Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform, Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian)

27:00But if you work on something that doesn't have a sharp problem, mistakes can kill you because essentially you're having to pay a lot for marketing, you're having to pay a lot for word of mouth. People, when they get bored, they don't care about it. Like recessions. Coming back to something you mentioned earlier, but just like how much pain it needs to be for people to care, or how much pain it needs to solve versus the status quo. I think it's a really important element of this. I think most founders, like no, I need to solve a problem, but usually it's not painful enough or it's not solving it enough.

27:33Given either an example of something that you've tried or you've seen of just like, that was a sharpish problem but not sharp enough and people didn't care. some either a company worked or started up you advised of just like okay that wasn't it wasn't sharp enough I don't want to create enemies because I know a lot of founders but but here's one here's one I don't know if you remember during the pandemic this venture studio by I think one of the ex -founders of ever known created who camera oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah it's a great video It was fun, but I don't think it was a sharp problem.

28:11Right? Like, it was fun, but yeah, it didn't change the world of your Zoom camera. It didn't change the world of your collaboration. And so, I think that's one example of a non -sharp problem, for example, for most people. What are signs that it's sharp enough, just like in your experience? I know you talked about it steals your time, energy, money, focus. What are flags that like this is sharp enough in your experience? I think there are two ways to think about it. If you're in the trenches as a founder, the easiest way to map out the sharp problem is draw the current approximate average workflow for your target customer, at least what you think is a target, and then draw the workflow after they've used your software and see how shorter it is, how much shorter it is, yes or no.

29:05And I try to measure those lines, if you draw them as horizontal lines, try to measure those lines and see if it's much shorter, if it's 2x shorter, 3x shorter, that's, so let's say pre -customer, that is the best way to honing on it. Post -customer, you should talk to the people who are most enthusiastic and derive their workflow flow and the workflow change and try to measure that. I think that's how you figure out if it's a sharp problem or not. The other thing that we talk about in the start of, or super early stage world is I call it the whites of their eyes. When you take a problem and you share it with someone who is going to affect their workflow, and I use the word workflow a ton because I don't use specs anymore or use cases.

29:55I think workflows are the unit of productivity. When you see people's eyes get big and expose more whites to you, you're probably on to something. It's not enough. That's not a workflow thing. That's an excitement thing. But people often react that way when you're solving a really sharp problem for them. And then people spontaneously bring up money. When can I pay? When can I? Those kinds of things give you an indication. Two other versions of the showing more whites of your eyes, which I love. Two other versions of that I've heard is one is you see their pupils dilate and they're just like, whoa, I need this now.

30:34And then the other is so indescribable as you see this nod of as you're talking, they're just like, oh, I get it. I get this. And then they're like, okay, we need this in our in our in our company. I'm a little over those ones because sometimes it's just excitement and this noise. And so the things I said previously about workflow compression or capability inflation, I think those are more reliable, which is all about like customer research and customer conversations. That's what I would focus on. Yeah. I'm saying all these from mistakes I've made, right? So I feel like this is a scar tissue, which is what I'm trying to point to the book.

31:17Speaking of talking to customers, another one of your big bullet points in the book is around continuous customer discovery. And I'm curious what you found to be successful in actually doing that. A lot of people talk about it when you keep talking to customers, get feedback constantly, what actually works in your experience. Yeah, I feel like all of Perk management is about discovery these days. Everyone talks about it. And I want to make a distinction. I think discovery is when you use customer conversations to understand a very specific thing that you want to optimize further, work flow that you want to optimize further.

31:57And then you call the people who are most likely to be affected and you do use various research strategies to talk to them. There's a version of that also that is what I call continuous conversations, which is a calendar and a type form, which will do more and more of, you should organize it so that your PMs, your designers, your engineering managers, and your PMMs are constantly talking to customers by default, meaning that customer conversations show up on their calendar every week, Automatically, without them getting involved, and then they're trained on how to have the conversation. Because the death of customer discovery is friction.

