#225 Christian Marek: How AI is Shaping the Future of Product Management

0:00The way we use AI here is really across the board. Most recently, we announced a new product called Product Board Pulse, which helps product managers to really accelerate ideation and delivery discovery pieces of this product management process by aggregating all the different insights, customer feedback that an organization has in a single place, in a single repository, where the PM automatically gets trend surfaced about certain feedback themes, about the product, about the go-to-market process, about pricing, whatever it might be that customers have. issues with and can also use basically an AI chat interface to ask specific questions like, hey, what is a specific customer saying about X?

0:41And that like really accelerates that ideation and discovery process from weeks to, we believe, days. Hi, this episode is sponsored by RapidSOS. Terabytes and petabytes data is exploding in our daily lives. How many connected devices do you own? Do you ever wonder how all this data could be used in emergencies? By 2030, we'll have over 32 billion IoT devices worldwide, double what we have now. Despite this data abundance, there's a critical safety gap. Vital information isn't reaching emergency responders in time. This gap results in reactive rather than proactive emergency response, putting lives and property at unnecessary risk.

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2:27Close the safety gap and transform your emergency response with RapidSOS. Visit rapidsos.com slash ionai. That's I-ON-A-I-E-Y-E-O-N-A-I all run together. Visit rapidsos.com slash IONAI today to learn how AI-powered safety can protect your people and boost your bottom line. That's rapidsos, R-A-P-I-D-S-O-S dot com slash IONAI. Visit them today. So go ahead. Why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us how you got to Product Board and what it is. Sure, sure. Yeah, happy to. So I'll start with Product Board and what we do. So Product Board, we're an end-to-end customer-centric product management platform.

3:32So, four product leaders were basically their command and control center for their product organization. And for individual contributor PMs that do the day-to-day work, we help them get the job done more efficiently, faster, and focus on the things that truly matter. And that is the product management craft. So as a comparable to think about, basically what Salesforce is to customer relationship management, we are to the product management discipline. And just to outline a little bit what the product management job is and how we think about it, product managers and organizations still have fairly new, fairly evolving discipline, typically own vision, strategy, and execution, roadmapping for a specific product area.

4:18And basically, ultimately to drive business outcomes and working very closely with customers to ultimately bring amazing products to market. it. Today, we count over 6 ,000 customers, including some brands like Salesforce, Toyota, and Zoom. And the reason why they choose Product Board is because they want to increase product ROI, get their product to markets too faster, etc. Now, I'm currently the VP of product here at Product Board. And the reason why I joined the company is because I'm personally extremely passionate about the product management craft and building amazing products for our customers.

4:56and actually I've set all my let's say product management career up to mastering my own product management craft I started at Google really absorbing the skill sets of many amazing product managers there then I would start then I went to DocuSign when the company was pre-ipo had amazing mentors folks who spent like decades at Microsoft I could learn so much from and then I was also at Meta for a year and a half where we actually had something called product manager circles where it'd be done on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. And we'd exchange like challenges and problems that we're facing, how to write a product vision document.

5:32And so I'm super excited to bring that all to ProductWord now and help other product organization, product managers excel at their product management craft, knowing that it needs to be, you know, opinionated in a way, but also flexible to meet the needs of the specific organization. Yeah. You know, I was talking to somebody probably on the podcast a few weeks ago and they had worked at Microsoft early on and they told me that Bill Gates actually created the position of product manager do you know if that's true I think there's there's different viewpoints on the subject I think probably I think Microsoft specifically had a role called product manager, sorry, program manager earlier on, which definitely had some aspects of the product management role the way it is known today.

6:27And actually one of my former mentors, she still mentor, was a program manager at Microsoft and was then a product manager at DocuSign or product leader. Many people also attribute Google to having like really founded the role and brought it to life and scaled it. So hard to tell who actually did it. Sometimes the good thing is the role of scaling in many organizations. Well, maybe start by describing exactly what a product manager is. I mean, a lot of people get confused between product manager and project manager. uh so yeah can you just in a nutshell say what a product manager is and then talk about uh how product board uh developed sure so a product manager in a nutshell is a function in an organization that owns the vision the strategy and the execution of a specific product or part of the product in larger organizations to that end they work together with the engineers the designer other folks in the organization to build ultimately the right product for um the customers and so the way that we think about product management is that it really always starts with customer centricity so this is baked into we call it the product excellence framework which is basically a process that you can follow it all starts with the customer inputs making sure that you're actually solving a customer need.

