you can grab some time with me from LinkedIn. There are not many Michael Dodsworth in the world, thankfully, so you can find me there. Or you can head over to fanfare.io. We've tried to build up our case studies and examples of things going well, things not going well, and what you can do to run a successful launch.
And if you wanna talk about anything that you see in the world coming up or in the past, I'm sure have a story to tell about those. So please reach out.
[00:38:06] Melissa Perri: I love that. We will put all of those links on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast, we'll be back next week. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me on product management, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We will see you next time.