32:44If you ask individuals to do customer discovery, they will not do customer discovery. This is the thing that dies in an innovative company because it's very difficult to actually talk to the right customer, not talk to any customer, talk less of the right customer continuously. But it's a third thing that I like to talk about, which is customer listening. In fact, I'm going to talk about this at industry in October, the PM conference. Customer listening is different. It's not really discovery. It is the scarfing up of customer signals that are happening constantly anyway. So people are talking on social, people are talking on app stores and G2 crowd.

33:31People are, if you have an instrumented turn survey, people are talking. If you have NPS, people are normally giving you the scores when they're putting into verbatim. If you have a bug report, which we had at Atlassian, people are filing bugs, you know, developers love the file bugs, so we have that for that audience. And then if you go to Zendesk and customer support, people are either talking about one thing all the time or a range of things and you can see the frequency distribution. And of course in Salesforce you have closed one. These are all things happening no matter what you do. Whether you're listening or not, you're getting these signals.

34:11One of the big, hairy, audacious goals of proc management is being able to process these signals efficiently. We did it in a certain way at Cali, which I drew a rig together through workflows and Slack, and then having individuals triage those things. And if you can do that hard, and at industry, I'll talk a little bit about how to do it, it's not exactly discovery. It is what matters, right? Our job is to meld customer delight with business ambition. And it feels essential beyond discovery that you are listening and you understand in what matters from a customer delight perspective. And I don't think many of us do this really well.

34:56I've tried to do it everywhere. I've gone Twitter of last year and Calam lead now a type form. But it still feels like something that the industry can get better. This touches on advice that Teresa Torres teaches around continuous customer discovery. And she actually had a really good tactic that I'll share here that stuck with me about how to actually do this. So the way she recommends companies do this is have a little pop up on your site, asking visitors, like we'd love to talk to you and get your feedback on our product. And it just links them to a calendar lead to book a meeting and that's how it shows up on the calendar.

35:30Yeah, that's what we did at CalMley, you know. But I will say, a couple of caveats, we did that in the community. We had community .cal .e .com. And we understood that that was a self -selected group, but it was still important to talk to them because they were still representative. And of course, you should do it in the product. The challenge of that approach is always, is it the right customer, right? And you know, the pro -con of that is talking to one customer is useless. talking to a hundred is super useful. And so the challenge is, are you targeting the right person so some intelligence upfront and like who to show it to and why you're trying it to them so that they can come is interesting.

36:15Very particularly effective way for growth because if people don't activate or churn, they don't want to talk to you but if you can present that thing out in their activation or conversion journey, they might actually talk to you and so that's really key. So I 100 % agree with Teresa. That's exactly what you should do for not even I wouldn't even call it discoveries for listening, right? And some of it can be discovery. Yeah, I think that's exactly what you should do. As you're talking, realizing I'm using most of the products you help it build. I'm on Twitter a lot. I use count only a lot. I use typemormas, my default survey tool.

36:55I saw that. My team is really excited to hear this entire four. You've impacted my life in so many ways, Ajit. I think you owe me money, Lenny. What do you need? How much? Give me your Venmo QR code. It's on the page. You fell in love with building products for a reason. But sometimes the day -to -day reality is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy. You're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing JIRA Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian.

37:38With JIRA Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on JIRA, where your engineering team is already working, So true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers, sales, support, leadership, even Greg from Finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in GiroProduct Discovery for free. No catch, and it's only $10 a month for you.

38:14Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. or re -discover what's possible with your product discovery. Try it for free at Atlassian .com slash Lenny. That's Atlassian .com slash Lenny. Hearing back on track, another important part of the book that you're writing is around onboarding and something that I talk a lot about on this podcast is just the power of onboarding and how impactful it is to retention and so much of the eventual success of your product and how customers use it. And so I'd love to hear just your advice on what you think is really important.

38:52I guess why onboarding is so important in success in field. And also just like what tactics have you gone to be really effective? Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and all these account -penicrant teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is? because if you can do that then you can process thousands of tons of customers very quickly. Umbording is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator. It's nothing more than that, meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology.