8:02Then you turn that into a roadmap that you share with your team members so that you can collaborate on that. And then ultimately delivering these features to market and getting feedback on that, all the while making sure that you're aligned to the strategic objectives to the company to ultimately drive that business impact. So the product management role is in that way, very versatile because it requires a certain product sense where you have figure out like what is the right product to build you need to be able to talk to customers you need to be able to work with engineers with designers um and you always need to think back about business strategy as well so it's actually a really fun role and so how did uh how did product board develop yeah so our founder um came up with the idea for product ward on a plane flight when he was who's trying with the Wi-Fi on the plane to basically manage his product roadmaps, et cetera, basically working on spreadsheets and presentations, et cetera, which is a very inefficient process because it typically involves a lot of redundancies in organizations.

9:15So for example, just to give you a sense, like when I actually started at DocuSign, I was asked to put together a presentation going around the entire product team that would summarize our product roadmap. Now, that was a great onboarding exercise for me, but the roadmap was outdated after just two weeks. And when we then presented to a chief product officer, we had to be like, oh, yeah, this is here. But in reality, it's taking a week longer and whatever it is. So I think our founder faced that very similar pain point. And that's when he decided to basically build a solution for that. And that is basically what product board is today, really covering that whole product management process end to end.

9:56And tell me about how AI integrates into the product board platform. Yeah. So we take a very customer centric approach to using AI in the product board platform. And so it manifests in a few ways. The way, basically what we think about it is like, how can we help PMs do their job faster, do the job most efficiently, drive greater ROI for the organization? And the way we think about the process is it starts with ideation where you think about like, hey, what are the right products to build in the first place? Then you do discovery where you basically try to figure out like, hey, does this idea that I have actually have legs and let me go validate with customers to make sure it's the right thing?

10:44And then there's the delivery cycle of actually like building the product itself. So the way we use AI here is really across the board. Maybe just to give a few examples. Most recently, we announced a new product called Product Board Pulse, which helps product managers to really accelerate the ideation and discovery pieces of this product management process by aggregating all the different insights, customer feedback that an organization has in a single place, in a single repository, where the PM automatically gets trends surfaced about certain feedback themes, about the product, about the go-to-market process, about pricing, whatever it might be that customers have issues with, and can also use basically an AI chat interface to ask specific questions like, hey, what is a specific customer saying about X?

11:35And that really accelerates that ideation and discovery process from weeks to, we believe, days beyond that we use ai like in the delivery pieces and discovery pieces when you actually write these product specs so what product managers do to convey their product vision their ideas actually the product that needs to be built to engineers to designers they typically write some sort of product specification to inform that now we use ai here as well to accelerate that writing off that spec, whether it's like automatically spitting out the pain points that customers have, then like ideas for requirements, solution suggestions, or whatever it is.

12:16And the reason why we can do that so well is because underneath our platform is a really structured basically database about the entire product organization at the products that they have. And that helps us inform the large language models that we are using to create really good output for product managers and help them get the job done faster. Right. You say that underlying knowledge base is not of a specific product, but the, I'm sorry, not a specific product, but sort of knowledge of the product manager role or product management in general. Is that right? It's both. It's both. we do, you know, when customers work with us, they typically build out their product hierarchy into, we call it the product hierarchy, into product board, where, say, like, you have a mobile application, you have a web application, whatever it is, and you have a bunch of features and components underneath that.

13:18And that then, you know, basically mirrors the real products. And so then, you know, when the PMs go in and they ask the AI a specific question, like, hey, how might I improve this specific product based on all that customer feedback that we're seeing, the problem can be highly contextual. And so, yeah, so it's both like we have the product management best practices that we believe in and that is, you know, reflected in the way we work with AI. And we have, because our customers enter that into our system, and sometimes, you know, we help them in this process, the actual hierarchy of their product landscape in our product as well.