39:38It's not really product, it's biopsychology. I guess who knows a lot about this stuff, it's people in the offline industry, the people who stalk shells, the people who provide inventory online and so on and so forth. They are extraordinarily good at this. So the reason I say this is to divert people who are girls to really find where to source their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all. If you think about this as intentful in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you and in a progressively developed confidence that you are the tool of choice, You then have to break it down into how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part?

40:25One is value proposition understanding, one is trying to see if it's simple enough and provides enough value. One is kicking tires and one is making the choice that this is something I'm going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support it? All of these things. Now, I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successful. At Caldley, for example, we ask them about connecting their calendar and setting some defaults, is it 9 to 5 or whatever that is.

41:16Those two things set up all the future success and if we made it optional more people would fail. So it's information and the essential setup and it should be as short as possible. Then there's a whole other set of things that should be optional because they're not necessary for everyone to be successful, but they're beneficial if people are curious and also it can be what we call a random access So people can get back to it any time they want, right? You're there feeling help. And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful.

41:51And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I get into in the book. Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins, things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind? Well, I think keep it short is one big win. the fewer things, the better that are central, that everyone has to go through. It's unclear if all those click -throughs go here, go here, and all those things work. The wizards. Yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited benefit. So much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do, post mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two, of what good looks like is particularly powerful because it's mimetic people see oh okay This is exactly what I'm shooting for Is very powerful in terms of trial and conversion Let me people understand and be very clear about Where they are in the trial cycle whether they want them to pay for it now or they need to pay for it later after seven days having them understand that really clearly, so they know where they are, because they feel like they're completely at sea, I think is very important for conversion.

43:07I think there are a few things like that, but I also want to mention that it's different for every product, right? It depends on where you end up quadrant and the amount of augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is. You might want to adjust your approach. And this is the kind of thing that there is no, there are some fundamentals but it's not necessarily this one size fits all. In fact, at Tyform, we're trying to maybe invent new, a new twist on freemium just because of some of the things we're seeing for our particular customers. And so, you know, these are, for me, some new learning as well as I go through each of different products.

43:49Along these lines of onboarding activation and getting a user activated is really important and I'm curious, do you have an example of what an activation milestone was at Calendly or Twitter or Typhurm just to give people a sense of like here's a good example of an activated user milestone. I think this goes back to, you know, people, the Pandas and the amplitude of this world, you have to sort of think through your aha journey, right? Like, at Calendly and also at Typhurm, we have three thresholds of increasing activation, right? And we just try to make sure that people will go through each one as many people as possible.

44:24And frankly, we tried to forget the drop off between the increasing definitions of activation. So, accountally, we want to make sure you've created your first meeting, right? But then if you've created five within a week, that's really much more powerful. At TIE form, it's really about, have you published the form and have you gotten responses? And have you gone to look at what the responses mean and the Insights page, for example. At Twitter, it is, are you following anyone, are you being followed? Because that verb, follow, is the way you start to construct your informal community. Remember what I said is Twitter is for people who want informal community around a topic.

45:09That is not, Facebook is about who do you know. Twitter is about who do you want to know, who's passionate about what you're passionate about. And so if you haven't set up your follow graph, at all, you're not going to really activate, it's not going to be compelling for you. Awesome, those are great examples. It's funny hearing the Twitter activation milestone out of context, I'm so creepy. Have you followed anyone? Or is anyone following you? Yeah, because a lot of people go in and then they don't, they tweet into the void, or they don't feel like they have a voice. Right. But that's not the most important thing, most important thing is, are you getting content that you're interested in?

45:42That makes you want to come back and see more and follow is a huge part of doing that. Yeah, just on the point of Twitter, I don't know if this goes anywhere, but it's crazy how it keeps going no matter how much Destruction is happening all around Well, you want to you want me to talk about that because I want to talk about please So You know one of the things that they they I want to say day one of the things I learned early on is Network effects. Yeah Network effects. Let me define it network effects is when you create value for passive members by other people joining the network. So I am by myself.

46:26I have done nothing. I'm at home chilling. But one person joins the network and immediately I gain benefit. Okay, so think about Facebook. If there are eight billion people on Facebook, it means that all of a sudden I can reach everyone on the planet. And so the more people on Facebook, the more it's valuable to me, regardless of my effort, that's network effect. If I am into Word, you know, Word processor, you know Microsoft Word, and the more people who use that file format, it means that the more Word documents I can read. And so I did nothing. So by increasing the people who adoption of Word, I gain benefit, network effect.

47:12That's what it is. So, Twitter, and then this is the mental mode of critical mass. Network effect is about critical mass. You hit a critical mass and sometimes that's not mathematically defined. And then you hit network effect because people want to come because people are already there. Right? So, Twitter has hit critical mass and lots of your favorite social networks. Network effect is a feature by itself and it's the most powerful feature. A good way to illustrate the power of network effects is Twitter did not die because threads came up came about, right? That's the power of network effect.

47:51In fact, the last telegram was sent in 2016 over 100 years after it was invented because of network effects. It had to be manually closed down. I believe friends there is still a life. So we have to be really clear that it's really hard to kill a network effect business now. How do you actually accomplish it if you were to accomplish it? Well, the revenue side of any social network is vulnerable to attack. So for example, if advertisers stop being on Twitter, for example, they're not gone, because again, network effects affects them. They want to go where the eyeballs are. But if it's on reason they disappeared, while the people will continue to come, the ability to have money to improve the network will disappear.

48:42And that is sort of a negative spiral. What is very, very hard to kill business is how to kill software as a rich network effect, although you can kill businesses that have reached network effect. That's a really important and interesting insight. I think with teaming especially interesting about Twitter is Elon on the team of kind of like removed every other Benefit of Twitter like the brand gone employees 80 % gone like every part of it is being cut off except for the network effects and so it's a really cool case study Dan Hawke at my tweet of this was a previous guest of just like it's a good case study of what is just the power of just network effect That's right.

49:20I think that people will you know when I did a really interesting course at Berkeley business school has about technology, companies and so on. And this is a perfect case study on network effect, the best I've ever seen. It is incredible. Yeah, it's well threads isn't able to get there quickly unlike what it felt like initially. I mean threads will prosper, I believe. And again, it'll just be another click for advertisers who understand the Facebook marketplace. This is Twitter at marketplace is much harder to access. us. So I think the way threads win is a revenue spiral versus the pure activity spiral.

50:02Interesting. We're essentially they find ways to even with lower base, make generate revenue, which drives advertisers, drives more investment. Correct. Correct. Alright, that'll be a funny, fun story to watch. Kind of along those same lines. I want to chat about virality a little bit. You work on some of those viral products out there in BDC, Twitter as an example, but also in B2B, which is really rare and interesting. And I I know there's no silver bullet for increasing morality, but everyone's always wondering, how do I increase the morality of my product? So I'm curious, anything you could share any tactics that you've seen work to increase the morality, especially if it be to be propped.

50:36Well, as is my style, I want people to understand what morality is in first place because I think people have misconceptions about it. People think morality is some, you know, hot males tag at the bottom that says, go get a free account. Viralty is really when the word of mouth of a product is high quality. That's really the essence of it. Let me rephrase that. It's when customers market your product, right? And that is incredibly powerful, but also that's incredibly actionable, if that makes sense. There are products who try to be viral just for what I call synthetic virality that fail. because in the end, if you're synthetically viral and people get to the product and it sucks, that's it.

51:25That's the end. Even hotmail, for example, people talk about the viral tag. I don't know. You know what I'm talking about because I absolutely at the bottom, like, yeah, the bottom. Well, remember, it wasn't just that. It was one of the first webmail things. And webmail was revolutionary because you didn't have to have a pop three client and lose your email across multiple devices. It solved a lot of really good problems for customers at the time for email. So when they arrived from the free account, it was like holy crap, this is amazing. And so let's do that. Uber doesn't have any weird viral traps, but it compresses the workflow of healing and have so much that it's viral, that makes sense.