13:52Yeah. And most of the product managers I know joined organizations and took over an existing product or product line. But this platform can help from ground zero, right? That you imagine a product and work out what the product is going to be. So can you take us through sort of how the platform works? Like if you come to the platform, you want to create a product, what do you do? Sure, sure, sure. So it actually does both correct for context, and we can go through both a little bit, where say like, hey, you're kind of like building on the existing. So your new product manager joining a product board today, and you're trying to figure out in the specific product space that you own what you need to do.

14:53So you can use actually like our own tools in product board to take a look at, hey, how does the product work today? What features are on the backlog? What are customers asking for? You can literally go in and ask the AI like, hey, what are the top feature requests from customers and basically explore from there. And that can quickly form your opinion as you ramp up as a new PM on an existing product where you might want to take it in the future and go through this journey of ideation, discovery, and delivery, and ultimately deliver ROI to the organization that much faster. Now, there's a second journey that you mentioned where it's like, hey, you're a product manager, and you're actually trying to figure out like, hey, is there a new product that you need to build?

15:36Oftentimes, that's the case when you're trying to enter a new market, or Or when there's a technology shift that might open up a product opportunity. Similarly, the way the product board helps here in these scenarios is product manager can go into the platform, ask AI and work with the customer feedback to figure out like, hey, what are existing customers saying about this already? What are sort of like my blind spots that I should go look into and then start ideating on that, building these product specs into the product documentation that are required directly in the platform. And then, you know, engage with different folks in the organization to really get this discovery process started.

16:15And ultimately, then later on, translate that into actually building out the product and getting that delivered with the engineers and the designers. Yeah. And on the building out process, again, are there LLMs that are informing that process? or are you connected to or do your engineers join the platform and you can suggest different engineering solutions to different ideas in the product specs? Yeah, that's a good question. So engineers can definitely collaborate on the product specs and, you know, add to that with the engineering content. Like we don't currently use AI to basically suggest like engineering approaches or technical specs.

17:14Yeah. Yeah. So as you move through this process, and this is how many people can be working on the platform collaboratively? at this point our largest customers have probably like thousands of concurrent active users so um just like within one customer beyond that we're talking about you know tens of thousands of active users yeah but i mean if i'm a product manager uh uh you know when i i i sign on to the platform do I have my designer also on the platform, my software engineer or machine learning, my data scientist also on the platform so we can sort of work collaboratively on the platform, and how large a team is optimal in that?

18:12Yeah, yeah, great question. So we support collaboration for organizations of all sizes, ranging from S &B to enterprise. So no matter if your engineering product design partnership organization that you work with is like a total of 100 people or your organization is like, you know, Salesforce, probably thousands of product managers and peers, like we support all of these use cases. So it really depends on your organization and the size that you have in order to get the best out of product management. We're here to support you. And the way we think about collaboration is like definitely like, you know, it's a tool for product managers first and foremost.

18:56but engineers and designers and other key stakeholders, data scientists, ML engineers, et cetera, are definitely like, you know, key contributors and also actively involved in the platform and do certain things in there. So for example, we talked about this a little bit earlier, when you as a product manager, you would write a product spec, an engineer would come in and sort of like review it, make comments there, et cetera. Similar as you as a product manager build out your roadmap and you say like on the high level, here's where I think I want to go in Q4 this year or Q1 next year, you can invite your partners to provide key input like effort estimations, feedback on the direction, technical visibility.

19:38You can also use these roadmaps to manage up in the organization and like share that with your leadership and get that feedback. Hey, here's what I'm thinking about. Is that aligned with the strategic objectives in my organization? And, you know, if not, then thanks for the feedback and I'll go fix it. So, and then we also obviously have collaborators in Product Board from the go-to-market organizations. So oftentimes feedback comes, you know, either directly from the customer success team within the organization, from sellers, professional services team, marketers, wherever it might be and whoever has like some sort of customer touch point.