52:14In fact, at this time, where Austin kicked them out for, and other apps came in and filled the void, and then he came back after the year and just crushed everybody. It was not no campaign, it was just viral by itself. So that's what the reality is. So then the question is, how do you increase it? Well, look, fundamentally build a great product that solves a sharp problem and build it really well. If you do this, this is the bedrock of virality. If you don't do this, there's no viral tactic that will work in a sustained way. It will fizzle. But if you do this, you can layer on synthetic virality strategies for referral strategies for coming back to the app and creating an account.

53:03Remember, before counting, there was acuity scheduling, there was other things. The difference was, Kali was so well made, so simple for schedulers. So respectful of schedulers time, not just the creators time, that the virality worked. It did not work for others who sucked. X .AI and other places. They went that good. You have to be good to be viral. That is such an important insight that everyone looks at calendar like, of course. You're sharing calendars with everyone. It's going to go viral. That's like a what a cool trick But your point is so interesting that there's previous versions of that But the product itself wasn't great.

53:47The experience wasn't great as too complicated didn't work and that's what made it so viral Yeah, there there may be some of the things I think affect virality What I think that this is the nugget that people need to take away That is the foundation of bedrock of all of them right like customer support actually affects virality like if you have fanatic customer support people will love it. Viral tactics like you know the pace that says we'll get an account and so on doc you know you know all these signing documents counting and so on and so forth you know network effects as you know in county you have these green dots if you and a person have county it tells you when you're free all network effects really high quality execution synthetic variety all contribute to next virality, but the fundamental is exactly what we just discussed.

54:38Just got to get it all right. No big deal. I am. Build the best product possible. Honestly, if you want to be viral, that's, you know, Slack wasn't even viral, right? There was no synthetic virality. Slack wouldn't even connect to organizations for the longest time. Why you could be working on the third floor and so on, using Slack on the fourth floor and you would have no clue. There's no way to share it with them. But what happens when you went to launch people are like, we got slack and this is amazing. And people on the third floor are like, holy shit, when can we get it? Boom, boom, boom.

55:11Great product first is viral. Seth Godin has this phrase that always come back to you if you want to make your product remarkable, something people want to remark about. Yes, basically the core word of mouth. Yes, yes, yes. I was watching a talk you did on this kind of topic and you have this great phrase. the sort of touched on, but I think it's so good and I just want to make sure we highlight it, which is that Verality's customer augmented marketing. Yeah, I think it's the thing that I started with first. It's when your marketing is essentially done by your customers, right? Because what it does, it affords you the ability to spend less on marketing.

55:48And you can either up level your marketing execution with that or save money that you can put in the product. Atlassian spends maybe like 10, 20 percentage points less on marketing than the equivalent competitors because it's viral and also because it's network effects at this point as well. Say, Jure. And so, it's customer -oriented marketing. Your customers are either forcing other people to adopt it or shaming them into adopting it or following essentially customer -oriented marketing, which gives you options. I love that phrase. I'm going to use it now. I have just a few more questions before we get to our very exciting lighting round.

56:34And these are kind of random two topics that I wanted to chat on. One is this concept that you call forest time. It's that Post -You wrote about the importance of forest time. Can you just describe what that is and why it's so important and then also just how to do this? I operate. I'm an operator right now, meaning that I'm building things that work for a company. But I also advise and invests, which is different. When I'm advising, I'm looking from above from outside, I have a bird's eye view and I'm able to say, you know what, this will work, this won't work. What have you done? Can I look at the results and then, you know, cycle the advice based on what you're seeing and what I'm seeing.

57:14When I'm operating, I'm building a team, I'm hiring and managing all the thing, Elena shout out that hates sometimes. And that's what I'm doing. When you are operating, you have the fog of war. Like it is so intense that you don't have the attention to have a bird's eye view constantly. And so forest time is the idea that you make time within your week, within your month to see the forest for the trees. Most of the time when you're operating your C in the tree, which is the problem for you, but sometimes you need to see the forests so you can figure out it is an alternate path different from the one that you are currently on your campaign.