20:13And we often see those folks use Product Board as well to get that feedback, track how their feedback made it onto the product roadmap and also stay up to date on the most recent things that actually get delivered and shipped to customers. So our collaboration platform in that sense is really comprehensive and can reach a large part of the organization. Yeah, you were saying at the beginning that the founder came up with this idea because he's on a plane kind of switching between Excel sheets and I imagine Word documents and maybe something else. How do people, how do product managers manage complex projects without something like Product Board?

21:02Is it all done on Slack and scrolling up and down in a Slack conversation to, you know, see what was said three days ago. I mean, I go through that all the time. Yeah, that's a good question. So I think there's different ways to project manage. There's definitely the traditional ones that you mentioned, like spreadsheets and Slack that still many of our customers use. Some customers also use purpose project management tools, specifically for the project management function, which is really all about driving timelines, making sure milestones are hit, then making sure scopes are clear. But what we have found is that the product managers that use ProductWare prefer our tool simply because it is purpose-built for them.

21:56We give them sort of the right structure to drive the project management process forward. Again, starting with the ideation and discovery pieces all the way to delivery. So we have specific metadata, for example, like on our roadmaps, like costing, like release timelines, specific tasks that need to be executed for certain feature launches, where then when a product manager actually thinks about the entire process, that's why they'd rather spend time in a product management solution specifically dedicated to them rather than a generic project management solution, which is really more tailored to timeline tracking, which is what the traditional project management role is more emphasizing.

22:34Yeah. And did you say that you're a product manager at Product Board? I am a product person and product manager at Product Board. That's correct. Yes. And do you use Product Board for managing the product of Product Board? Absolutely. It's very meta in that sense. But yeah, product managers at ProgBoard, including myself, as a product leader and VP of product, we use ProgBoard for all of our processes. So for example, when it comes to discovery and figuring out an ideation discovery and figuring out what we actually need to build, we use our new product called ProgBoard Pulse that uses generative AI to basically take all that customer feedback and create the source of truth.

23:24And we go and we leveraged those insights to decide and we just went through this exercise, which goes in the Q4 roadmap and what goes on the annual roadmap for next year. This is actually the season, I think, where everybody's going through this process in product management because you think about what your annual plan is. So we definitely do that. I personally also use ProductWord Pulse, for example, when I go into a customer meeting. So later on today, I have a call with one of our enterprise customers. I will go into ProductWord Pulse and learn about all the feature requests that they have made quickly so that I can get up to speed quickly and show that I can emphasize with their needs and give them context where it sits in our roadmap.

24:02Similarly, as we just went through Q4 planning now, the roadmaps that we've built, all the individual teams that have contributed created their planning documents in Product Board, built their roadmaps in Product Board, created their feature descriptions in Product Board and shared them that way with leadership. And we actually also just went through a OKR refresh as part of our objective and key results refresh, which is a goal setting methodology that we use as part of our next fiscal year planning at Product Board. And so these are now also in Product Board. And that's what helps leaders like myself, like our CEO, the founder, make sure that everybody's heading in the right direction because we can make the tie-in from objective and key result to the actual feature work and really monitor the end to end there.

24:48So yes, we use it very heavily and extensively. What's kind of the range of products that have been designed or are being supported by Product Board? Yeah, I would say our customers reach across industries. So definitely we're strong. We're strong representation in technology. So whether it's B2B SaaS or consumer companies, definitely well represented there. All the way from SMB to some of the largest tech companies on the planet. We also see product board being used in advertising companies and manufacturing companies to really all across the board where there is that might be a digital product in most cases, but we have even seen it's used in certain cases for other non-digital products.

25:38Yeah, is it too robust a solution for a startup? up? I think it's a great solution for a startup, to be honest with you. Particularly, I think if you're early and you want to get that product management muscle going in your organization, starting with that foundational structure basically pays off later on because once you're sort of planting the seed and you're establishing your product hierarchy and you're making sure that as your product grows, that it's reflected within that, it's extremely valuable. The other thing that's extremely valuable is that in a startup, you actually need to be super laser focused, right?

26:18There can't be any slack, like mistakes are very painful and costly. And if they happen, you need to react quickly. And so product board can help you make sure that everyone in the startup is aligned. So it's extremely valuable for startups for sure. I mean, it's obviously also extremely valuable for like the large companies, particularly the ones that are, we call them digitally transforming where the product management muscle isn't as established yet, because again, we help them out by giving them the structured process in terms of ideation, discovery, delivery, helping them make sure the investments are allocated to drive ROI.

26:53And we also help with things like the product excellence framework, which is a set of best practices to really help product managers in an organization organize, leverage processes on top of product board to really make the most out of their product management organization, but also about the product management deployment itself. But ultimately, it's all about the goal that product management is aligned to, and that's building for customers while driving ROI. Yeah. And product management doesn't end with the launch of a product. It's sort of a continuous process of evaluating performance or ROI or customer satisfaction.

27:37How is that presented in ProductBoard? Do you have a dashboard that's tracking these different things? How do you track customer satisfaction? Is there some sort of a feedback tool within Product Board to, I don't know, send surveys or something like that? Or for ROI? I mean, is all of that being fed into Product Board so a product manager has a snapshot at any point in time? Yeah, the short answer is yes to many of those things you said. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Like the product management job definitely continues post delivery, specifically like for the scenario that you mentioned earlier, where the product manager actually ships something big, something new, like that first delivery is actually just, you know, the first milestone.

28:39own. And oftentimes, you know, you joke when you, you know, you work towards this like first big launch, then it's like, hey, this is my job really starts because now you really need to hit the ground and get the feedback and iterate the product, just like you mentioned. And so ways that, you know, customers can do this today is leverage ProductWord Pulse, our new AI tool to collect that customer feedback and quickly get that feedback in to see what customers are saying, just to make it a little bit meta again, Craig, actually customers are giving us feedback about Product Board Pulse and we're seeing that in Product Board Pulse.

29:15Obviously, we're also seeing other feedback across the Product Board platform and Product Board Pulse. So that helps us quickly react based on the feedback and shift the product roadmap and shift the direction accordingly. We also have integrations with various data analytics tools that we can pipe directly into product board and dashboards to show things like engagement, usage, and all this kind of stuff that product managers typically care about directly where they do the job. Similarly, you can also tie to actually, you can actually also tie the feedback that you're getting to actual revenue input impact, which is extremely meaningful, right?

29:51When you're looking through, like, hey, this is the product I launched. What are the biggest opportunities I pursue next? What is actually the potential revenue tied to that based on my customer relationship management system, based on other systems I have internally that track that? And that helps really accelerate the prioritization decision. To your point about in-product surveys and doing that kind of stuff and launching surveys, that is also a way that we enable customers to see how their product is performing. So there are various ways of doing that. whether you collect a Net Promoter Score directly in the product or a customer satisfaction score, you can tie that all back into product board and then see how different features, how different capabilities, how different products that you launched are performing.

30:36And then ultimately, and this is really where we closed the loop, where it becomes really powerful, tie that back into the objectives and key results that you have set as an organization to make sure that you're hitting the goals that you set out to actually hit. Yeah. And you were talking about presenting to senior management or if it's a small organization to the founders. Presumably then product board or do the senior management or founders, do they log into product board to review or does product board have a function to generate a report that you can pass along? yeah so the short answer is yes they absolutely do so you know the the ceo directly as the founder like he spends a lot of time in product board and gives us feedback similar the entire executive team is actively using product board to for example check in on objective and key results progress and see if anything goes off track and then like digging in specifically into what that might be like is you know somebody uh is there a team that's running into challenges and then how can we help them and that is actually something that is used in offline reviews where you know you don't need to necessarily be in a meeting to do that you can do that at any time because we have the right operations processes through the product excellence framework that we have to make these things actually like populate and make sure the teams do the work but like sometimes we'll also online do online reviews in product work directly so that leadership uh folks in leadership like myself, like my peers, have the full visibility onto what is happening there.

32:14Now, what we also hear from organizations, from our customers, is that actually fairly senior leaders in the organizations like SVP, senior vice presidents of products, even CPOs review roadmap outputs directly in product board. Sometimes, to your point, they will consume it through reports that are generated by product board that ultimately reflects all the work that the PMs have put in to update the data, create the roadmaps. But like we see stakeholders up to the chief product officer level use product board to check in how things are progressing and if there's anything going sideways. Yeah.