58:02And so it's time to elevate, to get some bird's eye view to see the entire landscape and see if they'll try to pass through the current problems that you're escaping. And I think that it has to be very intentional. And intentionality there is some I have published a workflow a document that helps you Make that step to make that elevation like what other issues What are alternative ways to solve this potentially that I'm not seeing Etc. What I try to do is I tried to Create that first time for my executive team as well because it's not just me that suffers from this is most everybody in fact, it's most PMs because PMs are so influential that the spoke of the wheel of product creation and product development that we often, you know, you're, you're, you're, it's a sine wave, right?

58:55You are discovering and shaping problems and then you are commanding and captain execution and it's endless and they're endless meetings. And so you need to create time for forest time for elevation. If you don't, you'll become less effective over time. It's just attrition. And then just to make it even more concrete for people, what are examples of forest time? Is it taking time off? Is it advising on the side? It is taking a day off at the end of a month, a full day or two days. And instead of just playing golf, although that's fine, It is doing a workflow worksheet to survey the forest, specifically.

59:39And sometimes people, managers are like, wait, you'll give them people a day off when they should be working harder and harder. And I think it's completely worth it. It's not about working harder is working smarter. It's about seeing more options than you see. And so I'm very happy to give that time to park managers to park executives or design executives or engineering executives because I think that if they do it properly and we'll have better execution in the long run. Let's look at this way. We aim in product development. We aim for maybe like 10 % of the time and then we execute and build for the other side.

1:00:14It's not just that. There's more stuff we do. If your aim is off, then you're spending one, two million dollars incorrectly of people's time. And so first time should improve your aim. That's entire point because your aim is a precursor to a huge amount of investment. And so I think it's well worth it. I love this. So specifically what you do, your team is once a month, you give them a day to do this kind of worksheet that you put together. And then that worksheet isn't in this post that you wrote, that we owe point to. Is that right? Amazing. Okay, great. This is very practical advice. I love it.

1:00:53Okay, one last question before a very exciting lightning round. You worked at Bridgewater Associates, which I didn't know until I started digging into your past. That sounds creepy. And Bridgewater Associates famous for what Ray Dalio's Hedge Fund author principles and all these other credible books. And it's a very unique working environment. So I just wanted to ask about your experience there. Specifically, one of the craziest things there is just this thing called Dots. I think it's called, where people just call out mistakes, that people make it the company and it's public. Is that how it actually was any memories of that?

1:01:27Yeah, yeah. I was a senior management, what's called an SMA, which is the management layer right under race team. And we were the priests of the church of Bridgewater. But what I did things like record, this is public college, I'm not saying anything. Yeah, it works. What are their every meeting? Eventually we created a dot collector which is allows you to rate people in real time. So I'm just having a conversation with you. And before the meeting closes, in front of each other, I pull up my laptop and I rate you and rate the interaction. And you know, if you're the idea is that if you constantly rate people across hundreds of interactions, then you build a picture of them that is fairly accurate, statistically accurate, that will transcend, you know, maybe the emotional relationship is as wisdom of a crowd idea.

1:02:28So that's a theory. In practice, it is emotionally like exhausting. And like you said, the little creepy, even the recording. So I think there were things about bridgewater that I didn't at a student intellectually in terms of the purpose that Ray had designed but didn't quite work. It's like the way I think about this is the theory of the principles are really good. The practice can be quite and the execution can be quite off and not very human or not very empathetic. But I will say this, bridgewater taught me things that I don't think any older organization in the world have taught me. Like one example is bridge what are things of people in three dimensions, the skills, their attributes and their values.

1:03:21Most organizations think about people in terms of just their skills. But it makes sense that people have attributes and values, right? Right, people are timid, people are bold, people like to jump in, people like to stand back. All these other things we think about personality and proclivity, which are tries to establish and measure them and also tries to write job descriptions that say, this is the kind of attributes we're looking for, not just the skills we're looking for. And of course, values, like, are you a thief or are you a principal and so on and so forth. Now, that idea of looking at talent or people in general, both in your professional life and your personal life, is a huge addition to me as a professional from Bridgewater.

1:04:09So I am not by any means saying, I'm saying that there were things that didn't enjoy about Bridgewater, but things that I learned that I've learned nowhere else as well. Did you take that to what you do today, thinking of people in those three different ways? And you're like that? In my professional life, in my personal life, when I interview people, I am cognizant of those three things and I tried to extract those three things because I think it improves your success. You know, famously like all the weird skill -based interviewing at Google was only 50, you know, 50 -50 predictive and the reason is Google did not consider the other two things, I believe.

1:04:49Right? You know, Bridgewater was willing to endure 80 % attrition to arrive at the best people. Now, I don't think it works for them because some of their system was not empathetic of humans, like expecting humans to be computers. But I thought that was a very important insight. Awesome. Ajji, is there anything else that you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? In the history of our development, we have basically started to create abstraction to guide our work, right, versus wild, wild, wild west. So the engineers came up with Agile and pair programming on all these things.

1:05:27The designers have come up with design thinking, design sprints, and combined with research to talk about how to do discovery of various complexity. And the question is, the product abstractions was as code, there's product in this business. So the product and business layer, what is our abstraction. What is our crucible for organizing our work? We don't even have one. We don't have a name for it. And so the idea of a part system is that there's an abstraction above agile and design thinking that we have to pay attention to, to build solid organizations and execute well at the product and the business layer.

1:06:09This is a co -creative framework with me and Azina. And the idea here is, how do you construct a good product system? And literally you could boil it down into a checklist of the systems you need to build to build a really good cohesive R &B organization. So I think that's the tee up. I'm gonna have to leave you thirsty because Zona was probably gonna go deep into it. Amazing, and that's your wife that you mentioned who you are co -creating this framework with, and who we're gonna have on the podcast in the future. That's right. What is it like being married to another product leader? Would you recommend?

1:06:44100 % you're going to have really really productive conversations and you can you can redesign other companies applications in one conversation evening Amazing Well, that was almost the lightning round question, but I moved it up earlier and so with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Let's do it. Okay, great. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? There's one business book that I recommend. I think it's called the Halo Effect. It's basically a book that lets you call bullshit on all these business books that are tell your kinds of stupid shit.

1:07:25It is how to deconstruct what is important in the business and self -help book and what is not important and what is just circumstantial storytelling with random facts and form fitting evidence. It's called the Halo Effect. Read it. Why do garbage and garbage out. You know, people were amazed that the outlier effect Malcolm Gladwell and people have been tearing it down for 15 years now. But everyone ingested it and thought it was the most important thing. But how do you know what's important to take away from it and what's not? The Hiller effect will help you. And then the other thing is I read for pleasure because I read a lot for work.

1:08:07And so science fiction is the thing there's lots to recommend, but I would say that people should either redune Frank Herbert or Foundation by Asimov if you haven't read those two things on your science fiction Person you really should the wall buildings incredible. It's not You know, I understand Tolkien and fantasy, but the science fiction side of it is those two books There's also a TV series of foundation now, which I can't say recommend absolutely, but it's it's a beautiful show Yeah, I have a watch foundation yet. I just felt like I just felt super weird watching it after reading it and I could only make it through three quarters of June, version, you know, part one, but I will make it through them.

1:08:56I don't expect them to books are glorious. If you love pros, the books are. man crazy but I will get through them eventually. I've not actually read Dune but the movie was incredible. I played the video game Dune where you're just mining spice all day and just stuck in my brain forever. Okay next question what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing? I try to ask to I feel this is what you're like is gonna give people a cheat sheet. I want to interview you but what I try to ask two questions so I'm not a person who does favorites. It's hard for me to pick favorites, but I ask people to introduce themselves.

1:09:34I think it tells me a lot about them, how they tell about themselves, what they say about themselves, and the content of it. I ask people about the things they think they're truly great at. And then I ask people about the things they think they need to learn. The latter two is about their professional skill, their craft. I think it tells me a lot about how to communicate. It tells me a lot about how thoughtful they are. It tells me a lot about what they're proud of and what they lead into. And those kinds of things are very important to me. What is a favorite product you recently discovered that you love?

1:10:13I have been optimizing my workspace a lot. So I'm on a kick right now where I use Windows, I was in the Windows PM and I still have my Windows box. But a lot of people at Wee's Macs are work and I've used Macs for the last few years. So even though I switch between them, I'm spending a lot more time on Mac and my Windows experience is completely optimized. Like it is perfect. Well Mac, I'm like the windowing socks, there's all these gaps that I see. So I've been trying to figure out how to dial in my Mac experience. So I've been, you know, I hate the activity monitor sucks like what's a replacement, you know, the sound it doesn't support sound through HDMI or sound through just some weird setup.

1:11:02So I've been optimizing that one particular product that I like in the context of that is unlocks is like one man product that allows me to just look at my phone and log into my Mac when I walk up and then locks it when I walk away. and it actually detect my proximity. So it will start the logging process while I get close. I think that's incredible. And I feel like it improves my productivity. Very cool. Sounds like a lot of hate to rate for Macs over here. Well, for someone who uses a lot. No, I think pros and cons. I'm no longer paid by Microsoft. So I think that I don't like. But there are also things that the Mac isn't perfect either.

1:11:42Yeah, indeed. What is a favorite life motto that you repeat to yourself or share with other people, either in work or in life that you find valuable? I've taken to saying that there's more knowledge outside in my head than inside it. And this is a plea for curiosity. I have three main things that I, that a mind -north start personally, but also obviously when I mean everything, professionally, which is originality, curiosity, and wisdom. And so this thing about there's more knowledge outside my head than inside my head is a plea for curiosity. It's a plea for skepticism. It's a plea to be humble about what you know no matter how old you are, about the world around you, and always be listening for more.

1:12:36even when you know something, let other people speak because they might add 10 % more to the 90 % you know. And so being an active listener is very important. Beautiful. Last question, you are from Nigeria. What is a Nigerian food that you think people need to find and get ASAP? I will recommend to, depending on how familiar you are. So if you've never had fried plantain with beef stew. Oh man, that sounds great. And you should stop what you're doing, stop work, whatever you're doing, find your next Nigerian friend and go get some. Okay. This is the food that most Nigerians will basically trade years of life to have access to.

1:13:26Okay, so that's what I would say. And then the second thing is, if you really wanna go, you know, if you wanna be in the in club in Niger, as we call it, you gotta try pepper soup. Now, if you're not into spicy stuff, I'm sorry, the door is closed to you. What Peppa Soup is really in and it is amazing. It'll make you sweat, what it's delicious and you should give it a shot. Ajee, I think we've solved many people's sharp problems. I really appreciate you making time being here. Two final questions where it can folks find you online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you?

1:14:16I publish on Substack when I have time. You should check it out. It's usually all about things that are beneath the surface, what's behind the thing. I believe that's how you find it. I'm on Twitter as well, so you can follow me because I will talk about products. How you can be useful to me is go follow me on Twitter, sign up for updates on the book. If you do, I will draw from that audience to help name the book, to help design the cover for the book. The book is intended to have a premium because I want this book to be available to people in Africa and India across the world. So there'll be a free version of it.

1:15:00And there'll be premium versions with more tools, more help and maybe even like interviews with luminaries that you care and love as well. And so that hopefully that will fund the free side of it as well. So come in, become part of the party, maybe join a pre -read and early draft read. That is the best way you can help. So it's a call to all PMs and people of Goodwill. Amazing. What a great answer to that question. I'm going to go get some pepisoup and some plantain beef meals. Thank you so much for being here and I'm going to go get some food. Alright, thank you Lenny. It was super enjoyable.

1:15:44I love hanging out and got speed. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast .com. See you in the next episode!